Someone has quoted you for a five page website and someone else has quoted for twenty. Both sound plausible, neither has explained why, and you are left guessing whether you are about to underbuy or pay for pages nobody will read.
The number of pages a small business website needs is not a matter of taste. It is decided by how many distinct things you sell and how many places you sell them in. Get that right and the page count works itself out, usually somewhere between seven and fifteen for a typical local service business.
This post gives you the rule for working out your own number, explains why one page per service beats one page listing all your services, and covers the point at which adding pages starts to hurt you rather than help.
The short answer, and the rule behind it
Most small business websites need somewhere between seven and fifteen pages. But the number is a symptom, not a target. The rule that produces it is this:
One page for every distinct thing a customer might search for, and no pages for anything else.
That single rule explains almost every decision below. A customer searching “bathroom fitting Stirling” and a customer searching “boiler replacement Stirling” want different things. If both land on one page called Services that mentions each in a sentence, neither gets a good answer and Google has nothing specific to rank.
Start with the five pages every business needs, then add service pages, then location pages if they genuinely apply.
The five pages nobody should skip
Home. Says what you do, who for, where, and what to do next. Most homepages fail on the “where” and the “what next”.
About. More important for a local trade than people think. Customers letting a stranger into their house want to see a face and a history. This page also does real work for trust signals that Google reads.
Contact. Phone number, email, address, a form, and your service area. Put the phone number in the header too, so it is visible on a phone without scrolling.
One page per core service. More on this next, because it is where the ranking happens.
Privacy policy. Unglamorous and legally necessary if you collect any data through a form. It also quietly signals legitimacy.
That is your floor. A brand new business could launch on those and be perfectly functional. What takes you from functional to found is the service pages.
Why one page per service beats one Services page
This is the single highest-value structural decision on a small business site, and it is the one most often got wrong.
Google ranks pages, not businesses. A page that is entirely about drainage has a real chance of ranking for drainage searches. A page that mentions drainage in a bullet point alongside eight other services has almost none, because it is not clearly about anything.
So a landscaper offering garden design, fencing, paving, turfing and maintenance needs five service pages, not one. Each one should:
- Use the words customers actually search, not your trade’s internal terminology. “Block paving” not “hard landscaping solutions”.
- Explain what the job involves and what happens next, because that is what people are really trying to work out.
- Answer the two or three questions you get asked on every call about that service.
- Include a clear next step and your phone number.
A useful test: could this page stand alone as the answer to one specific search? If yes, it earns its place. If it reads like a section of a brochure, it does not.
This is also why a site of thin, near-identical service pages performs so badly. Five genuinely useful pages beat fifteen shallow ones, comfortably. Google has got much better at spotting pages that exist to hit a keyword rather than to help someone.
Location pages: useful, or a trap
If you serve several towns, the temptation is obvious. Make a page for Stirling, one for Falkirk, one for Dunblane, one for Alloa, swap the town name, done.
Do not do that. Near-duplicate location pages are one of the clearest quality problems Google looks for, and at best they get ignored while diluting your site.
Location pages work when they are genuinely different. That means real jobs you have done in that town, local specifics that actually matter, the areas you cover within it, and content written for that place rather than find-and-replaced. Realistically, most small businesses can sustain two or three proper location pages, not twelve.
A better use of the same effort for most businesses is strengthening your Google Business Profile, which does more for local visibility than a thin page ever will. Our guide to ranking higher on Google Maps covers what actually moves that needle.
If you do build location pages, build the one for your main town properly and see whether it earns its keep before making four more.
When a blog is worth it, and when it is not
A blog is not automatically valuable. An abandoned one with three posts from 2023 actively hurts you, because it signals a business that started something and stopped.
A blog is worth it when you can commit to it and when it answers real customer questions. The posts that work for local businesses are almost always the ones you already answer verbally ten times a week: how much does this cost, how long does it take, do I need planning permission, what should I look for when hiring someone.
Those posts do two jobs. They catch people earlier in their search, before they are ready to ring anyone, and they give you something genuinely useful to send to enquiries. If you cannot commit to one post a month, skip the blog and put the effort into your service pages instead. That is not a cop-out, it is the better return.
Counting your own pages
Work through this and you will have your number:
- Five foundation pages: home, about, contact, privacy, and at least one service page.
- Add one page for each distinct service you want enquiries for. Not every service you technically offer, just the ones you want more of.
- Add one location page for your main town if you serve a defined area, plus one or two more only if you can write them properly.
- Add a blog section only if you will actually maintain it.
- Add anything genuinely useful to your customers: pricing guidance, a gallery of real work, testimonials, FAQs.
For most local service businesses that lands at eight to twelve pages. A single-service specialist might sit at six and be perfectly optimised. A multi-branch business with eight services might justify twenty-five.
What should never drive the number is a package tier. If someone is selling you a “10 page website” without asking what you sell and where, they are pricing a template, not building you something that ranks. A properly planned conversion-focused website starts with the searches you want to win and works backwards to the structure, and good local SEO depends on that structure being right from the start.
FAQs
How many pages should a small business website have?
Most small business websites need seven to fifteen pages. The number comes from your services rather than a target: home, about, contact and a privacy policy, plus one page for each distinct service you want enquiries for, plus location pages if you genuinely serve multiple towns. A single-service business might need six. A firm with eight services might need twenty.
Is a one page website ever enough?
For a very simple business, a single service, or a temporary launch, a one page site can work. It is a poor choice for anything you want to rank locally, because Google ranks pages against searches and one page can only really target one search well. If you offer more than one service, you are giving up rankings you could have had.
Should I have a separate page for every service?
Yes, for every service you actually want enquiries for. Google ranks individual pages, so a dedicated page about one service can rank for that service, while a combined page listing everything rarely ranks for anything. Only build the pages you can fill with genuinely useful content. Five strong service pages will always beat fifteen thin ones.
Do location pages help local SEO?
They can, but only when each page is genuinely different, with real local content, actual jobs and specifics for that area. Near-duplicate pages with the town name swapped are treated as low quality and can dilute your site. Most small businesses are better served by two or three properly written location pages and a well-optimised Google Business Profile.
Does adding more pages improve my SEO?
Not on its own. Adding useful pages that answer real searches helps. Adding pages to raise a page count harms you, because thin content drags down how Google assesses your site overall. The question to ask about any new page is whether someone could search for exactly this and be satisfied by what they find. If not, do not build it.
Not sure what your site should look like?
Working out the right structure is the part that decides whether a website earns its keep or just sits there. Book a free discovery call and we will map out the pages your business actually needs based on what you sell and where, and tell you honestly if that is fewer than you were expecting.