A service landing page is a page that explains a unique service, discipline, solution or phase of work. A service landing page layout should include a brief explanation of three things:
- the problems it exists to solve
- how it solves them
- how you measure the success of its solutions
In this article, I will share my recommendations for designing a more effective service landing page layout.
Tell Them How You Do It
As I explained in a previous article, the parent page to your service landing pages is your capabilities landing page. A capabilities landing page explains your firm’s purpose in more detail than a short positioning statement can provide. If done well, it should direct a slightly more-informed prospect to learn more about the ways you fulfill that purpose. Those ways are your services.
What is a Service?
Your services might be truly discrete, meaning I could hire you for one or more of them individually. But that’s pretty rare among my clients. It’s more likely that your services represent discrete disciplines or solutions that are connected to one another. You use them together to provide a wholistic approach to your clients’ needs. What makes one unique is that it solves a unique problem in a unique way, it requires unique actions of your client, it employs unique people within your organization, and it measures success in unique ways.
Whether a service is completely standalone or a piece of a larger whole, each one should have a dedicated landing page. Your service landing page layout should be designed to explain what the service is, how it works, and what it achieves. And it should present a single primary action to prospects.
The Best Service Landing Page Layout
An effective service landing page layout that has the following four attributes:
- ~250 words of indexable content
- client testimonial (social proof)
- easily scannable list of related case studies
- buyer-friendly call to action
Most of these attributes are self-explanatory, but let me briefly elaborate on each one.
1. ~250 Words of Indexable Content
Be brief. This page needs to explain what makes an individual service unique, a little bit about how it works, and nudge the visitor toward envisioning some outcomes. On that latter point, that nudge will come in the form of your related testimonial and case studies. But as for explaining what makes this service unique and how it works, make sure you tell a prospect everything they need to know in order to make a decision to either buy or learn more, but not everything they’d need to know in order to do it themselves. This page is a pitch, not a manual.
2. A Client Testimonial
As I’ve written elsewhere, a happy client will always be a better salesperson than you. Try to feature a testimonial here that speaks to the specific experience described by this service. This is the social proof that prospects need to encourage them to dig a bit deeper.
3. An Easily Scannable List of Related Case Studies
Now give them your proof. The goal of this page is to direct an even more informed visitor toward the content that proves the value of your services. After your brief description of this service, list a few case studies in a way that is easily scannable. Stick to a name, a brief abstract, and a clear button that directs them to another page dedicated to the case study alone. Navigating to a case study detail page is the most important choice you want a visitor to make on this page.
4. A Buyer-Friendly Call-to-Action
A buyer-friendly call-to-action is one that invites a prospect to get in touch with you directly to discuss working together. Though the primary action you want to design in to this page is the one that takes a prospect deeper into a page dedicated to one of your individual services, if a visitor is ready to go, don’t block their way. Make it clear that filling out this form is a viable/welcome secondary action: that they can “get started” or “request a meeting” at any point along the way in flowing through your positioning pages.
The purpose of a service landing page is to best use the attention it receives by explaining how a service fulfills your firm’s mission and then quickly directing visitors to learn more about the application of that service in the form of a case study. The way you arrange your service landing page layout will make that more likely.
This article is the sixth in a series that will guide you through applying the principles of Prospect Experience Design for yourself.
Next in the series is a guide to designing an effective case study.