Building an Effective Service Page in 2025: Best Practices
Are your website service pages not holding up quite as well as they used to? If you've noticed a downturn in phone calls or form submissions recently, you're certainly not alone in your plight.
Google has shaken up its search algorithm dramatically over the past few years, with the 2022 and 2023 Helpful Content Updates triggering an especially seismic shift in how content is ranked and valued.
Genuinely useful and thoughtfully conceived content (that which demonstrates what Google calls E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) is being pushed up, while the kind of programmatic, check-the-SEO-boxes content that once dominated is being pushed down.
If you're thinking "that's how it should be," you're absolutely right. But as with anything worthwhile, it requires a little more effort. This means you can no longer just methodically shove keywords into page headings, body copy, and meta data and expect results.
Effective service pages in 2025 should be more user-focused than keyword-focused. Let's get into what that entails.
Write Anticipatorily
One of the hallmarks of helpful content — and by extension, a helpful service page — is knowing your audience. This is where firsthand experience and expertise become indispensable. What kind of questions and concerns do you field most frequently? How do you approach or adapt your processes to address unique customer challenges?
Mentally rehearse your prototypical customer scenario. Imagine a prospective client is sitting on the other side of your desk. Answer the who, what, where, when, why, and how of your operations with care and nuance. In this way, you can foster a sense of familiarity and trust from the start.
Another good technique for planning effective service page content (and also supporting FAQs or blogs) is to simply consult your leads. Reference call recordings, voicemails, or online form submissions and you're likely to find some recurring themes. If there's anything your audience is struggling with or wondering about, it should definitely be addressed in your copy.
Emphasize Originality and Authenticity
Does your service page content:
- Look like you? (Do you utilize original imagery and video?)
- Sound like you? (Is the copy written in an authentic tone and voice? Does it demonstrate a confidence and command of the topic at hand?)
- Feel like you? (Is the overall page experience representative of your brand?)
Generative AI has proven an incredible asset in many facets of content creation — given the right prompts and inputs, it is capable of generating high-quality (and even high-ranking) content. The problem is — especially as AI technology becomes more accessible and widely adopted — the quantity vs. the quality of information fed into search engines.
By default, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude excel at distilling down a topic to its essentials — the meat and potatoes of a service page. The seasoning, though, has to come from your lived experience and personal perspective. It's the difference between serving up a flavorful signature dish and a plain old plate of food.
So spice up that service page with your insights. Photos of your people, your building, your branded vehicles, your jobs. Ensure that everything you put in front of your user is unmistakably and undeniably consistent with the real-life business they reach out to.
Implement Social Proof
Even if you've done everything up until this point to show you're the real deal, most people are going to need a second opinion before they pull the trigger on that phone call or form submission.
People have a strong tendency to validate their own decisions based on the collected thoughts, opinions, and experiences of others. This is called social proof, and it's a powerful influence. This is why things like testimonials and case studies are absolute musts for your service pages.
Testimonials
You can source testimonials from online reviews, feedback surveys (sent via email or text), or even recorded statements — just as long as website visitors can see former and/or current customers vouch for you. If you have the luxury of choosing from a number of testimonials to present, select those that highlight a specific challenge or situation your service helped solve.
We recommend placing testimonials near your "Why Choose Us" section — this way, they lend credibility to whatever differentiators you're claiming to offer.
Case Studies
Case studies are in-depth accounts of how a client benefited from your services — less anecdotal and more grounded in hard data. The goal is to show a definitive return on investment (ROI) as a result of your services, so that clients with similar concerns can feel justified in making their own investment — especially if there are significant costs involved. The higher-profile the client and more complicated their challenges, the more valuable the case study.
Slot case study excerpts (summaries with links to the full articles) alongside "What We Do" (to illuminate the impacts of a particular subservice in context) or "Who We Help" content (to demonstrate applicability of the service to a certain target audience or industry).
Fold in the Local SEO
Chances are you offer your services in a specific local market (or markets). Your service pages need to acknowledge and speak to those localities if you hope to appear in local search results (for terms such as "restaurant near me" or "landscaping services little rock").
At minimum, your primary location served should be included in:
- The page title, along with the name of the service (i.e. the clickable "headline" that appears in search engine results pages)
- Your page's "Header 1" tag, or main heading, along with the name of the service (this signals the "main idea" of the page to Google)
- Subheadings and body copy where natural (speaking of body copy, relating to your local audience through subject matter and imagery is a big plus!)
If your customers come to you, we recommend a Google Map embed with directions to your physical location. If you go to them, we recommend a service area map along with a listing of municipalities or population centers served within that service area.
If your business has multiple locations or covers a larger or more population-dense service area, it may be a good idea to build out dedicated location pages and link to them from your service page.
Google Business Profile
It's important to note the correlation of service pages on your website to the services listed in your Google Business Profile (GBP). Basically, if you list a service on your GBP, you should have a corresponding service page on your website. This helps Google serve the most relevant results to its users.
See It in Practice: Reinventing a Service Page
In the wake of the Google Helpful Content Update (HCU), one of our longtime clients (Ayars Complete Home Improvements) saw a pronounced dip in new website traffic. Home remodeling is a crowded and highly competitive industry, which means a lot of websites — and a lot of content that in all likelihood looks, feels, and sounds the same.
Prior to the HCU, Ayars' service pages had performed well in search results — the keywords were there, the pictures were pretty, and the copy covered the basics. But they did not provide much beyond the obvious. So Epic's content team went to work.
Knowing the Audience
Ayars caters to predominantly middle-aged, upper-middle class clients in South Jersey — homeowners who are settled into and looking to significantly upgrade what they believe are their forever homes. So we asked Ayars' ownership directly: What do your clients want most out of their remodels? What features do they get most excited about?
What we got in return were incredibly insightful and nuanced answers that formed the foundation for the page content.
Originality and Authenticity
Ayars has a very strong brand vision — craftsmen who are obsessed with detail and respect for the homes they work in. Through the years, they've also meticulously documented their projects with original photography and video, which had already been thoroughly integrated throughout the site.
However, imagery wasn't employed on the service pages as purposefully as it could have been. Instead of inserting the prettiest images into a gallery and calling it a day, we used it in context with the copy, as a means to illustrate remodeling goals and design possibilities.
All of this was to show Ayars really does know what it's doing!
Social Proof
Former Ayars clients have nothing but good things to say, which made it easy to dedicate a prominent area of the service page for testimonials — two pulled from Ayars' bank of glowing Google Reviews, along with a professionally produced video testimonial (doubling as a sort of visual case study as well!)
Local SEO Considerations
As a service area business serving a number of smaller towns and municipalities, each service page was optimized for the all-encompassing (and more frequently searched) "South Jersey" region.
But those "home remodeling near me" searches still hold a lot of value, so we included a service area map and detailed breakdown of major population centers within the service area. This helps Ayars with two major local search ranking factors — relevance (facilitating ranking for more specific search terms) and proximity (allowing Ayars to achieve more visibility in search based on the searcher's physical location).
Carefully considering local SEO can be a huge boost for local businesses, increasing their chances of appearing in the all-important Google Map Pack (a listing of the top 3 local businesses per a given search query, packaged together with a Google Map atop search results).
The Result: Traffic and Visibility
In the end, these efforts made a tremendous difference, with new site users up 24% (from 2,529 to 3,134) and conversions up 9% (from 80 to 89) in the four-month period since the changes were published (November 2024 - March 2025) over the previous four-month period (July 2024 to November 2024).
Build Better Service Pages with Epic Web Studios
At Epic Web Studios, we believe content should be purposeful — crafted to resonate with audiences, not just fill space. If your service pages aren't clicking, chances are your customers aren't clicking either. Let's change that.
