Find out how many pages a website should have to be effective.
Think of your website pages like entry doors to your business for traffic from search engines. How many should you have? Five, 500, or 1,000? There is no magic number. In fact, the answer to this question is, “It depends”. It depends on your website type and your organization’s goals. For example, an e-commerce website could have thousands of pages but a website in a specific market could only have a few hundred.
So the better question to ask yourself is, “How many pages should my website have to provide the information my target audience seeks?” Keep in mind a website is never complete. It should always be evolving because your target audience is always evolving regarding the type of information it seeks.
To find the right number of web pages for your business, consider looking at the following variables: your competition online, your industry, and your budget.
1. Consider your competition.
If your major competitor has 1,000 web pages, you may want to consider a comparable amount on your website. This could be an indicator of how many pages a website in your industry should have. What kinds of information does your competitor include in its website? Conversely, if your major competitor only has five pages, you have an opportunity to increase your number of web pages (entry doors) to a few hundred. The more valuable and search engine optimized content you have on your website, the better your visibility will be in search engines.
2. Consider your industry.
If you're in a larger and more competitive industry, then you may see a lot of web search queries related to your product or service. If you sell shoes, everybody is looking for shoes so your website needs to have a lot of web pages. But, if you’re in the manufacturing industry limited to a small market with less web searches then you may not need to post a lot of content on a regular basis. Keep in mind, “a lot” is relative--it’s defined by your business needs and goals, industry, and competitive landscape.
3. Consider your budget.
It costs money to hire a writer or a copywriter to write all of the content for you. If you don't have the money to pay for those services, the task would fall on YOU (the business administrator) to create the content. This will cost time that you may not have. No matter which way you look at it, writing services are not free. So, take your budget into consideration when deciding how many pages should a website have in your industry.
Ultimately, every page on a website acts like a potential entry door to your business for visitors searching online. From that perspective, it would make sense to have an infinite amount of pages. But that's not realistic. Instead of focusing on the number of web pages you need, focus on the quantity and quality of content needed to educate your consumers, position your business and convert your audience.
Search engines always look for websites with fresh and unique content posted regularly. Always have a keyword strategy so you know what information your audience seeks. Then, support the keyword strategy with content.
We worked with a client who only had a five-page website. Just over a year later, the website grew to a few hundred pages and web traffic from search engines tripled.
If driving traffic to your website is your ultimate goal, then you must have quality content and a plan for creating new content to educate your consumers regularly. And remember, each page on your website site could be an entry door to your business-- so create as many as you would like to see opened.