A question we are often asked: What is the difference between a blog and a service (or landing) page?
From a technical website (and search engine) perspective, the pages are essentially very similar. There is, however, a significant difference from a user experience and search engine optimisation perspective.
There are three major elements to this, that will be discussed in this blog:
- Search Intent
- Style of writing
- Page design
Exploring Service Pages
Service pages are pages on a website that demonstrate what your business does. These pages typically describe the services you offer in the context of your business and are used to highlight specific services (or products) that your business offers.
Service pages also provide information about your offerings and, as a result, are key pages for driving commercial traffic, which generates leads and sales for your website.
Service pages have three primary purposes:
- Highlighting specific products or services that your business provides
- Providing information about your offerings
- Driving leads and sales
Key characteristics of service pages:
- Focused on specific keywords and search terms
One of the fundamental differences between service pages and blogs is the keywords that searchers use to find service pages. In a perfect world, service pages should target the middle, or bottom of the funnel keywords. That is, they’re designed to target users that are already aware of what the service is, they want to know why your service offering is different to the competitors and they also want to be convinced that your solution is the best fit.
- Service pages are structured in such a way as to highlight features, benefits, and pricing.
As the role of service pages is to generate leads and sales, pages should be designed in such a way that they demonstrate your service features, benefits and also pricing where possible.
- Service pages are built to showcase expertise, credibility and authority.
As service pages also lie in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey, where visitors are frequently comparing your service offering to that of your competitors, it’s essential to demonstrate your expertise, credibility, and authority on the subject. Social proof such as testimonials, and case studies can be helpful to include on a service page as a result.
4. Call to action
A good service page should include a call to action (CTA) that makes it easier for a prospective customer to procure your company’s services.
Example of an effective service page
Zendesk is a customer service solution for businesses that serve over 100k businesses around the world.
Here are some of the strengths of their service page:
- The Headline is short and direct and sounds like a call to action in itself, and then it asks to contact sales/asks for a demo.
- There is excellent social proof, in terms of instantly recognisable companies that are using the Zendesk service.
- Zendesk does an excellent job of demonstrating credibility, building trust in their solution and addressing any doubt customers may have (such as data security, niche-specific experience and personalised service)
- There is additional social proof at the bottom of the page in terms of customer testimonials
Unpacking Blogs
Blogs, or weblogs as they are officially called are a method to educate and inform visitors about a certain topic. Blogging for business purposes is also often referred to as content marketing.
There are three main components to a blog:
1. Informative and educational content
Blogs are designed to inform and educate readers about the topic at hand. Compared with service pages, blogs tend to be in long-form, often in the thousands of words and provide detailed explanations to questions, where it’s often difficult to be succinct.
2. Establishing thought leadership and brand authority
Blogs are an excellent mechanism to display thought leadership and demonstrate authority on a topic. When searchers discover these blogs, or they navigate from social media or another website, over time, the writer will often be perceived as a thought leader on the subject.
3. Driving organic traffic and nurturing customer relationships
Blogs also help to drive organic traffic to a website. They nurture customer relationships with those readers that are interested in the topics you are writing about.
Key Characteristics of Blogs
1. Diverse topics and formats to cater to a broader audience
Blogs are often written on diverse, tangentially related topics that act as a silo to provide “topical authority” on a subject, by covering every angle around that topic. As a result, blogs cater to a much broader audience, than a service page that is more focused.
2. Incorporating storytelling and engaging narratives
Blogs generally incorporate storytelling and engage readers to continue reading the article to learn more about the subject matter.
3. Encouraging social sharing and backlinking opportunities
Blogs for marketing purposes are often known as content marketing, as they have the potential to grow website traffic. If the blog is successful, it can also generate backlinks from other websites which can assist with SEO.
Search intent
Search intent aims to understand what the searcher is hoping to achieve by performing their search. The main search intents we use in search engine optimisation are:
Informational – The user is looking to find the answer to a question. Informational searches often start with “how”, “what”, “why”, “when” etc.
Navigational – The user is looking for a specific business, page or website. Eg “qantas call centre” or “southern cross vet surry hills”
Transactional – The user wants to complete an action, what’s known as a “conversion” in marketing terms. Its definition is unique to the business itself but is often a pre-defined action, such as: buy, call, download a document or otherwise contacting the business. Transactional search intent is at the bottom of the funnel and is usually considered the highest-value search intent. Near me searches are mostly Transactional, ie “Café near me”, as are searches that contain buy keywords, eg “Buy Nike shoes”
Commercial – The user is looking to investigate or compare brands or services. This search intent is often known as the consideration phase of the marketing funnel, where searches are deciding which product or service to procure. Examples include “call centre Philippines” and many “Vs” keywords, like “nike downshifter 11 vs pegasus 38”.
Tailoring Content to Search Intent
It’s imperative that you match the search intent on your website pages, to what the search engine is expecting to see, else it’s impossible to dominate the search results.
The first step, after completing keyword research, is to categorise your keywords into search intent. You can either do this using automatically, by using an SEO tool (like SEMRush), or by investigating the search engine results pages, using the criteria mentioned previously.
The next step is to determine whether the content using the appropriate keywords should be a service page or a blog. Wait, what? you say! All of the above was merely the theory of what content should be on a service page or blog. Below is the investigative process we follow to determine whether the content is best suited to being a service page or blog:
Which pages are being displayed in Google for the relevant query (home pages, service pages, blogs etc) for the top 3 search results?
If it’s predominantly service pages or home pages that are ranked, we’d create a service page in this case. It becomes more complex when there’s a mix of blog posts and service pages in the top 3 search results. In such a case, we break it down further:
If the client is a well-established business with an authoritative website and has already several service pages ranking in the top 3 – we’ll create a service page
If the client is a new player in the industry or has a website with little authority, we’ll likely create a blog post, as it’s often easier to rank a blog over a service page.
Conclusion
Service pages and blogs have very different purposes, and it’s important to get the content and keywords right if you want to attract the right type of traffic for your business and ensure it ranks highly. Search intent, website copy the page design are integral components of this process.
TL;DR
Blogs should be long-form and target informational keywords. Service pages should be shorter and designed to sell, by including sales copy and targeting commercial and transactional keywords. A better method is to analyse the search results to determine the most appropriate content for the keyword.