Why a one-page website costs you customers on Google

Google looks for pages, not companies

When someone searches on Google, they do not get a list of companies. They get a list of pages. For every search, Google picks the page that answers that exact question best.

A one-page website puts everything on a single page: services, team, references and contact, one below the other. That gives you exactly one page in the race for every search. That one page has to match “annual accounts”, “payroll” and “tax adviser for dentists” at the same time. It matches none of them properly.

People will still find you by your company name. But anyone who types your name already knows you. New customers search for their problem, not for you.

An example: the firm with one page

Take a tax firm with 35 people in Dresden. It works for medical practices, trade businesses and founders. It prepares annual accounts, runs payroll and supports company handovers. On its one-page website, all of that sits in one paragraph.

A dentist searches for “tax adviser for dentists Dresden”. Google shows her the firm that has its own page for exactly that. The page lists the questions dental practices ask, the practices the firm already works for and how the first meeting works. The firm with the one-pager may well be the better one. The dentist never finds out.

One page per question

In the trade, these are called money pages: pages built for one search that has a paying job behind it. They follow a simple grid:

• one page per service,

• one page per city you work in,

• one page per industry you serve,

• a page of its own for the most important pairs: service and city, service and industry.

Three services, four cities and three industries quickly add up to twenty pages. Each one is a separate door into your business. And unlike an ad, it does not cost money on every click.

What every page needs

Twenty pages with the same text and a different city name do not help. Google treats near-identical pages as copies and usually shows only one of them. Every page needs something that only appears there:

• the questions this specific audience asks,

• a project or reference from this industry or city,

• a price or a price range, if there is one, because people who search for “under 500 euros” want to see a number,

• a way to send an enquiry on the same page.

Why this rarely happens without a CMS

If every new page means hiring a developer, you stay with one page. With a CMS you create a new page yourself: pick a template, fill in the fields, publish. The design is already in place. You only supply the content.

Arda Media, a social media agency in Cologne, had no website at all before. With Mesa, 20 subpages for services, cities and industries went live in 10 minutes. They have since earned 9,186 impressions on Google. An impression means one of these pages appeared in someone’s search results. The Arda Media case study shows how the project ran.

How to start

1. Write down your services the way a customer searches for them, not the way you name them internally.

2. Add the cities and industries your best customers come from.

3. Pick the five pairs that earn you the most. Build a page for those five first.

4. After three months, open Google Search Console, Google’s free report. It shows which pages people find. Then build the next ones.