Practice websites with thirty or forty near-identical pages are everywhere: one per service, multiplied by every town nearby. The place name changes and nothing else. A clinic does it with every treatment, an architecture studio with every kind of project, a law firm with every practice area.
Does it work? For a long time it did. That is why, when you search your own sector, the first results are almost always those.
We don’t build that way. It is worth explaining why, without pretending the decision costs nothing.
An eight-page site shows up less on day one
On the day it goes live, a site of eight pages written properly shows up less than a site of forty pages written for a search engine. Fewer pages indexed, fewer word combinations, fewer ways in.
Forty pages are forty ways in. Eight are eight. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you optimism.
Three things go wrong with the generated page
It is a page written for one search, and for nobody else.
Nobody updates it. Thirty pages generated from a template are thirty pages the practice never opens again. Two years on, half of them contradict the other half: a service you no longer offer, opening hours that changed, the name of a colleague who left.
It shows. A patient, a client or a competition jury reads two sentences and works out that the text was not written for them. The trust the page was meant to build is the trust it spends.
The target moves. The advantage these pages had came from a search engine that rewarded quantity and exact matching. That engine has changed several times in the last decade and it keeps changing. A site whose only defence is volume is left exposed the day volume stops counting.
Fewer pages, and the work that is not the site
We write fewer pages, each one for a real person who will read it.
- One page per real service, not one per service times town.
- The language your client uses when talking to you, not the language the sector uses when talking to itself.
- A fast site, readable on a phone, with the essentials in plain view.
Then comes the work that is not the site: the Google business profile filled in properly, the same address and the same number everywhere, photographs that are your own. That is where local demand for a practice is decided, not across forty twin pages.
Where we would be wrong: the volume business
If your business lives on search volume and thin margins, the maths is different. A price comparison site, or a retailer with thousands of product lines, has real reasons to run a mass content strategy.
Tell us, and we will tell you whether we are the right studio. We are not, for everybody.
For anyone who lives on reputation, on referral and on work done well, a site that reads like the work is worth more than a site that talks about it.