Almost every practice website has a page called "Our Services". It lists eight or twelve things, each with a paragraph. It is tidy, it is easy to maintain, and it ranks for nothing.

The reason is straightforward. A search engine matching a page to a query is looking for a page that is substantially about that query. A page that is one-twelfth about antenatal care is not about antenatal care. A page devoted to antenatal care is.

What a real service page contains

Splitting is only useful if each resulting page has enough substance to stand alone. That means, for each service:

  • What the service is, in patient language and clinical language.
  • Who it is for, and the situations that lead people to need it.
  • What happens at the appointment, step by step.
  • How to prepare, and what to bring.
  • How long it takes and how results or outcomes are communicated.
  • Cost information, or at least the shape of it, including how HMO cover affects it.
  • The clinicians who provide it.
  • Common questions, answered properly.

That is a substantial page, and it is substantial because a patient genuinely wants all of it.

Do not split into thin pages

The failure mode is splitting one page into twelve pages of two paragraphs each. That is worse than where you started, because now you have twelve weak pages competing with one another and none of them answer anything.

Better to do three services properly than twelve badly. Start with the three that matter most commercially, get them right, and work down.

Keep the overview page

The combined services page still has a job: it is the map. Keep it, make each entry a short summary linking to the full page, and let it do the navigation work while the individual pages do the ranking work.

Interlink them

Services relate to each other in ways patients follow. An antenatal page should link to ultrasound. A diabetes page should link to eye screening and to dietetics. These links help patients find the next thing they need and help search engines understand how your services relate.

Then go one level further

Once your core service pages are solid, the next tier is service plus audience or service plus area. A page about web presence for dental practices, or about ultrasound for a particular neighbourhood, matches searches that a general service page cannot. This is where practices in competitive cities separate themselves.

Do not start there. A pyramid of specific pages built on top of thin general ones falls over. Get the core pages genuinely useful first.