Developing Your Website
Your website, together with your Google Business Profile, is the center of your marketing strategy. These are the two core places where you provide detailed information about your business and they serve as the central hub of your digital marketing activities. As a result, the information presented on your website should closely align with your Google Business Profile (Chapter 2), creating a consistent and efficient approach to communicating what your business offers. Your business name, address, and phone number, commonly referred to as NAP information, should be accurate and consistent across both platforms.
Additionally, just as with your Google Business Profile, your website should anticipate and answer frequently asked customer questions. Developing a comprehensive FAQ section is an excellent starting point. However, these questions should extend beyond basic descriptions of your products and services. They should also address business locations, service availability, and, perhaps most importantly, pricing. Providing clear answers to these questions helps customers make informed decisions while giving search engines and AI platforms a better understanding of what your business offers and where those services are available.
Consider how customers search for information. Someone might initially ask, “Where can I find a business that offers this service?” Their next question is often, “How much will it cost?” Businesses that publish clear, accessible pricing information give AI-powered search systems a better opportunity to answer both questions. Those that withhold pricing may be overlooked when customers request specific cost comparisons or recommendations.
Providing a high level of transparency is not always intuitive to business owners. This is not because business owners don’t want to be transparent. It’s more likely business owners do not know when to be transparent. For example, many business managers hesitate to publish detailed pricing information because they fear competitors will use that information against them. However, withholding this information may create a greater disadvantage in an environment where artificial intelligence platforms increasingly help consumers make purchasing decisions.
This creates a significant opportunity for small businesses. If an artificial intelligence platform can identify your services, location, and pricing, it has more information available to evaluate your business as a potential recommendation. Publishing pricing does not guarantee that your business will appear in an AI-generated answer, but it removes an important information gap that might otherwise limit your visibility.
The Importance of a Website
Your website remains the foundation of your digital optimization strategy. Your website is where you organize your expertise, explain your services, answer customer questions, and establish the relationships among different topics. Other platforms, including Google Business Profile, social media, online directories, and AI platforms, can help people discover your business. However, your website provides a central, structured source of information that you control.
If you believe your business no longer needs a website, think again. At least in the short term, a well-developed website remains essential to establishing and maintaining a strong digital presence. While artificial intelligence may eventually change the role of traditional websites, no one knows exactly how that evolution will unfold.
Your topic cluster (Chapter 2) is important for your website. By organizing your content hierarchically and continually expanding it with relevant customer questions, you create a valuable resource that can support traditional search visibility and improve the likelihood that AI systems will discover and accurately represent your business.
For the foreseeable future, your website remains the central hub of your digital presence and a critical foundation for search engine and AI optimization. However, simply having a website is not enough. To maximize visibility, your website must be properly optimized, strategically structured, and organized in a way that allows both traditional search engines and artificial intelligence platforms to discover, understand, and interpret your content effectively.
Focus on Information Gain
There is another important aspect to consider when thinking about how you present your information. It is very important to add meaningful information, especially on your website. One way to determine what is important to customers is to document customer questions. This provides a strong foundation for developing useful, informative content. That is what helps consumers make decisions and contributes to a concept known as information gain. Information gain refers to the new information you provide beyond what is already available to customers in other places. It is an increasingly relevant concept in traditional and AI-powered search.
By providing original information and sharing firsthand knowledge, businesses can demonstrate specific expertise that may help distinguish them from competitors and improve their opportunities for search visibility. To illustrate its importance, Google has received patents related to the concept. These patents describe methods for evaluating how much new information a webpage provides compared with information a user has already encountered.¹
The idea is relatively simple: a webpage that offers original, useful information may provide greater value than one that merely repeats what other websites have already published. For small business owners, this reinforces the importance of answering specific customer questions, explaining services in detail, and sharing knowledge gained through firsthand experience. This is what AI-powered search wants to serve when people are seeking information and trying to make a purchase.
Ultimately, there is mixed evidence establishing exactly how Google uses information gain in its current search results. However, the existence of the aforementioned patents demonstrates that Google has researched the concept and developed methods for applying it to information retrieval when people are searching. While this does not guarantee that information gain directly influences rankings, it provides another compelling reason for businesses to focus on creating original, informative content that offers meaningful value to consumers.
Providing Information Gain with Pricing and Stats
Both people and AI-powered search systems benefit from learning something useful when visiting your website. There are various ways to provide information gain, such as providing factual information that cannot easily be found somewhere else, original statistics about your business, detailed explanations of your services, or answers to questions that competing websites have overlooked. Pricing transparency is one example. If competing businesses provide little or no pricing information, publishing your prices gives customers information they may otherwise have difficulty finding.
Another important tactic is to use credible third-party information, especially statistics, to support your content. For example, a business might reference industry research to explain the benefits of a particular service or help customers understand common costs and purchasing decisions. This information can provide useful context and support the credibility of your explanations. However, simply repeating statistics found on other websites does not necessarily create information gain. The greater opportunity is to combine reliable outside research with your own expertise, observations, and business-specific information to provide something genuinely useful to the reader.
Internal Linking and Website Structure
Another important aspect of your website is internal linking. Internal links connect one page of your website to another. Links are simple to create and improve navigation and connectivity that should flow from your topic cluster (Chapter 1). Unlike backlinks from other websites, you have complete control over them. Although internal linking may seem like a minor technical detail, it serves several important purposes for both search engines and your customers.
Search engines use automated programs, often called crawlers or bots, to discover information on websites. These crawlers follow links from one page to another to identify content that may be included in search results. When you publish a new article or service page, linking to it from an existing page makes it easier for search engines to find. Just as importantly, the words used in those links help explain what the destination page is about. For example, linking the phrase “pizza catering services” to a catering page provides more information than simply using the words “click here.”
Think back to the topic clusters discussed in Chapter 1. The objective was to organize your website around the products, services, and questions that matter to your customers. Internal linking is what connects those pieces of information. Without these links, you may have developed a collection of useful articles, but they are not necessarily working together. By connecting related pages, you create a more organized website that is easier for customers to navigate and for search engines to understand.
There is also a potential search engine optimization benefit. When another website links to one of your pages, some of the ranking value associated with that link may be passed to other pages through your internal links. For example, if a local newspaper publishes an article about your company and links to your website, the page receiving that backlink may help support other related pages through internal linking. Although the exact impact is difficult to measure, this is another reason to connect important pages throughout your website.
Perhaps more importantly, internal linking helps customers find the information they need. Visitors often have several questions before making a purchase, and those questions may change as they learn more about your business. Someone reading an article about how many pizzas to order for a birthday party might next want to know about pricing, delivery, or available catering packages. Rather than forcing that customer to search for each answer independently, you can provide links that guide them to the appropriate information.
This creates a natural progression from answering questions to helping customers make purchasing decisions, which is important for leveraging AI platforms. The objective is not simply to encourage visitors to view more pages. It is to make your website more useful while connecting the information you have already developed. As you continue evolving your topic cluster, continue to review your internal linking pon your website. Each time you publish a new article, consider which existing pages should link to it and which pages the new article should reference. Over time, this relatively simple practice helps turn individual pieces of content into a more organized and effective website.
Backlinks to Your Website
Backlinks are another important consideration for your website. Just as internal linking helps visitors navigate through your website, backlinks provide opportunities for people to discover your business through other websites. A backlink is simply a hyperlink from one website to another. Think of a backlink as a vote of confidence in your business. When another website links to yours, it may signal that your information is useful or relevant. However, not all backlinks carry the same value. Links from credible, relevant websites are generally more valuable than large numbers of links from unrelated or questionable sources.
For example, if a local newspaper publishes an article about your business and includes a link to your website, that link is considered a backlink. Not only can readers follow that link to learn more about your business, but search engines may also consider it a signal of your website’s relevance and credibility. A link from a respected local newspaper may be more meaningful than dozens of links from websites that have little connection to your business or industry.
Your goal should be to develop backlinks to your website, but to do so in an ethical and natural manner. There are many ways to encourage other websites to link to yours, including participating in community activities, developing useful content, and earning coverage from local media or industry publications. The objective is not simply to accumulate as many links as possible. Instead, focus on building relationships and providing information that gives other websites a legitimate reason to reference your business.
This is an important aspect to developing your website, even though it is outward facing.
Applying the Lessons at The Standard Pizza Business
The Standard Pizza Business (TSPB) has completed its Google Business Profile. Now it’s time to build a website that does more than just show pictures of pizza! The owner must instruct their website designer make sure customers can easily find the basics: the restaurant’s location, operating hours, menu, prices, and ordering options. After all, when someone is hungry, they shouldn’t have to search through five pages just to find out how much a large pepperoni pizza costs!
Next, the owner should return to the topic cluster developed in Chapter 1. Remember all those questions customers ask? Each question is an opportunity to create useful website content. As an example, TSPB could create a main page about pizza catering, supported by articles answering questions such as “How many pizzas do I need for 20 people?” or “What are the most popular pizzas for a party?” These articles should link to the catering page and to other relevant articles, helping customers find additional information.
The owner should also look for opportunities to earn links from other websites. A local newspaper covering a community fundraiser, for example, might mention TSPB and link to its website. These backlinks can help build the restaurant’s credibility and support its visibility in search results.
Here’s another important lesson: Be specific! Almost every pizza restaurant claims to have delicious pizza and great service. That doesn’t tell customers very much. Instead, TSPB should provide actual menu prices, catering package details, serving recommendations, and helpful answers to common questions.
Think about it. If two restaurants offer catering, but only one explains how many pizzas to order, what they cost, and how far in advance to place an order, which website is more helpful? The goal is to make TSPB’s website a resource, not just an advertisement. By organizing useful information, answering customer questions, and connecting related pages, the restaurant makes it easier for customers, search engines, and AI platforms to understand what it offers. The more questions that the website answers, the fewer reasons a hungry customer has to look somewhere else!