Pages like this are often treated as an afterthought by businesses, but they shouldn’t be. They might not ever rank highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and that’s OK. Instead, they’re important in establishing your website as a trustworthy business and information source, which can boost your rankings for the pages to which you really want to drive traffic.
About and contact pages matter to Google
While much of the inner workings of Google are a mystery, there are some things that they’re quite transparent about. Google has a Search Quality Rating program that manually reviews search results and the guidelines this program uses are publicly available. This gives us insight into exactly what Google looks at when judging whether a site should be recommended by giving it a top spot in the SERPs.
Google tells their raters to look not only at the page in question, but the rest of the website as well. Guidelines specifically state that raters should view contact, about and customer service pages. It’s really worth reading all of the Search Quality Rating guidelines to see exactly how raters are instructed to evaluate these pages, but the main takeaways are:
When you fulfill these requirements, it boosts your Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) in the eyes of Google. There is no E-A-T algorithm and Google isn’t manually reviewing every website on the Internet, but E-A-T is baked into everything Google does as it tries to offer its users the highest quality content available.
E-A-T has on-page and off-page considerations and optimizing your about, contact, customer service and other afterthought pages can go a long way when it comes to those on-page (or on-site) factors.
What to include in your these customer service pages
Google takes what you say about yourself or your business with a grain of salt. People can (and do) say just about anything on the Internet, assuming no one will take the time to research their claims. Well, Google does.
Google raters are instructed to find independent outside sources to back up reputation claims made on the about page of a website. This is why it’s a good idea to link to notable press mentions on this page. Include the name of the publication and the article. Also include awards you’ve won and anything else that can bolster your E-A-T in the eyes of Google—but can also be verified by checking outside sources.
The more ways your clients, customers or users have to contact you, the better. Gone are the days when a simple contact form would suffice. You should have an email address, phone number and physical address on your contact page, in addition to a form. If you have a large business, create a more robust contact page with separate contact information for each department and key individuals
If your business has multiple locations, you should create a page for each of them and then link these pages from the main contact page.
If you run an online store, your customer service page should be thorough. At a minimum, you should have policies on payment, exchanges and returns. An FAQ is a great format for a customer service page.
