Single Page
The Negatives
If you’re in the market for a single page website with the goal to target a specific audience, then you might want to reconsider. Some of the negatives for single page sites include:
Low Keyword Targeting: If you have only one page on your website, you can’t target all of the keywords for which your business needs to rank. This limits you to only rank for a few keywords for your one page therefore lowering the exposure your business will get on the web.
Lack of Content: With a one page website, you’re limited to how much content you can put on your website without destroying your loading time. You can’t be as descriptive as you could be with a multi-page website. This will limit video, graphics, and copy usage on the website. People like to see videos, graphics, and interesting and enticing content that will keep them reading.
Lack The Ability To Target A Wider Audience: This dives into the lack of keyword density on your website. A reduced target audience limits your website to only attract people who are searching for your specific keyword and not people who search for long-tail keywords with specific intents.
If You Want To Rank Well: If you want to rank well, a single page is not what you want to go with. Yes, it may be more efficient for PPC landing pages, but at the same time it will limit your exposure on what you want to rank for. Limited keywords, content, graphics, and videos can inhibit your ability to rank and cause people to not find your business when they’re searching for a broad keyword and not a specific keyword for which you’re ranking.
Disorganized Content: With a single page website, you’re forced to stuff content into your website to try and entice users to read and understand what your business does. With disorganized content you’re begging to confuse your audience with either too much content or not enough to describe what you do efficiently while trying to rank well.
Slow Loading Times: If you want a single page website, you will have to smush all of your content onto one page; your load time will suffer as a consequence. Slower loading websites are discouraged both from search engines and users. If people visit a website that loads in 1-4 seconds, then you’re going to be happy (depending on what the content is focused on). This will have a lower bounce rate. Websites that are 5-10 seconds (or even longer) are subject to higher bounce rates for people who are on mobile devices or are on slower internet speeds.
Limited Design Options: Your design might be lacking due to having all of your content crammed into a single page website. If you’re building a 20-60 page website, you can tailor each page to fit your specific target keyword and audience’s intent.
The Positives
Even though there are more negatives than positives, there are still some positives to a single page website. Some of these include:
Fast Loading: Faster loading on mobile devices is what everyone wants. If an individual visits your website and is waiting 5-10 seconds for your website to load, then you have a higher chance of people bouncing off of your website. Therefore increasing your bounce rate (provided your content is simple, and not high in detail).
A Blessing If You Have Large Fingers: Will prevent you from having to jump from page to page on a smaller mobile device. This is beneficial if you have larger hands and are always accidentally clicking on ads or other items you have no interest in.
Light On The Wallet: One page websites are generally cheaper to build. They require less time to design and develop. This can be a good thing if done right.
Multi-Page
The Negatives
Having a multi-page website can be hard to deal with if you’re someone that just wants to find the info and be done with reading. Sometimes, depending on the industry, multi-page websites can contain too much information and confuse the user, causing them to avoid reading the content that you took time to craft. This is where landing pages come into play but we’ll talk about that in the positives of a multi-page website.
Lack of Simplicity: If you’re with an agency that just doesn’t know what they’re doing it can cause your multi-page website to be a cluster of chaos. Having more content on your website will promote good SEO, but could deter users who want to get their information quickly and leave.
Can Cause Duplicate Content To Arise: Duplicate content or repeating the same content throughout your website can cause your rankings to drop dramatically. This is done by creating pages that have the same URL variations (ex: page.html and page-1.html), lack of 301 redirects, and indexed 404 pages.
The Positives
In today’s SEO standards having a multi-page website is the way to go if you want to provide your audience with a plethora of information with exquisite design while having the outreach you want to rank well and efficiently in your industry.
Efficient Use Of 301 Redirects: With efficient use of 301 redirects, you will be able to effectively fix all errors with links on your website. Therefore promoting better SEO practices and preventing users from being linked to the wrong parts of your website.
Informative: The more information on your website the better. The more content you have to promote on your website, the better you will attract users to learn more about facts, falsehoods, and information in your industry.
Graphics & Videos To Covering A Wide Range Of Services / Information: The more information you have on your website, the more videos and eye catching graphics you can add to catch the user’s eye to your content. With an ever growing video industry, this is needed to attract users. Your audience does not want to read a wall of text without seeing graphical representations of what your pages are describing.
More Pages For Major Search Engines To Index: The more pages, the better. A website with 30 pages will rank better due to having better more content being indexed by search engines. This is due to the fact that you can cover more subjects and interests about your business in higher detail throughout all of your website’s pages.
Wide Range of Keyword Use: With more pages and content on your website you’re able to have a higher keyword density throughout your website whilst covering all of your subjects efficiently and accurately.
Higher Domain Authority: A multi page website filled with quality content will enhance your chances of being linked to by other websites. If you create a blog, landing page, or FAQ page that is the envy of your niche, then people will want to link to it! Along with that backlink comes that much-coveted link juice!
Better Rankings Overall: If your agency builds your website right, you’re going to rank well. When it comes to developing a multi-page website you want the right agency to build with eye-catching graphics, engaging content, and efficient keyword placement to promote quality search engine rankings.
At the end of the day, a multi-page website is better than having a single page website. It will promote having more content to entice users to read and learn more about your business. The more people that visit your website the easier you can better your content and learn what makes people want to learn about your industry.
Although there is good things about having single page websites, they are generally better for landing pages focused on specific locations or services for your business. This can be done efficiently by using the landing pages on your Google AdWords campaign that’s focused on specific locations in your area.
Look at it this way
If your single page website is a newly growing tree in the middle of the forest, the sunlight (i.e your potential visitors) is only reaching the top of the surrounding 50 ft trees (i.e. other existing multi-page websites). To give yourself the photosynthesizing chance that you need in the future, you need to grow your tree (i.e. the pages on your website) to capture as much sunlight as possible.
