Almost every conversation about a new project at SeoHab starts with the same sentence: “We need a website.” And almost always what stands behind it is not a technical specification but some business pain: too few leads, competitors ranking higher in search, customers who don’t trust the brand, sales reps losing enquiries, ad budget burning with nothing to show. The type of website is the first answer to that pain, and everything else depends on it: budget, timeline, structure, promotion potential, and how much money the site will bring in a year from now.
Usually the type is picked at random — on a friend’s advice, by price, or by a screenshot someone liked. And then it turns out that a landing page simply cannot be ranked for dozens of queries, and that nobody prepared photos or descriptions for the online store. Let’s go through each type on the merits: what problem it solves, where its ceiling is, and what it costs in money and time.
The website type is an economic decision, not a design decision
Any type of website can be made to look good. The difference is not in the visuals but in the customer acquisition model it supports.
If you buy traffic through Google Ads and social media, you need a page with one goal and maximum conversion. If you want free traffic from search, you need a structure of dozens of pages, each targeting its own query group. If you sell products with stock tracking, you need a system that counts inventory, accepts payments and exports orders. These are three different architectures, and trying to combine them into one “universal” solution ends in overspending.
The correct order is: first you articulate where people will come from and what they should do, and only then you choose the type. All website development starts with a question about the traffic channel, not about the number of pages.
Landing page: one goal, one traffic stream
A landing page is a single long page built as a sequence of arguments: offer, pains, solution, proof, price, objection handling, call to action. It has no menu in the usual sense and gives no choice: the visitor either submits a request or leaves.
A landing page is justified when:
- you have one service or one product, at most a narrow product line;
- your main traffic source is paid advertising or social media;
- you need to test demand or a new offer quickly;
- there is a promotion, launch, season, webinar or event with a limited timeframe.
The strength of a landing page is launch speed and conversion. The weakness is close to zero potential in organic search. One page physically cannot rank for dozens of different commercial queries: search engines need a separate relevant document for each topic. That is why a landing page lives on bought traffic, and the moment you switch off the ads, the leads stop.
The second mistake is turning a landing page into an accordion site by appending blocks about every service you offer: the focus dissolves and conversion drops. If you have more than two or three services, you need a proper structure. There is more about the format on the Landing Page page, and about setting up traffic for it in the PPC advertising section.
Business card site: minimal presence that still works
A business card site is 3–6 pages: home, services, about the company, contacts, sometimes a price list. The job of such a site is not so much to sell as to confirm that the business exists.
A business card site makes sense in three scenarios: you work on referrals and the client simply googles you before calling; you are an independent specialist and your range of services doesn’t require an elaborate structure; you need to occupy the domain quickly and start accumulating search history, with a full website planned for later.
What you should not expect from it is a flow of leads from search. Five pages will give you visibility for your company name and, with some luck, for a few low-volume queries. That is a reasonable starting point, but not a growth tool. The good news: a business card site built on a proper CMS with a sensible structure can be grown into a corporate website without rebuilding from scratch — provided somebody thought about that in advance. The format and scope of work are described on the business card website page.
Corporate website: the foundation for SEO and trust
A corporate website is a site with a deliberate structure: separate pages for every service and sub-service, a case studies or portfolio section, a blog, pages about the company, the team, guarantees, prices, reviews, and contacts with several offices. Usually 15–20 pages and upwards, with no real ceiling.
This is exactly the type that solves the organic traffic problem. Every service page is an entry point for its own query group. Every blog article is an entry point for informational queries that later lead to services. The case studies section handles objections and builds trust, while also giving search engines expertise signals. If you are planning SEO promotion even a year from now, a corporate website is the minimum viable option.
An important nuance: the structure of such a site should be designed not “by company departments” but by semantics — by the way people actually search for your services. One line item in your price list may split into four pages for four different queries, while three other line items may merge into one. We work through this before design begins, because reworking the structure on an already-built site is expensive. The scope of work is on the corporate website page, and texts written for such a structure are copywriting.
Online store: when the catalogue starts selling by itself
An online store differs from all the previous types not in the number of pages but in the presence of logic: product cards, categories, filters, cart, checkout, payment, delivery, order statuses, customer accounts, integration with a warehouse or ERP system.
You need a store if at least one of these conditions is true: you have more than twenty or thirty products, the customer has to see price and availability, the purchase happens without talking to a sales rep, there are repeat purchases. If you have five items and every sale goes through negotiation, you don’t need a store — you need a couple of strong selling pages.
The main mistake in e-commerce is treating design as the core of the work. In practice, 70% of a store’s success is catalogue structure and filters. Categories must match the way people search: not “Products” but “Kitchen faucets”. Filters must generate indexable pages — these bring the lion’s share of search traffic in product niches. Then there’s content: 500 product cards with no descriptions and no photos are 500 empty pages that search engines will ignore. The second underrated block is what happens after the order: notifications, statuses, passing the order into the CRM. That is covered in the business automation section, and the format itself on the online store page.
Portal and web system: when the website becomes a product
There is a category of projects where the website stops being a showcase and becomes a working tool: customer accounts with roles, price calculation based on complex logic, a database of objects with a map and filtering, service booking with a schedule, a marketplace with several sellers, a learning platform, an internal system for employees.
Such projects follow different rules: first the user scenarios and data structure are designed, then the interfaces. Development runs in iterations, often with an MVP launch. Budget and timeline are always individual, because what gets estimated is not the number of pages but the volume of logic. If your project is closer to this description, take a look at exclusive website.
How the website type affects SEO
Let’s go through this in order, because it is the most common source of disappointment.
A landing page ranks for one or two query groups, usually narrow or brand-related; pushing it into the top for a competitive commercial query is an expensive exception. A business card site adds queries for the company name and a couple of pages for general services. A corporate website gives you as many entry points as you are prepared to fill with quality content — this is where SEO starts working as a system. A store scales even further thanks to categories and filters, but it demands technical discipline: duplicates, pagination, canonical URLs, speed.
The conclusion: if you are counting on organic search as your main channel, choose the type one size up — migrating from one type to another is always more expensive than building a structure with room to grow.
Budget and timelines: what to expect for each type
Based on our projects, the benchmarks look like this: a landing page from $900 and about 7–14 days, a corporate website from $1,800 and 3–6 weeks, an online store from $3,200 and 5–10 weeks, a portal or web system from $5,200 and two months upwards. A business card site usually falls at the lower boundary of the landing page range in money, but takes less time.
The spread inside each category comes from four factors: custom design versus a template, the number of unique page templates, the volume of integrations (CRM, payments, warehouse, ERP), and how ready the client’s content is. The last point is the most underestimated one: texts and photos delay projects more often than development does.
You can get a rough figure with the calculator on the home page, and an exact estimate is always put together after a short brief — write to us via contacts.
Five mistakes that lead to choosing the wrong website type
The first is choosing by price: a cheap landing page instead of the corporate website you actually need means that in a year you will pay for a second website in full. The second is choosing by picture: “I want one like theirs” ignores the fact that “they” have a different traffic model and a different average deal size. The third is buying functionality for the future: customer accounts and multilingual support “just in case” mean an extra month on the timeline and money that could have gone into advertising. The fourth is the opposite: saving on structure, building five pages instead of the thirty you need, so SEO never gets off the ground at all.
The fifth is building a new website when an upgrade would do. Sometimes a project has a sound foundation and it is cheaper to rework the structure and redesign individual blocks: that is website improvement.
Three questions that settle the choice in ten minutes
Answer them in writing, one or two sentences each.
Where will traffic come from over the next six months? “Advertising” means a landing page. “Search” means a corporate website. “Both” means a corporate website plus separate landing pages for ads.
What should the visitor do? Call or submit a request — pages with a strong offer are enough. Choose from a range and pay — a store. Log into an account — a web system.
How much content do you have right now? If photos and texts aren’t ready, it is more honest to start with a compact format and expand as content appears than to build thirty empty pages.
The website type is a reversible decision, but an expensive one: half an hour of analysis before the start saves months afterwards. If you’d like to go through these questions together with us and see structure options for your niche — let’s discuss the project and we’ll show which format will bring leads faster. Have a look at our portfolio as well.
Frequently asked questions
Can I start with a landing page and later grow it into a corporate website?
Technically yes, but it almost always means new markup and a new structure: a landing page has no category templates, no nesting and no blog. If a corporate website is on the roadmap for the year, it is more sensible to build a site with the right structure straight away and carve out separate landing pages inside it for advertising — they will work like landing pages but stay part of the project.
Do I need an online store if I sell through marketplaces?
Your own store solves what a marketplace does not: margin without platform commission, your own customer base, and search traffic for your brand and products. A sensible strategy is to keep the marketplace as a sales channel and build your own site in parallel for organic search and repeat purchases.
What should I choose if the budget only covers one thing: the website or the advertising?
The website, because advertising without an adequate landing page simply burns budget: you get clicks and no leads. The minimum working set is one strong page plus a small advertising test. After that the budget is allocated by results: if leads come in, we add pages and connect search promotion.
How many pages should a corporate website have?
As many as the query groups you want to cover. The practical minimum is one page per service you actually sell, plus case studies, plus a blog. For most service companies that means 15–40 pages at launch, growing through the blog and new landing pages. What you should be counting is not pages but semantics.