Start from the questions, not the sitemap
The useful exercise is not "what pages should we have" but "what does someone need to know before they contact us". Write those questions down. Each one that requires a real answer is a candidate for a page; the rest are sections.
This is also how search works. A page earns visibility by being the best answer to one specific question. A page that tries to answer six questions is rarely the best answer to any of them.
The pages nearly every business needs
This is the core set. It is smaller than most people expect and it does more work than most people expect.
- 02.1A homepage that says what you do, who for, and what to do next — in the first screen.
- 02.2One page per service you actually sell. Not one page listing all of them; one page each.
- 02.3A services overview that introduces the set and links to each page.
- 02.4An about page — the second-most-visited page on most small business sites, because people want to know who they are hiring.
- 02.5A contact page with a real form, real expectations about response time, and no unnecessary fields.
- 02.6Proof of work: case studies, a portfolio, or documented projects.
- 02.7Pricing, or at minimum an honest explanation of how you price.
- 02.8Privacy and terms.
The pages that are usually a waste
A page per city you would like to work in, with the city name swapped and nothing else changed, is a doorway page. Search engines have detected and discounted this pattern for well over a decade, and it makes your site worse for humans in the meantime.
The same is true of near-duplicate service pages targeting phrasing variations of the same intent. If two pages would say the same thing, they should be one page.
A blog with three posts from four years ago actively signals neglect. Either commit to publishing or leave it off.
Structure matters as much as page count
Every page should be reachable from the navigation or from a contextual link within two or three clicks of the homepage. A page nobody links to is a page search engines will crawl last and visitors will never find.
Link with descriptive text that makes sense read aloud. "See how we approach website redesign" tells both a person and a crawler what they will get; "click here" tells neither.