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Service area pages that help and ones that hurt

Getting found 6 min read

A page for every town you might work in is a common piece of advice and a common way to make a site worse, so here is which town pages earn their place.

You work in eight towns, or you would if somebody called from them. Someone has told you to make a page for each one, and the list of towns you could add keeps growing as you think about it.

There is a version of this that helps you and a version that makes your site worse. They look almost the same from the outside.

What a town page is supposed to do

A person searching with a town name in the box is asking one question: do you come here.

A town page answers that with evidence rather than assertion. It tells somebody in that town that you were on their street last month, that you can be there in twenty minutes, and what you charge to come. That is a real page and it is worth writing.

A page that only holds the town's name does not do that. If the only thing that changes between two of your pages is a word, the page is not answering anybody.

The version that hurts is the same page eight times

Take one page, copy it eight times, swap the town name in the heading and the first line. It takes an afternoon and it is the most common shape this advice takes.

Two things go wrong. Search engines have published guidance against pages built only to catch a place name, so the effort may earn nothing. Worse, a person who lands on one can tell. They read a page that mentions their town four times and says nothing about it, and they close the tab, because a business that pretends to be local when it is not is exactly what they were trying to avoid.

The same trap catches a page for every service, and for the same reason. A page needs something on it that could only have been written by somebody who does the work.

The other cost, which is the call you have to turn down

There is a cost even when the pages work.

Add a town you do not really cover and you will eventually get the call. Somebody with a real problem, who read a page with their town in the title, and now you are explaining that you do not actually come out that far. That call is worse for them than never finding you, and it is a Saturday morning you do not get back.

Every town on your site is a promise to drive there.

When a town page has earned its keep

Write one when you can honestly do most of this:

You work there regularly, not once. You can name streets, neighborhoods or a landmark without looking anything up. You have photographs of work you did there. You know your drive time at eight in the morning, which is different from the drive time the map shows. Something about working there is different: the housing stock, the age of the systems, parking, a service call arrangement, a longer minimum charge.

Two or three towns you actually serve, written properly, are worth more than twelve written from a map.

What actually goes on one

The town in the heading, once, in a sentence a person would say. Your drive time and where you set off from. Which of your services you do there, since it is not always all of them. Whether the price differs, and how. A job you did there, described plainly, with a photograph. A review from somebody in that town if you have one. Then the phone number.

If you cannot fill that, the town does not have a page yet. It has a line on a list, which is a perfectly respectable thing for it to have.

What to do about the other twenty towns

Make one page called something like where we work, and put the honest version on it.

A plain list of the towns you cover. A sentence about how far you go and what happens past that, including whether you charge for the distance. A note about the places you are asked about and do not cover, which saves both of you a phone call. Nobody minds a boundary. They mind finding it at the wrong moment.

Then make sure your Google Business Profile says the same thing, because for a lot of local searching that listing does more work than your site does. The basics of the profile and how local search sorts people are both worth twenty minutes before you write a single town page.

Do not claim a town you cannot get to today

The temptation is to list the towns you would like to work in and let the pages pull you there. It rarely works that way round, and it puts the least accurate thing on your site at the exact moment somebody is deciding to trust it.

If you want to expand, go and do a few jobs there first, take the photographs, then write the page. Written before the work, the page is a wish and the caller finds out.

Before you write a town page, check these

If you cannot tick six of those, put the town on the list instead.

Questions people ask

How many town pages should I have?

As many as you have towns you genuinely work in and can write about. For most one-van businesses that is between one and four, with the rest on a single list.

Can I write a page for a town I have only worked in once?

Not yet. One job is a sentence on your work page, not a page of its own. Do a few more, take pictures while you are there, and it will write itself.

Should the town name be in the page title?

Yes, when the page is real. A title that names the town and the service is how somebody knows they are in the right place.

If I write town pages, will I show up in searches there?

Nobody can promise that, and be careful with anyone who does. Location, distance and your Google Business Profile all matter to what people see, and a page cannot override the fact that you are half an hour away.

What if I cover a whole county?

Say so in one sentence, then name the four or five places you go most. A county name means little to somebody trying to work out whether you will come to their road.

I only work in one town. Do I need any of this?

No. Put the town in your main heading, say how far outside it you will travel, and spend the time on your service pages instead.

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