Write one real page about the work you do in that area, carrying detail only somebody who works there could have written. Do not copy a page and swap the town name. Google names blocks of text listing cities and regions as keyword stuffing, and the templated town page is the version of that which still gets sold.
The test is simple and unforgiving. If you can find and replace the town name and the page still makes sense, it is a doorway page. If replacing the name makes the page wrong, it is a real page.
What goes on a real area page?
The things that are actually different about working there. Housing stock and its era. What the ground does. What the roads do in winter. How the local permit process actually runs and how long it takes. Which problems come up over and over in that particular place.
In this region that is easy to write honestly because the differences are real. A lakeside community with a lot of seasonal properties has a completely different set of problems from a township of year round houses on well and septic, and anybody who works both knows it in their hands. Write that down and you have a page nobody can copy.
How many area pages should I have?
As many as you can write honestly, which for most businesses is between two and five. Not fourteen.
Five genuine pages beat fourteen templated ones by a distance, and they are also five pages you can maintain. A business with fourteen thin town pages has fourteen things going stale and no way to improve any of them without noticing that they are all the same page.
Not sure whether your town pages are a liability?
Send us the links. We will apply the find and replace test and tell you which ones are real pages and which ones should come down.
Get a free website and marketing auditWhat if I do not have anything specific to say about that town?
Then you probably do not work there enough to be claiming it, and that is a useful thing to discover.
The honest alternative is a single service area page that names where you work and explains the common regional conditions without pretending to town level expertise. That is truthful, it is useful to a customer checking whether you come out that far, and it will not get you into trouble.
Will this put me in the map results there?
No, and any page that promises it will is lying to you. The map results are heavily influenced by where your business physically is, and content cannot change your address.
What a real area page can do is rank in the ordinary results below the map, which is a genuine route into a town you are not physically near. Slower, less prominent, and completely legitimate. If you need the map pack in that town, the honest answers are a real staffed location there or paid advertising.
| Doorway page | Real page |
|---|---|
| Town name swapped into the same text | Detail that is only true in that place |
| One per town in your radius | One per place you genuinely work |
| Written from a template | Written from jobs you actually did |
| Nothing to maintain, nothing to say | Gets better as you do more work there |
What about the job pages instead?
Often better. A page about a specific job you did, with the town named naturally in the course of describing it, does much of the work of an area page and is far more interesting to read.
Ten job stories across four towns will out perform four town templates, and they are easier for an owner to produce because the material is already sitting on their phone. This is the recommendation we give most often and it is the one people are most surprised by, because it does not look like SEO. It looks like showing your work, which is the point.
How do I write one if I am not a writer?
Talk it. Pick a job you did in that area and describe it out loud: what the property was like, what you found, what was different about doing it there, what it cost roughly and why.
Five minutes of that is a page, and it will contain the local detail automatically, because you cannot describe a real job without saying true things about where it happened. The version people struggle with is the abstract one, sitting down to write about a town in general, and that is exactly the version that comes out as a template. Start from a job and the page writes itself. Start from a town name and you end up with the thing this whole article is warning you about.
The mistake to avoid entirely
The footer list of forty town names. It is still on a lot of local sites, it has been a liability rather than an advantage for years, and it makes an otherwise credible business look like it is gaming something. Take it off. Put the towns you actually serve in a sentence on the contact page and let the real pages carry the rest.
How we approach this for clients is on the digital marketing page, it shapes the content side of the Growth Engine, and it comes up constantly with the home services businesses we work with.