At some point every contractor who cares about search gets the same advice: make a page for every city you serve. Somebody offers to do it for you, and a week later the site has sixty new pages. “Roof Repair in Torrance.” “Roof Repair in Carson.” “Roof Repair in Lomita.” Each one reads the same, word for word, except the city name, which appears eleven times.
Those pages have a name in Google’s own documentation. Its spam policies describe doorway pages as, among other things, multiple pages targeting specific regions or cities that funnel users to one place, with little unique value of their own. Google says sites that rely on them can be ranked lower or removed from results. So the advice is half right. Pages for the places you serve can help. Pages that exist only to catch a search and have nothing to say do not, and can hurt.
The difference is not the number of pages. It is whether each one would be useful to a real person who lives there.
Why city pages can help at all
A homeowner in Whittier searching for an electrician wants one who works in Whittier. For searches that name a place, or searches from a phone that Google knows is in that place, it helps to have a page that makes clear you serve it and gives some reason to believe you know the area.
Your Google Business Profile does much of this work for the map results. A service area page does it for the ordinary search results underneath, and it gives your profile, ads and other listings a specific page to point at. It also answers a question customers really do ask: “Do you come out to us?”
The test for a real service area page
Before writing a page for a place, ask whether you could fill it with things that are true only of that place, or true of your work there. If you can, the page is probably worth having. If the only thing that would change is the city name, it is a doorway page, however well written the rest is.
Things that can make a page genuinely local:
- Jobs you have done there. A short description of a real project in the area, with a photo, and without identifying the customer. “Replaced a 60-amp panel in a 1940s bungalow off Painter Avenue” says more than any paragraph about quality.
- The housing stock and what it means for your trade. Older homes with galvanized pipe, hillside properties with drainage problems, tract homes from the same builder with the same attic layout. Tradespeople know these patterns, and homeowners recognize them.
- Local conditions. Inland valleys that run hotter in summer than the coast, neighborhoods with mature trees over the roofs, areas near the water with more corrosion on outdoor equipment. Keep it to what you actually see.
- Permits and rules. Which city or county issues permits for the work, whether the city has its own requirements. Get this right or leave it out.
- Practical details. How quickly you typically get there, which crew covers the area, whether you are based nearby.
- Reviews from customers in that area, if you have them and they are happy for them to be used.
How many pages, and which places
Fewer than you have been told. Start with the places that bring in the most work, or the most profitable work, and that you can write about honestly. For many local contractors that is somewhere between a handful and fifteen or so. Add more only when you have something to say about them.
A useful way to decide, as an illustrative exercise for your own shop:
| Question | If yes | If no |
|---|---|---|
| Do we get regular work there now? | Strong candidate | Maybe later |
| Is it work we want more of? | Strong candidate | Skip |
| Do we have jobs, photos or local knowledge to write about? | Write it | Wait until you do |
| Is it big enough that people search for it by name? | Its own page | Group it with neighbors |
Grouping is fine. A single page for “the Beach Cities” or “the Foothill communities” that covers several small places properly beats five thin pages. Organize it the way people in the area describe it.
What goes on each page
A workable outline, not a template to fill in identically:
- A headline that names the trade and the place. “Plumbing in Long Beach, from Belmont Shore to Bixby Knolls.”
- An opening in plain words. Who you are, that you work in the area, how long you have, if that is worth saying and true.
- The local part. The housing, conditions and common problems you see there. This is the section that makes the page unique; it should be the longest.
- Recent work in the area. Two or three short project notes with real photos.
- The services you offer there, as links to your service pages, not rewritten copies of them. The service page explains the job; the area page explains the place.
- Practical details and a next step. Phone number, a short form, what happens after they contact you.
A note on writing: resist the temptation to say the city name over and over. Use it where a person would, in the heading, once or twice in the text, and let the rest of the page be about the place rather than the word.
Things to stop doing
If your site already has a batch of copy-and-swap city pages, you do not need to panic, but you should clean up.
- Consolidate. Keep the pages for places that matter and rewrite them properly. Redirect the rest to the nearest real page or the main service area page.
- Remove hidden lists of cities. A footer or sidebar with eighty city names in small print does nothing for readers.
- Stop claiming offices you do not have. “Our Santa Monica location” when there is no Santa Monica location is misleading to readers and can cause problems with your profile and listings.
- Stop buying pages by the dozen. If someone offers you fifty location pages as a package, ask to read three of them side by side before agreeing to anything.
Done properly, service area pages are slower to make and there are fewer of them. That is the point. Each one is something you could hand to a homeowner in that town and they would learn something about how you work there. That is also, not by coincidence, what search engines say they are trying to reward.
If you want a second opinion on which places deserve a page, that is part of the SEO work we do.