Service-area pages: the least glamorous SEO work that keeps paying
Done badly they are spam. Done properly they are why a two-van business outranks a franchise in six towns. The difference is entirely in what goes on the page.
A service-area page is a page about one service in one place. Boiler replacement in Meridian. Invisalign in Folsom. They have a bad reputation, deservedly, because for a decade the standard approach was to write one page and swap the town name forty times. Google has been able to detect that since roughly 2013.
The version that works is more effort and considerably more durable.
What makes a page genuinely local
- Something true about that place. The housing stock, the age of the pipework, the parking situation, the local authority that issues the permit. One paragraph a person who lives there would recognise as accurate.
- Real jobs you have done nearby. A street name, a job type, what it cost as a range. Two or three is plenty.
- Your actual coverage. Response times, whether there is a call-out charge to that area, which days you are usually over that way.
- Local proof. A review from a customer in that town, quoted with their name and the job.
How many to build, and how fast
Start with the four or five towns you already work in and want more of. Do not publish forty pages in a week for places you have never driven to; a page for a town you do not serve will eventually rank, generate an enquiry, and cost you a bad review when you decline the job. Two well-made pages a month is a perfectly good pace, and the compounding is what matters.
Internal linking is half the value
Each service-area page should link up to the main service page and sideways to the two or three neighbouring towns. This is the part almost everyone skips, and it is the part that makes a cluster of pages behave like a body of work rather than forty orphans.
What to expect
These pages are slow. A new one typically does nothing for six to ten weeks, then settles into a position and stays there. The business case is not the first page; it is that thirty months later you have twenty-odd pages each quietly producing enquiries, none of which you are paying per click for.
Marcus Reyes
Head of Search
Marcus has worked on local search since 2017, mostly for trades, clinics and independent retailers. He is the person who will tell you that your third-best keyword is the one worth having.
