If you drive forty minutes for a job, you have a service area. If your website only mentions the town your shop is in, you are invisible for most of it.
The trap
The obvious move is to take your services page, copy it eleven times, and swap the city name. This was effective in 2012 and has been actively penalized since. Search engines recognize near-duplicate pages easily, and they discount all of them — so eleven thin pages can leave you ranking worse than the one page you started with.
What makes an area page real
- Something true and specific about working there: the age of the housing stock, the common problems, the permit process, the response time from your shop.
- Jobs you have actually done in that area, with photos.
- The neighborhoods or ZIP codes covered, named individually.
- A local phone presentation and directions, with correct structured data.
- Reviews from customers in that area, if you have them.
That is two hundred words of genuine local knowledge per page. It is not hard to produce, it is just tedious — which is why almost nobody does it, and why it still works.
How many pages?
Start with the towns that already send you work, plus the two or three you want more of. Eight to twelve is typical for a single-location contractor. Adding thirty at once, all thin, is worse than adding six good ones.
Measuring it
Give it ninety days, then look at which area pages get impressions in Search Console and which get zero. The zeroes usually need more specific content, not more pages. This is the part that never happens under a bill-by-the-change agency arrangement, because every revision has a price tag on it.
