Service area pages
Also called City pages, Location pages, Area pages.
Service area pages are pages on your website about the work you do in a specific town, city or part of a metro. A good one says what you do there, how fast you get there, and something specific to that place. A copy of another page with the town name swapped is a doorway page, which Google treats as spam.
Doug's Field Guide · Updated
Why do service area pages matter?
Customers search for a job and a place: 'water heater repair Pflugerville', 'emergency dentist Cedar Park', 'estate lawyer Georgetown'. People ask AI assistants the same thing in a full sentence. Both look for a page that answers that exact pairing.
A home page that says 'serving greater Austin' in the footer rarely wins those searches. A page about your work in Pflugerville, with real details about Pflugerville, often does. It also gives an assistant a clear sentence to repeat, like 'Smith Plumbing covers Pflugerville and usually arrives within two hours.'
Service area pages pair with service pages. The service page covers one job everywhere you work. The area page covers everything you do in one place. They link to each other.
What goes on a good area page?
Open with the plain answer in the first two sentences: what you do in this town, how soon you can usually get there, and how to book. For example: 'We fix and replace water heaters across Pflugerville, usually the same day. Most calls start with a free estimate on site.' Then add what is only true there.
- Neighborhoods, zip codes or roads you cover, and where your coverage stops.
- Local conditions that change the work: hard water, older homes with galvanized pipe, clay soil, HOA rules, county permits.
- The jobs you do most often in that town.
- A real photo or short note from a job there, and a real review from a customer there if you have one.
- Links to the service pages for the work you do in that town.
How many area pages is too many?
Google's spam policies name two things that catch careless area pages. Doorway abuse is pages made to rank for similar searches that lead to a less useful page. Scaled content abuse is many pages generated mainly to manipulate rankings, however they were made. Fifty pages that differ only in the town name fit both.
The test is simple: can you write three true sentences about this town that don't fit the next town over? If you can, the page earns its place. If you can't, leave the town on your main service area list and skip the page until you have something to say. Ten real pages do more for you than fifty copies, and they are far easier to keep current when prices or coverage change.
Write your first real area page
- List the five towns where most of your jobs came from last year.
- For the top town, write down how long it usually takes you to get there, the neighborhoods you cover, and one local detail that changes the work.
- Write the page: two sentence answer at the top, then those details, then a link to each service you do there.
- Add the town to your Google Business Profile service area if it isn't there already.
Common mistakes
- Publishing dozens of town pages that are the same text with the name swapped, which Google calls doorway pages.
- Making pages for towns you don't actually go to, which leads to calls you have to turn down.
- Leaving area pages orphaned, with no links from your service pages or menu, so neither customers nor Google find them.
How Doug does it
Doug drafts service and area pages from your own material, like your services, prices, coverage and the questions customers ask him, and can publish them to WordPress, a GitHub repo, or a fast site he builds and hosts on your domain. His weekly site health check also flags orphan pages that nothing links to.
Terms on this page
- Doorway page
- A page made to rank for one search that offers little of its own, often a copy of another page with the town name swapped. Google's spam policies prohibit them.
- Slug
- The last part of a page's address, like /drain-cleaning-round-rock. Short, lowercase words separated by hyphens are easiest for people and search engines to read.
Keep exploring
- Internal linksLinks from one page on your site to another, with words that say where they go.
- Google Business ProfileYour free listing on Google Search and Maps, and the first thing a local customer sees.
- Local packThe map and short business list at the top of a local Google search.
- Done for youOur team works your fix queue on your accounts and reports every Monday.
Sources
Written by Doug's team from these sources and our own work with local businesses. Search engines change their rules, so check the source before a big decision.
