City & Area Pages

Almost every local business ends up needing this at some point, because you serve six areas, or ten, and you quite sensibly want a page for each one so that people searching in those particular places can actually find you, and then you sit down to write the second page and realise with a sinking feeling that it is going to say more or less exactly the same thing as the first one did.

That is the precise problem this section exists to solve, because copying a single page and simply swapping the place name gives you a stack of pages that add nothing for the reader, read badly the moment anyone compares two of them, and are unlikely to do you much good in search results either, and yet the alternative of writing ten genuinely different pages about one service can feel completely impossible when the service really is the same in every area.

It is not impossible, and it usually comes down to finding what actually changes from one place to the next, which turns out to be far more than most people expect, including travel time, the age of the housing, the kind of jobs that come up most often, the landmarks people use when they give directions, and the questions local customers tend to ask first.

The guides here walk you through how to research an area before you write about it, how to arrange a set of location pages so they support one another instead of competing, how to handle a business that has no shop or office at all, and what to write for your Google Business Profile.