The test for a town page is simple and almost nobody applies it: swap the place name for a different town. If the page still makes sense, it was never about that town, and it will not do the job you built it for.
Why the swapped-name page fails
The standard local page names a place four or five times and says nothing else that is local. It is the same page as the one next to it, with a different word in the same slots.
Two things go wrong. Search engines have become good at recognising templated pages produced at scale, so the effort rarely earns the ranking it was built for. And a homeowner who opens two of your town pages and finds identical text learns exactly what that effort was, which is a poor first impression from a business asking to be trusted inside their home.
What is actually different about a place
Plenty, once you look at it as a tradesperson rather than a marketer. This is knowledge you already have and rarely write down.
- The housing stock and its age. A district of pre-war houses has different pipework, wiring and heating from an estate built in the last decade, and different problems follow.
- Local conditions. Hard water, salt air near the coast, ground movement, a high water table, the trees that block particular drains.
- What you are actually called out for there. Your job records will show a pattern by area, and it is usually a real one.
- Access and logistics. Narrow streets, shared drives, parking restrictions, buildings with awkward loft access.
- Local rules. Permits, conservation areas, and anything a homeowner would not know to ask about.
- Response time from where you are based. Concrete, useful, and different for every town.
Any two or three of these produce a page that could not be about anywhere else.
Proof beats description
The strongest local content is evidence rather than assertion. Jobs you have done there, described plainly: the work, the type of property, roughly when. A photograph of a job in a recognisable setting. A review from a customer in that town, quoted with the town named.
“We proudly serve the residents of Anytown” is a sentence any business could write about anywhere. “We replaced twelve water heaters in Anytown last year, mostly in the older properties near the station, where the hard water shortens their life” is one only you could.
Only build the page if you can fill it
The uncomfortable consequence. If you cannot say anything specific about a town, you probably do not work there enough to justify a page, and an empty one is worse than none, it ranks for nothing and demonstrates the templating.
The better answer for those places is a single service-area page listing them honestly, with real pages only for the towns where you have something to show. That is the structural version of the same argument in how many pages a contractor site needs.
Where the material comes from
Not a brainstorm. Your job records, your technicians, and your own memory of the awkward properties.
Asking an engineer what is different about working in a particular area produces more usable local content in five minutes than an afternoon of writing, because they will tell you about the water, the access, the age of the boilers and the streets where parking is impossible.
Frequently asked questions
How do I write a good local page?
Include things that could only be true of that place: housing age, water conditions, what you are called out for there, access, response time, and prove it with jobs you have actually done.
How many town pages should I have?
As many as you can fill with something specific. For the rest, one honest service-area page listing them is better than a set of near-identical pages.
What is wrong with listing all the towns I serve?
Nothing, as a list. The problem is a separate page per town that says nothing about any of them.
Where do I get local detail from?
Your technicians and your job records. Ask what is different about working in an area and you will get water conditions, property ages and access problems in five minutes.
Where to start
Take one of your town pages, replace every instance of the place name with a neighbouring town, and read it. If nothing else needs changing, you have found what to fix.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our search optimisation or book a strategy call.