What that list of towns is actually doing
Nothing. Or close enough to nothing that it is not worth the space.
Search engines match a page to a search. A homepage that says “covering Bolton, Bury, Radcliffe, Farnworth, Horwich and surrounding areas” is one page trying to be the best answer to six different searches, while also being the best answer to “electrician”, “EICR”, “rewire” and “EV charger”.
It cannot be. Something else out there is a page about exactly one of those things, in exactly one of those towns, and that page wins.
One page can be the best answer to one question. Ten questions need ten pages.
The maths, without any invented statistics
This is arithmetic rather than a claim. If you cover six towns and offer five services, that is thirty distinct things somebody might type. A ten-page website cannot cover thirty searches, however good the copy is.
You do not need thirty pages. You need enough that the searches worth money each have a page pointed at them — usually the services with the highest job value and the towns you actually want to work in.
What makes a location page real rather than spam
Find-and-replace location pages are the reason location pages have a bad name. Ten pages identical apart from the town name are worse than not having them, and search engines have been catching that particular trick for over a decade.
A location page earns its place when it contains something that is only true about that place:
- Specifics of the work there. Housing stock, common faults, typical property age, the jobs you actually get called out for.
- Named areas within the town, because that is how people describe where they live.
- Real jobs you have done there, with photographs if you have them.
- Practical detail — how quickly you can get there, whether you charge for the call-out, parking or access quirks.
- A different first line. If the opening sentence works with any town name dropped in, it is not a location page.
A useful test: cover up the town name. If you cannot tell which page you are looking at, neither can anybody else.
How to write ten of them without losing a week
The trick is that you do not write them. The whole brief is ten short questions: what you do, where you work, which jobs you want more of, which you would rather stop getting, and anything you would rather not say. Ten minutes on a phone.
Everything after that is our problem. Structure, headings, internal links, schema, and making sure each page says something the others do not.
What to do first if you already have a site
- Count your pages. Then count your services multiplied by your towns. The gap is your ceiling.
- Check Search Console for what you already appear for. Anything sitting at position five to fifteen is a page that is nearly there and worth fixing before building anything new.
- Look for cannibalisation — two of your own pages competing for the same search, splitting the signal.
- Then build outwards, starting with the service that pays best in the town you most want to work in.
Occasionally the answer is that the site itself is the problem and no amount of new pages will fix it. If that is the case we will tell you, because building ten pages on top of a broken foundation is a good way to spend money and change nothing.
Spend £100 and see a real homepage built on your own words and photographs before you commit to anything. Refunded in full if you go ahead.
The same thinking applies to services: should every service have its own page?
One email a month. Nothing else.
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