Area pages that work, and the ones Google ignores

Short answer: area pages work when each one is genuinely useful to someone in that town: what you do there, the jobs you've done nearby, how quickly you can get there and what customers in that area usually ask. They fail, and can drag the rest of your site down, when they're the same page copied twenty times with the town name swapped. Google calls those doorway pages and treats them as spam.

Area pages are one of the most effective things a local business can add to its website, and one of the most abused. Done properly, they're how a plumber in Basingstoke shows up for searches in Tadley, Hook and Chineham. Done badly, they're the reason a site full of pages still doesn't rank anywhere.

If you could swap the town name for another and nothing else would need to change, it isn't an area page. It's a template.

Why area pages matter

Google matches searches to pages, and local searches nearly always include a place, even when the person doesn't type it. Someone searching "roofer" on their phone in Fleet is looking for a roofer in Fleet. A page about your roofing work in Fleet gives Google something specific to show them. A footer line saying "we cover Hampshire" doesn't.

AI tools work the same way. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in a particular town, it looks for businesses that clearly say they work there.

What Google says not to do

Google's spam policies specifically call out doorway pages: lots of near-identical pages created to rank for slightly different searches, that all funnel to the same place. Twenty town pages with the same three paragraphs and a different place name are the textbook example. At best they're ignored. At worst they make Google trust the whole site less.

What a good area page includes

• What you do in that area, in plain words, not a list of every service you've ever offered
• Real local proof: jobs you've done nearby, with photos where you can, and reviews from customers there
• Practical details: how far you travel, typical response times, whether there's a call-out charge
• Local specifics: the housing stock, the estates, the problems you see most in that patch
• Links to your service pages, so someone in that town can go straight to the job they need
• A way to get in touch on every screen

How many area pages should you have?

As many as you can make genuinely useful, and no more. For most local businesses that's the five to fifteen places where most of your work actually comes from. It's better to have eight strong pages than forty thin ones. Start with the towns you'd most like more work in, and add others as you build up local jobs and reviews to talk about.

How we build them

Every Zenlio Local site gets a page for each main service and an area page for each town your work actually comes from, written from what you tell us in your form: the towns you work in, the jobs you do there and what customers ask. You can see how we approach it on our own Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey pages.

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