Do you need a separate page for every town you cover?

Short answer: no. You don't need a separate page for every town you cover. But you might want a few. The difference matters more than the number.

If you're a plumber, electrician or roofer working across a dozen towns, someone has probably told you to build a page for each one. Same layout, same wording, town name swapped in at the top. Twelve towns, twelve pages, job done. It sounds tidy. It is also the pattern Google's spam policies single out.

Google has a name for this. In its spam policies it calls it doorway abuse: sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries that lead users to intermediate pages less useful than the final destination. Two of its own examples are worth reading slowly. One is "multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page". The other is "substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy".

Read that second one again. A stack of near-identical pages looks less like a website and more like a list of search results pasted onto your own domain.

Writing a page about a town isn't the problem in itself. The policy is aimed at pages that exist to rank for similar searches and lead people on to somewhere else. So the question isn't "should I have area pages?" It's "does this page hold anything real for that place?"

I won't promise what any of this does for your rankings, and nobody honestly can. What the policy does say is that near-identical, region-targeted pages are a problem, and they don't help the person reading them either.

Google's helpful-content guidance asks whether your content shows first-hand expertise and depth of knowledge. For a tradesperson, that second bit is the easy part. You have it. You've been in the lofts, under the sinks and up the ladders. You've seen what the houses in that town are like.

So think about the customer. Someone in a particular town is deciding whether to ring you. What would settle it? Probably a few plain things: do you work round here, what do you tend to deal with, how quickly could you get to me, who do I actually speak to. A page that answers those is useful. A page that says "Looking for a reliable plumber in [Town]? We are the best plumber in [Town]" answers nothing.

Before you build a page, try this. It takes about a minute.

1. Take the draft page and delete the town name everywhere it appears.
2. Read what's left. Could it be pasted onto any other town's page without anyone noticing?
3. If yes, it isn't an area page yet. It's a template with a label on it.
4. Now ask whether you can add at least one thing that is true of that place and no other.

If you can't think of anything specific to say about a town, that's useful information too. It may simply mean you don't do enough work there to justify its own page. Fair enough. It can sit in a list of places you cover on your main services page, and that's perfectly respectable.

Here's a short list of what earns a page its place. You won't need every item, but a page with none of them is probably padding.

1. Jobs you've actually done there. Describe the type of work and what it involved, in your own words. Only include what really happened, and only with the customer's say-so if anything identifies them. No invented case studies; if you've nothing you can share yet, leave it out rather than make something up.
2. Local conditions that affect the work. Older housing stock, hard water, exposed roofs, the sort of problems that keep turning up in that area. This is your first-hand experience doing its job. If you know it from the work, say it. If you're guessing, don't.
3. Who to call. A real name or a direct number beats a generic contact form. People like knowing who's turning up.
4. Response times you can truly meet. This one deserves care. "Same-day in town" is a promise. If you can't keep it on a wet Friday in winter, don't write it. A modest honest time is worth more than an impressive one that sets you up to disappoint someone.
5. A clear route back into the rest of your site. The page should sit inside a sensible structure, not float on its own like a leaflet nobody asked for.

Notice what isn't on the list: a paragraph about the town's history lifted from somewhere else, or a block of keywords. Neither comes from your work, and neither is for the reader.

There's no magic figure. My own judgement, for what it's worth: write fewer pages and make each one properly. Three strong area pages for the places you work most beat thirty thin ones. You can add more later as you build up real material for new places. That's a sensible pace for a small business, and it means each page can be kept honest and up to date.

This trips a lot of people up, so it's worth separating. Your Google Business Profile service area and your website's pages are two different things.

Google's help pages describe a Service Area Business as one that visits or delivers to customers but doesn't serve them at its own address, and plumbers are one of its examples. Such a business can have only one profile for the whole area it serves. Within that profile you can set up to 20 service areas, based on cities, postcodes or other areas. And if you change them, edits can take up to 48 hours to show.

So the profile is where you tell Google the patch you cover. You don't need a separate profile per town (you only get one), and you don't need a website page per service area either. Choosing 20 areas in your profile doesn't create an obligation to write 20 pages. Treat them as two jobs. The profile says where you work; the website says what you're like to deal with.

1. List the towns you cover, then mark the ones where you've done real, memorable work in the last year.
2. For each marked town, run the delete-the-name test on any existing page and rewrite or remove the ones that fail.
3. Write one proper area page for your busiest town using the list above, only including things that are true.
4. Check your Google Business Profile service areas (up to 20) and make sure they match where you actually work.

One good page is a better start than a dozen copies.