Should a Plumbing Company Have a Page for Every City?

This is the single most common question we get from plumbing companies, and it
usually arrives already answered: somebody has told the owner that they need a page for
every city they serve, and the owner wants to know how many that should be.

The honest answer is that the number is the wrong end of the question.

A location page should exist because it helps explain a real service
relationship — not because a city name can be inserted into a
template.

What Google actually says

This is one of the few areas where the documentation is unusually direct.
Google’s spam policies describe doorway pages as sites or pages created to rank
for specific similar search queries, which lead users to intermediate pages that are
not as useful as the final destination. The policy explicitly names
“multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that
funnel users to one page.”

That is not a grey area or an interpretation. Mass-generated city pages that differ
only by place name are the example in the policy.

When a location page is genuinely useful

There are real reasons a page about working in a particular place can be the most
useful page on a site. All of them involve having something specific to say.

• The water is different. Hardness, iron, chloramine treatment, well
  versus municipal supply. If the water chemistry in one city creates problems it
  doesn’t in the next, that is a genuine local subject with genuine local
  searches.
• The housing stock is different. A city of 1920s bungalows has
  galvanised supply lines and cast iron drains. A 2005 subdivision has different failure
  modes entirely. This changes what you actually get called for.
• The rules are different. Permit requirements, inspection
  processes, and which authority has jurisdiction. Customers genuinely search this.
• Your relationship to the place is different. Response times, a
  yard or crew based there, decades of work in that community, specific projects you can
  point to.

Notice that every one of those is a fact about the business or the place. None of
them is “we would like to rank in this city.”

When it becomes a liability

The failure mode is easy to recognise once you know the shape of it.

• Twenty pages whose only difference is the place name and a map embed.
• Pages for towns you have never worked in, added because they were nearby.
• A paragraph of text repeated with synonyms swapped to look different.
• Pages that link to nothing and are linked from nothing except a footer list.
• Claims of a local address or presence that isn’t real.

That last one deserves emphasis. Google’s Business Profile guidelines are
strict about representing locations you actually staff. Inventing a presence is a
different and more serious category of problem than a thin page.

The alternatives people forget

When a company serves twenty towns and only genuinely differentiates in four, there
are better structures than twenty pages.

Regional hubs

One substantial page covering a coherent area, with real detail about the region and
honest coverage of the towns inside it. Far stronger than twenty pages that each say
almost nothing.

Service-plus-place, only where it’s real

Rather than a generic page per city, a page about the specific intersection that
actually gets searched — water softener installation in an area with famously
hard water, say. Fewer of these, each with a genuine reason to exist.

A properly built service-area page

One page that explains the territory clearly, honestly and in useful detail, and
links to the places where you do have depth.

Strengthening the service pages instead

Often the highest-value work isn’t locations at all. It’s that the
services themselves are under-explained, and adding geography to a thin service page
just produces a thin service page with a city name on it.

How to decide, per town

A short test that tends to settle it:

1. Have we actually worked there? If no, stop.
2. Can I write 400 words about working there that would be false if I swapped
   the town name? If no, it doesn’t need its own page.
3. Is there a real difference in the work? Water, housing stock,
   rules, distance, response.
4. Will this page connect to anything? A page with no inward or
   outward relationships is an orphan regardless of quality.

Companies that run this honestly usually end up with fewer location pages than they
expected and much stronger ones.

The FLOWLINE view

We have never started a project by deciding how many location pages a company needs,
because that number is an output, not an input. It falls out of understanding where the
trucks go, what changes between those places, and what customers there are actually
searching for.

One strong page about a place you genuinely serve is worth more than ten that a
reader could tell were generated. So is the reverse of the usual advice: sometimes the
right recommendation is to delete the city pages you already have.