A Trades Site That Never Says Where It Works

The phrase in question

Serving the Lower Mainland and surrounding areas, in the footer, in small text.

That is the only geographic information on the entire site.

It sounds inclusive and it is actually useless, because it means something different to the business and to every reader.

To the business it means the six towns they can reach in under forty minutes. To a reader in a town ninety minutes away it might include them, so they phone, and the call wastes both parties' time.

The two failures

It fails in both directions simultaneously, which is why it is worth fixing properly rather than adjusting.

Enquiries you cannot serve. People outside the area phone, you decline, and both sides have spent time. A proportion feel mildly misled.

Enquiries you never receive. Somebody in a town you do cover reads the vague phrase, cannot tell whether it includes them, and phones a business whose site names their town.

The second is invisible and larger. Nobody tells you they did not call.

What the site should say

• The towns you cover, named individually.
• Where you go for larger jobs only, if that applies.
• Where you charge travel and roughly how much.
• Where you do not go, which saves everybody time.
• A note about how the boundary works, since it is rarely a clean line.

The third is the one businesses avoid, and stating it prevents an awkward conversation later. A customer told upfront about a travel charge accepts it; one told at the quote feels ambushed.

Where it belongs

On the homepage, in the first screen, alongside what the business does.

The heading that works is a trade and a place together: bathroom fitting in Coquitlam, Port Moody and Burnaby.

That single line does three things: confirms to the searcher they are in the right place, tells somebody outside the area immediately, and gives a search engine the geographic context it otherwise has to guess.

Repeating it in the footer, alongside the address, is worth doing since footers are where people look for it.

A worked example

An electrician covering roughly seven municipalities whose site said Greater Vancouver.

He estimated he was declining two or three enquiries a week from outside his range, mostly from the eastern valley.

He added a line to the homepage naming the seven, and a short page listing each with a sentence about the kind of work he did there.

Out-of-area enquiries dropped to roughly one a fortnight.

More usefully, enquiries from two of the named towns rose noticeably, from an area he had always covered and had never appeared to serve.

His comment was that the vague version had been protecting him from nothing while costing him work in places he actively wanted.

The reason businesses stay vague

Worth naming, because it is a real concern rather than laziness.

The fear is that naming towns excludes work from anywhere unnamed, and that flexibility is lost.

In practice the opposite happens. Naming towns makes you findable in them, and somebody from an unnamed place who wants you will still phone, particularly if the site says the boundary is flexible for larger jobs.

A line saying that you occasionally travel further for the right project preserves every bit of flexibility the vagueness was protecting.

Vagueness costs certainty and buys nothing that a single sentence cannot preserve.

Pages per town

A tactic worth doing carefully or not at all.

A page for each town you cover can work, provided each one contains genuinely different content: jobs done there, local considerations, a photograph, something specific.

What does not work, and can actively harm you, is twenty near-identical pages with the town name swapped. That is recognisable, it adds nothing for a reader, and search engines handle it poorly.

Three or four substantial pages for your main areas beat twenty thin ones, and they are achievable.

If you cannot write something genuinely different about a town, it does not need its own page. It needs to be named on the main one.

The counter-case

Where naming the area is not the priority.

A business that genuinely travels nationally for specialised work, where geography is not the filter and capability is.

A trade whose enquiries come entirely through referral, where the caller already knows whether you serve them.

And anybody at capacity within a small radius, where broader visibility produces enquiries they cannot take.

Even in that last case, naming the small radius is the point: it filters to exactly the work they want and refuses the rest without a conversation.

Making the boundary honest

The detail that makes the whole thing credible.

Boundaries are not clean, and pretending otherwise creates its own problems.

What works: a core area with no travel charge, a wider area with a stated charge, and a note that anything further is worth asking about for larger jobs.

That describes how nearly every trade actually operates, and stating it is more useful than any map.

It also stops the question arriving in every first phone call, which is time back for both sides.

What a map does and does not do

Many trades sites solve this with an embedded map and a shaded circle.

It looks decisive and it works poorly. A circle on a map cannot be read by search engines, is difficult to interpret on a phone, and does not tell somebody whether their specific town is inside it.

It also adds weight and a third-party request to the page for information a sentence conveys better.

A named list is more useful in every respect: readable, searchable, unambiguous, and free.

If you want a map as well, put it below the list rather than instead of it.

The five-minute version

1. List the towns you actually work in.
2. Put them in the homepage heading or immediately below it.
3. Add the travel charge boundary.
4. Repeat it in the footer.
5. Update your listing so the two agree.

That is genuinely five minutes of work, and on most trades sites it is the second highest-return change after making the phone number tappable.

The fifth matters because a listing and a site disagreeing about coverage confuses both customers and search engines, and it is a two-minute check.

The related listing question is covered in claiming your Google My Business listing.

Frequently asked questions

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