Serving Three Cities From One Van

The legitimate version of this

Plenty of businesses genuinely serve several places. A van covers three cities, a consultant works across a region, a contractor takes jobs anywhere within an hour.

That is a real situation and it deserves real pages, because somebody in the second city searching for what you do should be able to find evidence that you work there.

The tactic has a poor reputation, deservedly, because of how it is usually executed rather than because the idea is wrong.

The distinction is entirely in what the page contains, and it is not a subtle distinction.

The test for whether a page should exist

One question, asked honestly: can you fill it with content that could only be about that place.

If you have done eleven jobs in that city, have photographs of four of them, know what the housing stock is like there, and can name the areas you work in, you have a page.

If you have done one job there in two years and would be writing around that fact, you do not.

That test also answers the question of how many pages to have, which is otherwise the hardest part. It is however many places pass it, and for most small businesses that is two or three rather than nine.

What a real area page contains

• Named jobs you have done there, with enough detail to be real.
• Photographs taken in that place.
• Reviews from customers there, quoted or embedded.
• Specifics about the area: housing types, access, local conditions.
• Travel and coverage: how you get there, what you charge for it.
• The neighbourhoods you actually cover, named.

The first three cannot be faked and are what separate a page that ranks from four hundred words with a place name in it.

Local specifics are the differentiator

The part that requires knowing the place and is therefore the part that works.

A roofer writing about one city can talk about the prevalence of a particular roof type there, the wind exposure on one side of town, the conservation area rules affecting what can be used, and the access problems in the older terraced streets.

None of that appears in a template, none of it can be produced by substituting a place name, and all of it is obvious to somebody who works there.

It is also what a customer in that city recognises as knowledge of their situation, which is the actual purpose of the page.

Sit down with whoever drives the van and ask what is different about working in each place. Twenty minutes produces more usable material than a day of writing.

The photographs are the hard part

Worth flagging because it is the constraint that determines whether this happens.

Text can be written from memory. Photographs from a specific city have to have been taken there, and if nobody has been photographing jobs, you cannot produce them retrospectively.

Which means the first step for a business planning area pages is often to start photographing work by location, and to build the pages in three months when there is something to put on them.

That feels like a delay and it is the difference between a page with evidence and a page without.

Where you genuinely have no photographs from a place, that is the same signal as the test above: you may not work there enough yet.

A worked example

A plumbing business covering three towns had three identical pages, differing by place name, each around three hundred words.

None ranked for anything and one had never been visited.

They started again from the jobs. The office pulled a year of invoices by postcode, which showed forty-one jobs in the main town, nineteen in the second, and three in the third.

The third page was deleted and redirected, since three jobs did not support it.

The other two were rebuilt: named jobs, photographs the engineers had been taking anyway on their phones, four reviews each from customers in that town, and a paragraph about the older properties in one and the newer estates in the other.

Both ranked within about five months, and the second town began producing enquiries for the first time.

Two real pages outperformed three fake ones, and the invoice data made the decision rather than an argument.

Let the invoices decide

The most useful input and the one businesses already have.

Pull twelve months of jobs by postcode or town, and count.

That tells you where you genuinely work, which is frequently not where you believe you work, and it removes the ambition from a decision that should be evidential.

It also identifies the case worth acting on: a place with meaningful work and no page, which is more common than the reverse and is straightforwardly an opportunity.

Set a threshold in advance, whatever suits your volume, and apply it rather than deciding page by page.

Structure and naming

Practical points that affect whether the pages work.

One page per place, at a sensible address containing the service and the place, linked from your main services page and from your navigation where there are few enough.

Name them the way people search, which is usually the service followed by the place rather than anything more elaborate.

Do not create a page per service per place, which multiplies quickly and reproduces the thin-page problem at scale.

Link each area page to the relevant service page and to the others, so somebody in the wrong place can get to the right one.

The counter-case

Area pages are not always the right answer even for a business that genuinely travels.

Where the work is specialised enough that customers search by the service rather than by place, one strong service page will do more than three area pages, because nobody is typing a town name.

Where you cover a large rural region rather than distinct towns, a single coverage page listing the areas is more honest and more useful than fragmenting it.

And where the business is small enough that maintaining three pages properly is not realistic, one good page beats three neglected ones, which will drift out of date and read as abandoned.

The question is whether people search with a place name attached, which you can check in your search console, and whether you can sustain what you build.

Building them

1. Pull twelve months of jobs by town or postcode.
2. Set a threshold and apply it.
3. Start photographing jobs by location now.
4. Ask the van crew what is different about each place.
5. Ask customers there for reviews specifically.
6. Write one page per qualifying place.
7. Delete and redirect the ones that did not qualify.

Step one settles the argument, and step seven is the part businesses find hardest and benefit from most.

The listing side of this is covered in ranking in a town you do not have an office in.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.