You Are Invisible for the Towns You Cover: The Website Fix

#The problem

You are based in one town and work across five or six around it. Someone in the next town searches "electrician [their town]". Google shows electricians based there, and the ones with a page about working there. You have neither. You are twelve minutes away and invisible.

Google Business Profile helps within a radius of your address and fades with distance. For the towns beyond that radius, the website has to do the work, with a page per town. Done well, these are the pages that grow a trade business. Done badly, they are the doorway pages Google ignores.

#What an area page is, and is not

Is not: one paragraph with the town name swapped in, repeated for twenty towns. Google recognises this and does not rank it; customers recognise it and do not trust it.

Is: a page about your work in that specific town, with content that could only be true of that town, written for a customer there. Google ranks it because it is genuinely about "[trade] in [town]"; customers trust it because it shows you know the place.

#What goes on each area page

1. Heading and opening: "[Trade] in [Town]" and two sentences: how long you have worked there, how far you are, typical response time.
2. Recent jobs in that town, with photos and a line each: "Consumer unit replacement, [estate or road area], March." Three to six. This is the content that makes the page real, and it is content you already have on your phone.
3. What you do there, linking to your service pages. If a service is more common in that town (older housing stock, lots of extensions, new-build estates with EV chargers), say so.
4. Local knowledge, briefly: the estates and areas you cover, parking or access quirks, the local council's requirements if relevant, the water or gas supplier peculiarities. Two or three sentences a local would recognise.
5. Reviews from customers in that town, pulled from Google and filtered where possible, with reserved space.
6. Travel and availability: "Usually with you within [X] minutes; same-day for emergencies."
7. Call and quote buttons, tracked with the town as a parameter.
8. Credentials bar, as on every page.

Four hundred to seven hundred words, most of it specific. Add a job photo from that town every month or two and the page stays fresh.

#Which towns

The ones you actually serve and want more work from. Typically five to fifteen. Start with the three where you already do the most work (you have the job photos), then the ones you want to grow into. Do not create pages for towns you would not happily drive to; a page that brings a job you decline is worse than none.

#The technical side

• URL: /areas/[town], stable.
• Title: "[Trade] in [Town] | [Firm]" under sixty characters.
• Description: one sentence with the trade, the town, your response time and a credential, under 160.
• H1: "[Trade] in [Town]".
• Structured data: the business as a local service type with areaServed listing the towns, and each area page reinforcing it; reviews marked up where genuine.
• Internal links: from an Areas page listing all towns, from the footer, from service pages ("we do this across [towns]"), and between neighbouring towns.
• Built as records with fields for the town, jobs, reviews and local notes, rendered by a template, so adding a town is filling a form and adding a job is uploading a photo.

#Google Business Profile alongside

Your profile ranks you in the map results near your address. Keep it complete: services listed, service area set to the towns you cover (this does not rank you in those towns but tells Google you serve them), photos of jobs, reviews answered, posts occasionally. Link the profile to the website's home page, and where it allows, list your services with links to the service pages.

Do not create fake additional profiles for towns where you have no premises; it is against the rules and gets suspended. Area pages on the website are the legitimate way to be found there.

#What to expect

Area pages are indexed within days and begin appearing for "[trade] [town]" within weeks to a few months, depending on competition. Trades that build ten genuine area pages typically see enquiries from towns they previously got none from within the first quarter, tracked by the town parameter on the call and quote buttons. The pages with real job photos rank; the ones without stall, which is the incentive to keep uploading.

#Where this sits

Area pages as records with local jobs and reviews are part of every trade website we build, and adding them to an existing site is the single most common recommendation from a trade diagnosis, because they are the difference between a site that ranks where the van is parked and one that ranks where the van goes.