Why a sitter needs them and a groomer does not
A groomer has an address. People search the town and find the shop. A pet sitter has a car and a radius, and the owner searching is not looking for where you are, they are looking for whether you come to them.
That is why "cat sitter near me" and the same phrase with a village name in it is the search that matters, and why a single home page listing fourteen place names in a paragraph does nothing for any of them.
Area pages fix it. Done badly they are the oldest thin-content mistake on the internet. Here is how to build them so they are worth having.
1. Draw the real radius first
Before writing anything, decide the honest boundary. Not where you would go for the right booking, but where you can reliably do two visits a day in December without the schedule collapsing.
Twice-daily cat visits are the constraint. A twenty minute drive each way, twice a day, for ten days, is the arithmetic that decides your radius, not ambition.
Write down the list of places inside it, and note which ones you charge travel for.
2. Pick the units owners actually type
Look at how people around you name where they live. In a city that is neighbourhoods and postcode districts. In a rural area it is villages and the market town. Do not build a page for a county or a whole city if nobody searches that way.
Aim for a page per place you genuinely cover well. Six good pages beat thirty empty ones, and thirty near-identical pages actively harm the site.
3. Give every page something only you could write
This is the whole game. A page that swaps one town name into the same eight paragraphs is worthless to a reader and to a search engine.
Per page, include the parts that differ: which streets or estates you cover and where the edge is, parking and access notes, whether there is a travel charge, roughly how long you have sat in that area, the local vet practices you would drive to in an emergency, a photograph taken there, and a review from a client who lives there if you have permission to use one.
Two or three genuinely local paragraphs are enough. Padding to a thousand words with filler is worse than being short.
4. Keep the shared parts shared
Prices, what a visit includes, your insurance and vetting, key handling and the meet-and-greet process do not get rewritten per page. Summarise in a line and link to the real page.
That keeps the pages maintainable. When your rates change you change the price records once, not on eleven pages you have half forgotten about.
5. Structure every page the same way
Heading with the place name and the service. One line saying you cover it and from where. What visit types you offer there and the price link. The local detail from step three. Your proof in short form, insurance, vetting, first aid and key handling, with a link to the trust page. A meet-and-greet booking button. A short list of neighbouring areas you also cover.
Same skeleton, different substance. That is the difference between a set of area pages and a doorway page.
6. Wire the internal links properly
Each area page links up to the service pages and across to two or three neighbouring areas. An areas index page lists them all, and links from the footer or the main navigation depending on how many you have.
If there are more than about eight, keep them out of the top navigation and use the index page. Owners do not want a menu with fourteen village names in it.
7. Sort out Google Business Profile alongside
For a sitter working from home, this is where the near-me results actually come from. Set a service area rather than displaying your home address if you would rather not publish it, keep the categories accurate, and ask happy clients for reviews that mention the place they live in naturally.
Reviews are the strongest local signal a sitter has, and the reviews section on the website should pull from Google rather than from a testimonial you typed yourself.
8. Titles and descriptions per page
Each area page needs its own title tag and description with the place name in it, not a template with a variable that produced fourteen identical ones. Sixty characters and 160 characters respectively. Say the service and the place.
Add local business structured data with your service areas listed, which is a build-time job rather than something you maintain.
9. Publish them as you earn them
Do not launch with a page for everywhere you hope to work. Launch with the areas you actually serve, and add a page when you take your third or fourth booking somewhere new and can write about it honestly.
A site that grows an area page a quarter looks alive. A site that launched with twenty and never touched them again looks like what it is.
10. Check them once a year
Radius changes. You drop the far village, you pick up the new estate. Read the pages once a year, delete what is no longer true, and remove any page you would not now write.
Where this sits
Area pages, built with real local detail rather than swapped place names, are one of the six things a pet sitting website has to do, and the same local pattern runs through the other pet business websites we build. Packages are on pricing. Cover the places you really cover, well.