Service area pages: Boost local SEO across locations

Service area pages are website landing pages that promote the locations to which a business travels to serve its customers. They are sometimes also known as “city landing pages.”

When properly optimized, service area landing pages can earn organic search engine rankings for brands that don’t have storefronts but do serve customers in specific locales. They can be an excellent form of helpful content, assisting the public in discovering the offerings of nearby service area businesses.

Service area pages differ from location landing pages because they represent customers’ locations instead of the locations of physical storefronts. While typical location landing pages are the right choice for business models like retail stores and restaurants, service area landing pages are appropriate for home services brands like plumbers, mobile providers like mobile notary publics, and delivery-based businesses like ghost kitchens.

There is also a use case for service area pages for hybrid businesses, like pizza restaurants that have both indoor dining and home delivery. Hybrid brands can create location landing pages for their physical addresses but may also want to create additional website pages to represent all of the cities to which they’ll deliver their goods and services.

Why service area pages matter for local SEO

Services area pages provide three core benefits to service area businesses (SABs):

1. Customer service content

They are a form of always-on customer service content that assists the public in finding service providers in their area. When created with human visitors in mind (instead of merely focusing on search engines), service area pages meet Google’s definition of Helpful Content.

Here’s an example of a business that hasn’t really put thought into creating helpful content to represent its service areas. Instead, their homepage features a block of city names and zip codes that are rather hard for humans to read:

This moving company is doing a better job of being clear about where they serve and offering a map of their service area:

But here’s a small mobile notary public business that has invested more effort in creating a unique landing page for each of the eight cities they serve in Silicon Valley:

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Pro tip: You’ll typically find that many of your local competitors simply aren’t doing a stellar job with the development of truly helpful service area landing pages. There could be a major opportunity to distinguish a brand you’re marketing as the most helpful business in town by investing in strong service area pages. 

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2. Local SEO wins

Service area landing pages can earn organic search engine rankings for local intent keywords, even when a business lacks a storefront in a given city. This expands the brand’s visibility in valuable towns and neighborhoods throughout its service area. Strong service area landing pages capture traffic for common searches like “housekeeping service near me” or “mobile notary service Mountain View.” 

The mobile notary public featured in our last example has a very basic website, but their location landing pages are earning them top organic rankings in Google for their most important search phrases, as seen here:

3. Overcoming part of the Google/SAB imbalance

There is a long-standing theory in the local SEO industry that service area businesses don’t rank as well as brick-and-mortar businesses in Google’s local packs, local finders, and Maps. 

The Guidelines for representing your business on Google require service area businesses to hide their addresses. However, agencies like Sterling Sky have released noteworthy studies capturing local ranking drops when businesses comply with the guidelines and hide their addresses on their Google Business Profiles.

While this outcome of guideline compliance has never been acknowledged by Google, service area businesses may need to work harder than their brick-and-mortar peers to earn visibility in Google’s local system. Service area landing pages are one way to win organic traffic when an SAB is being outranked in the local results by a competitor with a physical storefront. 

At the same time, service area pages represent a risk of watering down overall website quality. In particular, SAB owners and marketers should be aware of Google’s definition of and stance on doorway pages, which reads: 

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Doorway abuse is when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination. Examples of doorway abuse include:

• Having multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page to maximize their reach for any specific query
• Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific locations, regions or cities that funnel users to one page
• Generating pages to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of a site
• Creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy

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Avoid service area pages being viewed by Google as doorway pages by:

• Publishing truly helpful, customer-centric content that acts as “the final destination” for website visitors
• Making each page as unique as possible rather than duplicating content across multiple pages and simply swapping out city names

How to structure high-quality service area pages 

Usefulness and uniqueness are the two concepts that should guide your development of high-quality service area landing pages. Use the following checklist to create helpful and diverse landing page content for each of the main towns and cities you serve:

An optimized URL for each page

Don’t assume that Google or the public understands the locations in which you serve. Create a unique URL for each landing page that includes the city name and the core service being offered, as shown below. 

An optimized title tag and meta description for each page

Though Google can customize the wording it shows in the blue title tag area and accompanying meta description area for any organic SERP entry, be sure you are filling out these fields for each of your landing pages in your website CMS. 

Title tags should typically be between 55 and 70 characters in length to avoid being cut off in the search engine results. Meta descriptions can also avoid truncation by being kept to about 150 to 160 characters. 

The above example shows a clear and simple title tag reading “Mobile Notary Services in Mountain View, CA.” It does a good job of incorporating both the service being offered and the city name of where that service is available. Write a unique title like this for each of your service area pages.

The meta description reads, “Champion Mobile Notary comes to you for all your notary needs. Reduce your stress and be more productive with service from Champion Mobile Notary.” It’s a bit repetitive, but does a decent job of making an elevator pitch of how choosing this service provides human benefits of reduced stress and increased productivity. 

Write a unique meta description tag that acts as a marketing pitch for the service being offered on each service area page. 

Optimized headers and text on each page

Emphasize location and services throughout the headers and text on each page. For example, the first header (H1) on the page below reads, “Mobile Notary Services in Mountain View, CA.” This makes it clear that a Google user clicking through from the search engine results to this page has landed in the right place for their needs. 

The actual text content of the page will be different for each business, but should be guided by the usefulness and uniqueness principles mentioned above. Use this list of possible page components for inspiration:

• A complete service menu: Don’t worry if this part of the page is basically the same across all of your service cities, and do feel free to link from this page to other pages within the site that fully describe each unique service. 
• Project showcases: Make each service area page unique by using images and video to showcase projects completed in the featured city. This could include before-and-after documentation, city-level case studies and original data, and imagery of staff at work.
• Reviews: Diversify service area pages by publishing first- and third-party reviews from customers in the featured city. 
• City-based offers: Rotate special offers across your service area, keeping page content unique and fresh with new deals in different locales. 
• Staff bios: If unique staff serve different locations in your service area, photograph, film, and interview them. 
• Awards and PR: Publicize city-specific awards the business has earned and link to mentions of the business in local online news, hyperlocal blogs, and industry publications.
• Proofs of community involvement: Sponsor city-specific events or teams, speak at city conferences, or donate a percentage of sales to valued nearby institutions to demonstrate that the business is highly involved in a positive way in each community. 
• City-specific expertise: Provide authoritative guidance on relevant topics that are unique to each city. For example, a housepainting contractor might offer unique tips on the best paint brands for the coastal cities in its service area as compared to inland areas. 
• B2B cross-promotion: Partner with related brands in each city to build a referral network. For example, the city landing page for a caterer in Mountain View could showcase their recommendations for a local wedding event site, event planner, DJ, and florist. 

Page-level must haves

Boost your conversion rate by ensuring that every location landing page features the following essentials:

• The name of the city being served: This seems obvious but is often overlooked. Put the city name in the URL, the title tag, and throughout the text so that humans and bots understand the geographic relevance of the page.
• Complete contact information: List out every possible way a customer can connect with the business. While location landing pages emphasize the physical address of the business, service area pages emphasize how customers can access the brand’s offerings at their locations. Give prime focus on the page to phone numbers, text lines, booking buttons and calendars, hours of operation, contact forms, email addresses, live chat assistants, and social media profiles. Make it as easy as possible for visitors to the page to contact the business.
• Customer-centric language: Speak directly to the customer about the benefits they will enjoy by doing business with the brand. Use keyword research software like the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool or Answer the Public to identify how potential customers are searching for the services you offer and reflect your findings in what you publish on each page. Combine keyword research with active listening to how customers describe what they need when you speak to them face-to-face. Prioritize customers’ words over internal corporate language.
• Answers to FAQs: Document the most common questions customers ask before deciding to do business with you. Provide a clear, helpful answer to each question. The more questions you answer, the more helpful each landing page will be. 
• Calls to action (CTAs): Facilitate the next steps you want customers to take after landing on the page by providing clear invitations to act. Create bold links and buttons guiding visitors to schedule a demo, book an appointment, make a phone call, etc.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Use this checklist of “don’ts” to steer clear of the most common problems with service area landing pages:

• Don’t sacrifice site quality just to publish service area pages: If you can’t find something unique and useful to write about on each page, reconsider whether this is the right type of content for your brand. You don’t want to develop a reputation with Google for publishing large volumes of pages in which you’re copy-pasting the same content and swapping out city names, even if you see competitors appearing to get away with this strategy. Instead, bring maximum creativity to the development of these pages. If your business isn’t yet ready to invest in creating strong pages, you may choose to rely on a simple map and store locator widget that reveals service locations but doesn’t link to landing pages.
• Don’t hide this content behind an uncrawlable store locator: If the only way to get to your service area landing pages is by typing something into a store locator widget, you can’t expect Google’s bots to crawl and index them. While store locators are a very useful tool for your website visitors, be sure there is an alternate linked path to the content. If you have a small number of service cities (10 or fewer), link directly to them from a “cities we serve” tab in your main navigation menu. If you have more than this, be sure they are included in an HTML sitemap on your website to boost indexation.
• Don’t exclude this content from your internal linking strategy: In addition to linking to all of your service area pages from a menu and/or HTML sitemap, identify other pages on your website from which you can link internally. For example, your service description pages, blog, and about page could feature linking opportunities. 
• Don’t go overboard with city coverage: The classic example of this is large brands publishing thousands of thin pages for every possible town across a huge service radius. While you’re not obligated to follow the Guidelines for representing your business on Google when creating your own website’s content, remember they feel that service areas shouldn’t extend beyond two hours of driving time from each corporate hub. They do make some exceptions to this for larger businesses, but a good rule of thumb is to prioritize developing rich content for the most important cities in your service area first. Then, move on to developing for smaller communities if you continue to find something unique and useful to say. 
• Don’t treat this content as set-and-forget: Use templated page elements for reviews, events, special offers, and other lively aspects of the business to build freshness into your service area pages. Also, audit them on a regular basis to be sure that core contact and hours of operation data remain accurate across time. 
• Don’t forget to track service area landing page performance: Use analytics to understand which of your service cities is interacting most with this content. Identify top performers and underperformers to replicate successes and create strategy for improvements.

Technical SEO best practices for SAPs

To avoid technical errors, study up on these topics before you begin publishing service area landing pages:

• Adopt URL best practices: Read our new tutorial on SEO-friendly URLs to understand how to create a proper URL structure and employ canonicalization for near-duplicate content.
• Adopt sitemap best practices: In addition to creating an HTML sitemap to avoid your location landing pages being hidden behind a store locator widget, you may want to create and submit an XML sitemap to Google to increase page indexing. Read our guide to both sitemap types.
• Consider Schema implementation: Local business Schema is the most relevant type of structured data markup for service area businesses. If the content on your service area landing pages is complex, Schema can help search engines parse it more easily. Read Google’s tutorial on local business schema and see examples at https://schema.org/LocalBusiness. 
• Evaluate the fitness of your CMS: Be sure your current system has sufficient access limitations to keep service area managers and franchisees from reaching backend site environments where they could cause technical damage. While it’s an excellent idea to give control of city landing pages to the people in your enterprise who serve specific areas, you likely don’t want them playing with something like your robots.txt files.
• Link local business listings to relevant service area pages: Create a frictionless path for searchers by linking from listings like Google Business Profiles and Yelp profiles directly to the appropriate service area page, instead of to the company home page. This creates a seamless user experience, connecting potential customers with content that has been customized for their service area, instead of expecting them to hunt through the website to discover whether the brand you’re marketing serves their city. 

Next steps to ranking locally

While many brands are classic service area businesses that only serve customers at their locations, hybrid models are also common. If a business you’re marketing has both storefronts and service areas, you’ll need to add to your service area landing page knowledge by learning to create location landing pages for each of your physical premises. Read Location Page SEO: Rank Locally, Convert Visitors Fast.