The contractor's guide to ranking in every city you work

The problem, stated plainly

You run crews in six towns. Your phone rings from one — the one your shop sits in. In the other five you're invisible, or you're on page four under a company half your size that got there first.

This is the most common ceiling in the trades, and it isn't a marketing problem. It's a structural one: Google decides local rankings town by town, and a website that only talks about one town only competes in one town. Everything below is what it actually takes to fix that, including the two rules most contractors break by accident.

Rule one: you cannot buy a Google listing in every town

Start here, because half the multi-city advice on the internet quietly ignores it. Google's guidelines for representing your business are explicit: "Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts."

And for contractors specifically — the ones who travel to the customer rather than the other way round — Google's rule for service-area businesses is that you keep "one profile for the central office or location with a designated service area", and that a service-area business "can't list a 'virtual' office unless that office is staffed during business hours."

Read that twice, because it kills a popular scheme. Renting a mailbox in five towns and standing up five Business Profiles is not a growth tactic; it's a suspension waiting to happen. If you have a real, staffed location in a town, that town gets a profile. If you don't, you get one profile and a service area — and every bit of extra visibility in those other towns has to come from your website.

• One staffed office per town → one Business Profile per town, legitimately.
• One yard, crews driving out → one Business Profile with a service area covering the towns you cover.
• A mailbox, a virtual office, or a relative's address in a town you don't staff → against Google's guidelines, and the listing is the thing you lose.
• Everything the map pack won't give you in those towns has to be earned by a page on your own site.

Rule two: the swapped-city-name page is the exact thing Google names as spam

So you build a page per city. This is where most contractor sites get quietly buried, because the obvious way to do it — one template, find and replace the town name, publish twenty — is named in Google's spam policies.

Google's definition: "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." The example list includes, word for word, "having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" and "creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy."

That is a description of the cheap city-page package, written by the company that decides whether it ranks. If a vendor offers you fifty city pages for a flat fee and doesn't ask you a single question about those fifty towns, you're buying the penalty, not the traffic.

What makes a city page real instead of a doorway

The test is simple and it isn't about word count: could this page have been written about any other town? If yes, it's a doorway. If no, it's an asset. Ten pages that pass beat forty that don't, every time — and the ten are cheaper to build.

Here's what a page that passes actually carries. None of it is exotic; all of it is stuff you already know and your website doesn't say.

• Jobs you've actually done there, named by neighbourhood or road, with photos from those jobs — not stock images of somebody else's work.
• The local specifics of the work. Permit office and inspection quirks, HOA rules, the age of the housing stock, the failure you see most in that town — clay-tile repairs in one, ice-dam damage in the next.
• Who covers it and how fast. Which crew, out of which yard, how far the drive is, what your realistic response time is for an emergency call in that town.
• Reviews from customers in that town, quoted with the town named — the single hardest thing for a competitor to copy.
• The services people there actually buy, in their order — not your full menu pasted on every page.
• A way to act that fits the town: the number that rings the crew covering it, and a form that tells you which town the lead came from.

How many city pages you should actually build

Fewer than you'd like, and that's the honest answer. Every page on this list needs true material behind it, and you only have true material for towns you genuinely work.

Start with the towns that already send you jobs — those pages write themselves and rank fastest, because you have photos and reviews to put on them. Add the towns you want next, one at a time, as real work arrives to fill them. A contractor with six honest city pages outranks one with thirty thin ones, because the six get treated as a real site and the thirty get treated as what they are.

The other half of the job is structure. Every city page should feed the same set of service pages, so one well-written page about repiping does the selling for all six towns instead of being rewritten badly six times. City pages carry the geography; service pages carry the expertise. Mix them up and you get thirty pages that each say a bit of everything and rank for nothing.

What a multi-city build costs

A multi-city site is the big end of any web shop's price list, because it's the one with real page count and real writing behind it. The market, as published:

How ours works, and what you pay when

Three flat tiers, one-time, you own everything: Starter $1,490 for a single page in 3 days, Growth $2,490 for a 5–8 page site in 7 days, and Pro $3,490 for the multi-city build in 7–10 days. The optional care plan is month-to-month — $99/mo on Starter, $149/mo on Growth and Pro — and cancelling it doesn't cost you the site, because the site is yours.

There's no deposit. The finished site runs on our subdomain first, so you open the real thing on your own phone, click every city page and read what we wrote about your towns before any money moves. Approve it and pay, and it transfers to your domain with the code and the analytics in your name. Miss Lighthouse 95+ on every page or two seconds on a real phone, and you don't pay at all.

Why we can work that way: every build runs on our own engine and trade-specific templates, so a site takes days rather than months and there's no payroll waiting on your money. An agency with eight people on salary has to take a deposit — they're paying wages the whole time they design.

The order to do this in

• Fix your Business Profile first — correct category, correct service area, and one profile per real staffed location. It's free and it's the fastest-moving piece.
• List the towns that already send you work. Those are your first city pages.
• Collect what makes each of them real: three job photos, one review, the local quirk, the crew that covers it.
• Build the service pages once, properly, and point every city page at them.
• Launch, then watch which towns produce calls — tracking split by city tells you where to add the next page and where to stop driving.
• Add towns one at a time as real work gives you something true to say about them.