"Do you cover my area?" asked forty times a week.
A question with a yes-or-no answer that your website almost certainly does not publish, and which costs you a conversation either way.
It is the first thing people want to know and the last thing most websites say.
Do you come out to me?
It has a yes or no answer. You have known it for years. And on most small business websites it is either missing or written in a way that answers nothing.
"And surrounding areas" is not an answer
It is on thousands of sites. Leeds and surrounding areas. Covering the whole of Kent.
Someone in a village fifteen miles out reads that and still does not know. Are they surrounding? They have no idea, and neither does anything else reading your site.
So they ring to ask. Or, more often, they do not.
Why owners keep it vague
Two honest reasons.
It genuinely depends. You will drive an hour for a good job and not twenty minutes for a small one. That is sensible and it is hard to put on a page.
And you do not want to rule anywhere out in case the phone stops ringing. Which is the same fear behind not publishing prices.
Both are real. Neither is worth what vagueness costs you.
Write it in three parts
This keeps the flexibility and loses the fog.
- The core. Actual place names. "Leeds, Wetherby, Harrogate, Otley, Ilkley." Not a radius. People do not know what twenty miles looks like, but they know their own town.
- The edge. "Further out we do go, for bigger jobs, and there may be a travel charge." That is your flexibility, written down.
- The no. "We do not work south of the river" or "we do not cover the islands." Saying the no is what saves you the calls.
Three lines. Ten minutes. It will answer more questions than anything else you write this year.
Put it where people are, not on a page called Areas
Areas Covered pages exist mostly for search engines and almost nobody clicks them.
Put the place names on your front page, near the top. Put them in your profile. Put them next to your phone number. The question arrives early, so the answer has to be early.
Why this one matters twice over
A customer skimming your site needs it. So does anything trying to recommend you.
When somebody asks an app for a plumber in a named town, it has to be confident you cover that town before it says your name. "And surrounding areas" is not confidence. That is one of the reasons businesses get left out of AI answers.
This is the sort of fact hailera is built to hold and answer, but the ten-minute version above costs nothing and does most of the work. Write the three lines first.
Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.