How to be findable if you cover several towns

You cover six towns. Your address is in one of them. And as far as the map is concerned you exist in exactly that one place, so the people fifteen miles out — who you'd happily drive to, who you've worked for before — never see you at all.

Every owner in this position eventually asks the same question: can I have a listing for each town? The answer is no, and the reasons matter, because the things people do instead of accepting that answer are how listings get suspended.

What you cannot do, first

Three approaches come up constantly and all three are against the rules.

Separate Google listings for each town, with a different phone number on each. Renting a mailbox or a virtual office to claim an address somewhere you want to rank. Using a relative's address in a neighbouring town.

These get reported — often by competitors, who are watching — and a suspended listing takes weeks to recover, during which you're invisible everywhere rather than just in five towns. The risk is badly out of proportion to the gain.

Set your service area honestly, and not too wide

Google's guidelines for representing your business let a business that travels list the areas it serves rather than a walk-in address. That's the correct mechanism and it's what you should be using.

List the places you genuinely go. Not every town in the county, because an over-wide area doesn't improve your position in distant places and can get flagged.

Be aware of what it does and doesn't do, though. Setting a service area makes you eligible for those places. It doesn't override distance, which remains the biggest single factor in who appears for a local search. A business in the middle of a town will usually beat you there, and no setting changes that.

Pages, not listings

Here's the legitimate version of what people are trying to do with multiple listings: a page on your own website for each main area you cover.

This works, and it's a normal, accepted thing to have. It also goes wrong constantly, in one specific way — people produce six near-identical pages with the town name swapped, which reads as filler to a human and is treated as filler by search engines.

A page for a town earns its place if it says something true about working in that town. The sort of housing stock and what that means for the work. How long it takes you to get there and what days you're usually over that way. Jobs you've done there, with photos. Anything local and specific.

Three genuinely good town pages beat twelve swapped-name ones, and they take an afternoon each rather than ten minutes.

Name the places in the words people use

This is small and it's the bit most often missed. Write the place names the way local people actually say them, and include the smaller ones.

People search for their village, their estate, their neighbourhood — not the district council area. If your listing and your site only mention the big town, you're invisible to somebody searching the name of the place they actually live.

Put those names in plain text on your pages, in sentences rather than in a list at the bottom. A block of thirty place names in the footer is the oldest trick there is and it does nothing now except make the page look cheap.

Be honest about the edges

The most useful thing you can publish when you cover several towns is where you stop.

I cover Chorlton, Didsbury, Withington and Sale as standard. I'll go further for bigger jobs, but there's a £40 call-out beyond that ring and I'm honest that it's not worth it for a small repair.

That's worth more than another town page. It stops the calls you'd turn down, it gives the ones inside the ring confidence that you'll actually come, and it reads as somebody who knows their own business.

Let people ask, rather than guess

Here's the thing a list of towns can never handle. Somebody lives in a village you've never named, three miles outside your ring, and they cannot tell from your page whether that's a yes or a no.

Most of them won't ring to find out. Working out whether you'd cover them feels like a favour they're asking, so they go to a business that named their village instead — even if you'd have driven there happily.

That's the gap we built hailera around: you write your coverage and the conditions around it once — the ring, the exceptions, what changes for a bigger job — check it yourself, and publish it as an agent so your website and the AI apps people ask can answer "do you come to here?" directly. The honest paragraph above does a fair share of that for nothing, though, so write that first and see how many awkward calls it saves.

The routes where distance doesn't count

Worth remembering that the map is only one way in, and it's the one where geography works against you.

When somebody's been given your name and searches it, distance is irrelevant. When somebody asks in a village group chat, what matters is whether a past customer speaks up. When another trade passes work on, your address doesn't come into it at all.

For a business covering six towns, those three routes are usually bigger than the map results in five of them. Getting reviews from customers in your outlying towns helps more than another page does, because a name in a local group is worth more than a position in a ranking.

The order to do it in

Service area set honestly. One good page for each town where you do real volume, written properly. Place names, including the small ones, in ordinary sentences. An honest paragraph about the edges. Reviews from customers spread across the area rather than concentrated in one town.

Then stop. There isn't a clever version of this, and the people selling you one are selling you the thing that gets listings suspended.

Today: write down the towns and villages you genuinely cover, and the point where you'd start charging extra or saying no. Put that paragraph on your website. It's the most useful thing on this list and it takes ten minutes.

Sources

• Guidelines for representing your business on Google — Google Business Profile Help

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.