They look like the same product at different sizes. They are not. One covers a single phrase across ten towns. The other covers the whole way your customers talk, across your whole service area. Here is the difference, in plain terms.
Two minutes, in plain terms.
A city page is one page about one service, written for one town.
If you install flooring and you work in Kilgore, there is a page on your site about installing flooring in Kilgore. It mentions the town properly — the neighbourhoods, the kind of houses, the sort of jobs you get there — because a page that could be about anywhere reads like it was written for nobody.
One page headed “Areas We Serve” with thirty town names listed underneath. It is about all of them and specific to none, and both readers and search engines treat it as a list rather than an answer.
Two people want the exact same thing from you. They type completely different things into Google.
Say you remodel kitchens and bathrooms in Longview. All of these are the same customer:
One page cannot answer all six well. It ends up vague to cover them all, which means it is the best answer to none of them.
Six pages can. Each one is specific, each one is about the thing that person actually typed, and each one still points at the same phone number.
How many towns, times how many ways people describe what you do.
| Towns | Ways of describing it | Pages | What that covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 1 | 10 | Your main service, in ten towns |
| 15 | 3 | 45 | Three services, across a real service area |
| 15 | 6 | 90 | Most of how customers describe you, everywhere you work |
| 20 | 9 | 180 | A trade with many services and a wide area |
This is not a made-up illustration. This site is built the same way — nine different ways of describing web design, across the towns we serve. You are reading one of the pages it produced.
Your main service, in the ten towns that matter most. If you are a salon in Kilgore and almost everybody who walks in says “hair salon”, ten pages is the right shape and more would be waste.
Six or more ways of describing what you do, across your whole service area. This is for a business where customers arrive using genuinely different words — a contractor, a law firm with several practice areas, a clinic with a long treatment list.
If your customers all describe you the same way, a hundred pages will not help you. You would be paying for coverage of phrases nobody types.
If they describe you six different ways and you only have pages for one of them, you are invisible to five sixths of the people looking for you. We will tell you honestly which of the two you are before you buy anything.
Building the pages is the part we control. Where they rank is not.
Search results depend on your competition, your reviews, how long your business has been established and a great many things nobody outside Google can see. Any agency that promises you a position is guessing, and charging you for the guess.
What we will tell you is exactly what gets built, why it is built that way, and what it costs — once, not monthly.
Tell us what you do and where you work, and we will tell you how many pages that honestly needs — even if the answer is the cheaper tier.
Ask us