First: what a city page actually is
When people talk about the SEO structure for a website that serves more than one town, they usually mean city pages. 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 neighborhoods, the kind of houses, the sort of jobs you get there. A page that could be about anywhere reads like it was written for nobody.
The alternative most sites use is one page headed "Areas We Serve" with thirty town names underneath. It is about all of them and specific to none, and readers treat it as a list rather than an answer. Google's spam policies even single out blocks of text that list cities a page is trying to rank for.
People describe the same job differently
Two people want exactly the 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:
- kitchen remodel Longview
- bathroom remodeling Longview
- home renovation Longview
- custom cabinets Longview
- general contractor Longview
- flooring installer Longview
One page cannot answer all six well. It ends up vague enough 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.
So the number of pages is multiplication
Towns you serve, times the ways people describe what you do, equals pages.
| Towns | Ways of describing it | Pages | What that covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 1 | 10 | Your main service, in ten towns |
| 10 | 3 | 30 | Three services, across a real service area |
| 12 | 5 | 60 | Most of how customers describe you, everywhere you work |
The table is arithmetic, not a menu. The research decides which combinations are worth a page. A town nobody searches from, paired with a phrase nobody types, does not earn one.
Which is what the two tiers actually buy
Pro: ten city pages
Your main service, in the ten towns that matter most, each town researched and then written from scratch. If you run a salon in Kilgore and almost everybody who walks in says "hair salon", ten pages is the right shape and more would be waste.
Agency: usually 30 to 60 pages
Keyword research across your whole service area comes first. Then a hand-written page for every town-and-service combination the research says is worth having, usually 30 to 60, delivered in waves with the first live inside two weeks. This suits a business where customers use genuinely different words: a contractor, a law office with several practice areas, a clinic with a long treatment list.
The honest version. If your customers all describe you the same way, more 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, you are missing most of the people looking for you. You will be told which of the two you are before you buy anything.
We do not sell page counts. Every page is researched and written by hand for your business and your town. If the research says your service area needs thirty pages, you get thirty good ones rather than a hundred thin ones.
How this fits the SEO structure for your website
City pages are one layer of a simple structure. Google's SEO Starter Guide recommends organizing a site so people and search engines can see how pages relate, and using descriptive words in web addresses. In practice, for a local business, that looks like this:
- Home page that says what you do and where.
- Service pages, one per main service, explaining it properly.
- City pages, one per town (or town and service) worth having, each linking back to the matching service.
- Plain web addresses such as
/flooring-kilgore-tx/, words separated by hyphens, which is what Google's URL guidance recommends. - One address per page, so the same content is not reachable at several URLs.
- A sitemap listing every page, submitted to Google.
This site follows the same pattern: service pages, guides, and a city directory where each town page was researched before it was written.
What this does not promise
Building the pages is the part we control. Where they rank is not. Search results depend on your competition, your reviews, how well known your business is and a great many things nobody outside Google can see. Google itself says there is no way to pay for a better local ranking. Any agency that promises you a position is guessing, and charging you for the guess.
What you will be told is exactly what gets built, why it is built that way, and what it costs: the website is a one-time price, and any monthly add-on is spelled out before you buy.
Not sure which one fits you?
Tell us what you do and where you work, and you will get an honest answer on how many pages that needs, even if the answer is the cheaper tier. Use the contact page, compare the tiers on the pricing page, or read SEO web design for the rest of the search setup.
Start with the free demo and ask how many city pages your area honestly needs.