One office, a wide service area, and where local rankings really come from
10 September 2026 · 7 min read · Optimum IT Solutions
You have one unit on an industrial estate, or one office above a shop, or a van and the spare room. You cover forty miles in every direction and you would happily travel further for the right job. Google, unhelpfully, wants to know where you actually are.
This is the most common local search problem we get asked about, and it is the one with the most bad advice attached to it. The bad advice is nearly always the same: build a page for every town you serve, put the town name in the heading, and wait. Some people will also suggest a virtual office address in each town, which is a faster way to get yourself in trouble.
The honest version takes longer to explain, so here it is properly.
What Google is actually deciding
There are two different results you are competing for, and they behave differently.
The map pack is the box of three local businesses with pins, stars and phone numbers that sits near the top for local searches. Entries in it come from Google Business Profiles, and a profile is anchored to a real verified place. Distance from the person searching is a genuine factor. If a competitor has a workshop in the town somebody is standing in, and you are twenty five miles away, you are starting that particular race a long way back and no amount of writing will close all of it.
The ordinary blue links below are a different competition. They rank pages, not pins, and distance matters less. That is where a business with one location and a wide patch has a real chance, because a page can be genuinely more useful about a job in a town than a nearer competitor's thin page is.
Understanding which of the two you are actually chasing changes what you should build. Most people build town pages hoping to win the map pack, which is not what town pages do.
The page per town idea, and why it usually falls over
The theory is sound enough. Somebody searches for a service in a town, so you would like a page about that service in that town. The trouble is what happens when you multiply it out. Six services across thirty towns is a hundred and eighty pages, and nobody writes a hundred and eighty genuinely different pages. What actually happens is one page gets written and the town name gets swapped in.
Google has a name for the result and it is not a compliment. Doorway pages are pages built mainly to funnel people into the same destination, with little of their own to offer, and they are covered explicitly by the spam policies. The risk is not only that the pages fail to rank. It is that a large set of near identical pages can drag down the parts of your site that were fine.
There is a quieter cost too. If a hundred and eighty pages all say roughly the same thing, none of them is the obvious best answer, and your own pages compete with each other.
We did this to ourselves, and then we measured it
We are not passing this on as theory. We built exactly this on our own site, at scale, before we knew better.
The layer was fifty four services across twenty eight towns and cities, which came to one thousand five hundred and twelve pages, all indexable and all in our sitemap. Out of one thousand seven hundred and seven URLs on the site, that template was almost everything we had.
When we finally sat down and checked it properly, we pulled two of those live pages and compared them word by word. Two thousand and eighteen words each, and a word level similarity of just over ninety nine per cent. Once we replaced the place names with a placeholder, the two pages were effectively the same document with two phrases different.
That is our own site, measured on our own pages, and it is the same standard we ask clients to be measured by. We have not finished putting it right yet, because collapsing that many URLs is a decision with consequences either way and it is being weighed rather than rushed. We are telling you about it because a firm that sells audits ought to be willing to publish the one it failed.
What a town page has to be before it earns its place
The test we now use is simple and slightly brutal. If you could copy the page, change the town name, and every sentence would still be true, the page should not exist.
A page that passes usually has most of these in it.
- Real jobs you have actually done in that area, described specifically enough that they could not belong to anywhere else.
- Photographs you took there, not stock images of a generic high street.
- Something concrete about working in that place: the parking, the one way system, the age of the housing stock, the industrial estate everybody means when they say the name of the road.
- Your genuine coverage of it, including honest limits. Saying you charge for travel beyond a certain point is more convincing than pretending you are local to everywhere.
- A reason for the page to be read by a human, rather than a reason for it to exist in a sitemap.
Service area, not an invented address
If you travel to customers and do not have premises they can visit, your Google Business Profile can be set up as a service area business. You hide the street address and list the areas you cover instead. That is the supported, honest way to say what you do.
What you must not do is create listings at addresses you do not occupy. Mailbox addresses, a friend's spare room, a virtual office you have never sat in: these get found, and the consequences are considerably worse than the invisibility you were trying to cure. The same applies to inventing a phone number per town that all forwards to the same handset.
Setting a sensible service area also beats setting the widest one available. A profile claiming to cover most of the country reads as noise, both to the system and to the person deciding whether you are near enough to bother calling.
What tends to move a local ranking
None of this is clever. It is the dull work that most local competitors have not done, which is exactly why it still counts.
- A finished, current Google Business Profile with the right primary category, real photographs, accurate hours and the services list actually filled in.
- Your name, address and phone number matching everywhere they appear, including the directories nobody at the company remembers signing up to.
- A steady flow of genuine reviews, gathered at the moment the customer is happiest, and answered, including the awkward ones.
- Strong pages for the service itself, which is usually where the effort spent on thirty town pages would have been better placed.
- Being mentioned and linked by things that are genuinely local: the trade body, the supplier list, the club you sponsor, the local paper when you do something worth reporting.
A sane plan when you have one office and thirty towns
Start with the assumption that you will win the map pack close to home and compete on ordinary results further out. Build accordingly. One strong page per service, a properly finished profile, and a small number of place pages only where you genuinely have work, photographs and something specific to say. Three real ones beat thirty hollow ones, and they are far less likely to cause you a problem later.
Then be patient with the towns at the edge of your patch. You may never top the map there, and that is not a failure of your website. If those areas matter commercially, paid search covers the distance in a way that local ranking will not.
We will not tell you where this lands you, because local results depend on how close you are, how relevant you look and how well known your business is overall, and you control only part of that. What we can say is that the version above tends to hold up over time, and the hundred and eighty page version tends not to. We know, because we built the second one.
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