The cheapest page most trade websites are missing
We audit a lot of trade websites. The same page is missing from most of them, it takes about an hour to write, and it costs nothing but the hour.
It’s the one that says where you work.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Think about how somebody actually looks for a tradesperson. They don’t search “fencing”. They search “fencing Loughborough”, or “fencer near Melton Mowbray”, or they ask their phone for someone nearby.
Every one of those searches has a place in it. If your website never writes those places down, there is nothing on it for the search to match. Google isn’t being awkward — it genuinely doesn’t know you cover Loughborough, because you never said so.
The frustrating part is who wins instead: quite often somebody doing worse work who simply listed their towns.
What most sites say instead
Nearly always some version of: “We cover the Midlands and surrounding areas.”
Nobody searches for “the Midlands and surrounding areas”. It reads as thorough and matches nothing.
How to fix it in an afternoon
- Write down every town and village you’d happily drive to. Not a radius — actual names. Include the small ones; there is less competition for a village than a city.
- Make a page called “Areas we cover” and list them, grouped by county or by rough direction.
- Say something real about a few of them. Even a line — the kind of properties, a job you did there — beats a bare list, and it stops the page reading like it was written for a search engine.
- Put the same towns in your Google Business Profile service areas, so the two agree.
What not to do
Don’t build fifty near-identical pages, one per town, with the name swapped. It used to work. It now reads as spam to both Google and anybody who lands on one, and it can do more harm than the page you didn’t write.
One honest page listing real places beats fifty thin ones. If a particular town genuinely is a big part of your work, that one deserves a proper page of its own, with real photos of jobs you did there.
The wider point
Most of what makes a trade website work isn’t clever. It’s writing down things you already know and assume are obvious — where you work, what it costs, what happens after somebody rings, what the last job looked like.
It’s obvious to you. It isn’t on the website.
Not sure what yours is missing?
We’ll look at your site and tell you straight — including the bits that are already fine.