Say which towns you cover, in words an engine can read

Your customers know you cover the next town over. Nothing an engine reads knows it, because a map graphic and a radius are not sentences.

The questions you cannot win without it

A large share of local questions name a place. Somebody in a particular town wants somebody who works in that town, and they say so.

If nothing an engine can read says you cover that town, you are not eligible for the question. Not ranked poorly — ineligible. It is the cleanest failure in this whole library, because there is no partial credit and no clever workaround: the engine has no basis on which to name you, so it names somebody who said the word.

This is also why it is worth doing early despite being a smaller scoring item than prices or service pages. Fewer questions turn on it, and the ones that do are unwinnable without it.

Why a radius is not an answer

Most sites that address coverage at all do it in one of three ways, and all three are invisible.

A radius — we cover thirty miles around the depot — requires the reader to know where your depot is, to do geometry, and to decide whether a town falls inside the circle. A person will squint at it and guess. A machine assembling a sentence about who works in a specific town will not attempt it.

A map graphic is worse, because it looks like the most complete answer on the page while containing no text at all. Whatever is drawn on that image does not exist as far as anything reading the page is concerned.

And a phrase like the surrounding area, which appears on a remarkable number of sites, claims nothing. It is a hedge, and hedges are unquotable by design.

The fix in all three cases is the same: write the names out.

There is a second reason to write the names rather than a radius, and it has nothing to do with machines. People search for the place they live in, not for the place you are based in. A customer three towns over reading their own town on your page has been told, in the plainest possible way, that you will come. A circle on a map asks them to work that out for themselves, and plenty of them will decide not to bother.

What counts as claiming a town

Three things, and doing more than one is better than doing any of them well.

Names in prose. A sentence or a list on a page, in text, naming the towns, suburbs, boroughs or neighbourhoods you work in. Written as they are actually called locally, including the version people say rather than only the official one.

A page whose address says so. A page at a path that plainly concerns coverage is a strong signal on its own, because the URL is itself a claim about what the page contains.

areaServed in your structured data. The machine-readable version of the same list, which states the claim in a register that requires no interpretation at all. It sits alongside the other fields in the schema block, and it is worth adding at the same time as the rest rather than as a separate afternoon.

Your Google profile has its own service-area setting, and it should agree with all three. A contradiction between the profile and the site is the expensive kind of error, because it discredits both.

Which towns, and how many

Name the places you would actually drive to tomorrow, and stop.

The list should be as long as your business is, which for most local trades is somewhere between a handful and a couple of dozen names. Include the ones you genuinely serve but rarely think about — the town on the other side of the ring road, the village your best customer came from — because those are exactly the questions where competition is thin and you have the most to gain.

Order them the way you would say them out loud: the core first, then outward. And use the same list everywhere. A site claiming eight towns, a profile claiming four and a directory claiming a county is three different answers to the same question, and it will be averaged into a blur.

The temptation to claim everything

Every so often somebody works out that if naming a town makes you eligible for that town’s questions, naming three hundred towns must make you eligible for three hundred questions.

This does not work, and it is worth being clear about why rather than just calling it spam.

Generated pages, one per town, differing only in the place name, are a pattern every search and answer system has been detecting for the better part of two decades. At best they are ignored. Frequently they cause the site to be treated as low quality overall, which costs you the towns you actually do cover. And the pages themselves are unquotable — a page that says nothing specific about a place gives an engine nothing to say about you in that place.

There is also a plainer objection. If somebody two counties away reads a page claiming you cover them and rings, you either turn down the job or take it badly. Neither is worth the traffic.

The honest version of the same instinct is much smaller: name the places you cover, and if a few of them deserve a real page — because you do a lot of work there and can write something true and specific about it — write those few properly.

Writing the page so it is worth reading

A coverage page can be one short page, and the good ones tend to share a shape.

Say what you do, then where. Name the places in a list rather than in a paragraph of commas, because a list is easier to scan and easier to lift. Say something about the practicalities where they differ — a call-out charge that changes past a certain distance, a town you cover on weekdays only, a village where you need more notice. Those details are the part nobody else writes down, and they are exactly what makes the page quotable rather than generic.

Then say what you do not cover, if there is a sensible boundary. It reads as confidence, it stops wasted calls, and it gives an engine a reason to name somebody else for a question you would not have wanted.

An example, because the difference is small and total

Here is what most sites have:

Based in the north of the county and covering a wide surrounding area, we pride ourselves on a fast, friendly service wherever you are.

Nothing in that sentence names a place. It could belong to any business in any country, and no engine can use it to answer a question about a specific town.

Here is the same claim, written so it can be read:

We cover Harrogate, Knaresborough, Wetherby, Boroughbridge and Ripon. Same-day call-outs in Harrogate and Knaresborough; elsewhere we usually need a day’s notice. We do not currently take work in Leeds.

Five names, a practical distinction, and a boundary. Every clause is liftable, and the last one does real work — an engine that knows where you stop is an engine that can name you confidently where you start.

The rewrite took two minutes and is the entire fix. This is not a content strategy; it is remembering to say the thing out loud.

Keeping it current

Service areas drift more than people expect. You take on somebody who lives on the other side of the county and quietly start covering it. You drop a town because the traffic makes it uneconomic. A new estate goes up and gets its own name that everybody local starts using.

Add the list to whatever note holds your other published facts, so that when the area changes you change it in the same three places — the page, the markup and the profile — rather than in whichever one you happen to open. The failure mode is not forgetting the list exists; it is updating one copy of it and leaving two behind to disagree.

When your area is not a list of towns

Some businesses do not work this way, and forcing the shape does more harm than good.

If you have a shop that people come to, your service area is the place you are in and the areas people travel from. Say that, name the neighbourhoods, and do not invent a delivery radius you do not operate.

If you cover a whole county or a whole city, say so and then name the main constituent parts anyway. The umbrella term and the specific names get asked about differently, and the specific names are where the thin competition is.

If you work nationally with a local base, be explicit about both. An engine handling a question about your own town should still find you in it.

What this is worth, and what it is not

It is a small share of the content pillar and the whole of a question type. Those are different things, and the scoring breakdown is deliberate about the difference: points measure how much of the score moves, not how much of your revenue does.

It also will not carry a page on its own. A coverage list on a site that states no prices and describes no services in detail tells an engine where you are without giving it a reason to prefer you — which is why this sits next to putting your prices on the site and making your own pages quotable rather than instead of them.

Checking it

Read your own site as though you had never seen it, looking only for place names in text. Not in the header image, not in a map, not implied by a photograph of a van outside somewhere recognisable. If you cannot find the names as words, an engine cannot either.

Then ask an assistant the question a customer in one of your outer towns would ask, without naming your business. If somebody else is being named for a town you have covered for years, you have just found the cheapest job on your list.