Location pages

What a location page is

A location page is a page about your business in one named place: what you do there, how long you have done it, who you have done it for, what is different about working there, and how someone in that place gets hold of you. It is written for a buyer who has already decided they want a local supplier and now wants evidence that you are one.

It is not your service page with a town name dropped into the headline and the first paragraph. Everyone who lives in a place can tell within a sentence whether the person writing has ever been there. A page that says "we proudly serve the residents of Chilliwack with quality service" tells a resident of Chilliwack one thing only, which is that nobody involved has driven the highway there in February. It loses you the sale you would have had on the strength of the general page.

It is also not the coverage list. Saying where you travel to belongs on a single properly written coverage page, which is a different job from writing about one town.

When you need one

You need one when you have a real presence in a place: premises, a vehicle that is there weekly, staff who live there, or a run of customers in it. Presence is what gives you something to write.

You need one when the work is genuinely different there. Older housing stock, a different building code, a ferry, a bylaw, a season that starts a month earlier, one large employer whose shifts decide when you can attend. Any of those is a page.

You do not need one, and you should not have one, for a town where you have nothing true to say. This is the rule the whole service turns on. If you cannot name one street, one job, one customer, one condition, one constraint or one habit that belongs to that town and to no other on your list, you do not get a page for it. The town goes on the coverage page instead, in one honest sentence. Ten empty location pages make a business look like it is everywhere and based nowhere.

What makes it genuinely local

Every page has to carry at least three of these, and they have to be checkable.

• Named local detail. Neighbourhoods, roads, the industrial park, the older subdivision with the cast-iron stacks, named as someone who has worked there would name them.
• A local condition that changes the job. Water hardness, soil, wind exposure, the age of the wiring, the municipal permit that takes three weeks rather than three days.
• Proof from that place. A named customer, a described job, a photograph taken there. One real example outweighs four paragraphs of description.
• The practical answers. Response time to that town, whether there is a travel charge, which days you are usually there, where to park if they come to you.
• The people. Who covers that area and whether they live there. In trades this is often the only thing a reader remembers.

Nothing on the page may be true of every town equally. If a paragraph would survive a find-and-replace of the town name, it belongs on the service page and not here.

What you get

The page copy. Six hundred to nine hundred words per place, with the local detail, the proof, the practical answers and one action, plus the title tag and meta description.

A go or no-go on every town you asked for. Each place on your list is weighed for whether enough is true about it to fill a page. The ones that fail come off the quote, with the reasoning.

The coverage wording. A paragraph for the towns that did not qualify, saying you serve them without pretending to be based in them.

A local detail file. What was found about each place and where it came from, so the pages can be kept current as jobs and staff change.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A septic and well-water contractor covering a rural stretch of eastern Ontario has fourteen location pages, one per township, produced by a template. Each is the same two hundred words with a name swapped. Almost nothing comes in from any of them, and the owner assumes local pages do not work.

Going through the job book with him, four townships have more than thirty jobs each and ten have between none and four. The four get real pages. One opens by naming the two concession roads where the clay makes a conventional bed impossible and describes what gets installed instead. Another deals with the seasonal cottage belt: what a system needs after standing empty from October, and why the inspection is booked in April. Each page names the technician who covers it. The other ten townships become four sentences on one coverage page, and the enquiries that now arrive mention the detail.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which places you actually work in, how often, and what is different about each. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. How many places qualify, the price and the dates, agreed before anything starts.
3. The job book. Two to four working days going through your own records with you, place by place, to find where the work really is and what it looked like.
4. The go or no-go list. You see which towns earn a page and which do not, and you approve the list before writing begins.
5. The draft and one round of changes. Read by somebody who works in that place, if you have one.
6. Final pages, coverage wording and the detail file. Delivered together.

About a week and a half for the first place and a few days for each after, since only the local research repeats.

What it costs

Location pages are quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, priced per place, and the towns that fail the go or no-go are not charged for. What moves the number is how many places qualify, how much local detail has to be gathered, and whether customers there can be quoted. The figure is fixed in writing before anything starts, and the pricing page shows the four ways of working.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The practical answers outgrow the page and become a set of questions locals actually ask. The job described on a page gets written up properly as a structured customer story. And where the aim is to be found by someone who types a place name, pages built for that purpose are a separate discipline with separate rules. None of that is assumed. A location page written from something true is finished work on its own.