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What Are Service-Area Pages?
A service-area page is a dedicated page about a specific location that a business services, but does not have a physical office in.
For example, if you are a local business you should have a dedicated page for each service-area that you travel to for work. This gives the site the opportunity to rank for all the locations that they provide services in.
Example: An HVAC company would have separate pages for each service-area:
- Tampa, FL
- St. Pete, FL
- Clearwater, FL
What Is Duplicate Content in Local SEO?
If a website has two pages that are exact copies of each other, or if the majority of content on both of those pages is the same, this would be considered duplicate content.
When it comes to local SEO, many businesses will create multiple service-area pages in order to target multiple cities. While this can be an effective approach, often times they are done poorly.
What I mean by that is that someone will create a service-area page for city #1, then make a copy of that page for city #2, and then they only swap out the city name in the content.
That is not the best idea. It’s highly possible that the work you just did will not pay off. These pages are unlikely to rank if they are seen as “low-quality” in Google’s eyes. If two pages are 99% the same, then search engines will not see them as unique and may only choose to rank one of the pages, not all of them.
You catch my drift?
Can Service-Area Pages Be Considered Duplicate Content?
Yes, they absolutely can be! But that’s only if they are not done properly. If you invest time into make them unique, they won’t be considered duplicate content.
The same principle applies to making unique location pages and making unique service pages.
How to Make Unique Service-Area Pages
It’s not hard to make service-area pages unique. But it does take some manual effort. That’s why many people end up doing it the lazy way (copy a page and swap out the city name).
But if you want the time and effort you put into creating service-area pages to pay off, then I recommend making each page as unique as possible.
Don’t forget, these pages should actually be helpful to users also.
Service-Area Page Checklist
There are quite a few things you can add to service-area pages to make them unique.
If you have time, you should read Phil Rozek’s article “Template for Creating Knockout City-Page Content for Local SEO“.
I’ve created my own checklist here that you can use in addition to his.
Each service-area page can include:
- Business name, address and phone number (even if it’s not the same city as the service-area page you want to give users a way to contact you).
- Embed a map of the service-area
- Describe the overall business
- Describe the service-area
- Discuss what services are offered in this service-area
- Mention your favorite places in the service-area
- List partners and / or complimentary businesses in the service-area
- Insert reviews or testimonials from customers in the service-area
- Add photos from employees or jobs in the the service-area
- Use this awesome questionnaire from Phil Rozek to come up with ideas for other city-specific topics you can write about on each service-area page
Service-Area Pages: Unique Content Template
Use this free Google Sheets template to create unique content if you need to create multiple service-area pages!
Service-Area Page Experts
In conclusion, if you’re a business without physical locations, I recommend creating service-area pages for each location you want to rank in so that you can grow your organic traffic. But make sure each one is unique!
At CONTENTAMIGO our focus is creating stellar local SEO content. If you need assistance finding the right keywords to target on a local level or need service-area pages created, we’d love to help! Just place an order!