Free tool for home service contractors

Service Area Page Planner: Free, Runs in Your Browser

List the towns you serve and what you’ve actually done in each one. The planner tells you which towns deserve their own page now, which can wait, and which belong on an area list. Then it maps the internal links so no page gets stranded.

3 callsPage now, page later or area list, with the reason

4 proofsJobs, photos, reviews and local detail per town

20 areasThe most a Business Profile can list

0 uploadsEverything runs in this browser tab

Privacy: nothing you type, paste or upload leaves your device. The planner runs in JavaScript in this browser tab. Nothing is sent to a server or saved.

Roofers, lawn care companies and pest control firms all hit the same question once calls start coming from the next town over. Should that town get its own page? Honestly, only if you’ve got something real to say about it. This planner turns that into a rule you can run over a list of 10 towns or 200, and it’s the same first pass I do at the start of my roofing SEO and local SEO services work. Do you already have city pages that read like copies of each other? Read how to write location pages without duplicate content alongside it.

1. Your business

Website address

Used to write full URLs in the plan. Leave it blank and the plan uses example.com.

Base town (where you’re based)

Your homepage already covers it, so it won’t get a town page.

Hub page path

The hub becomes https://www.yourcompany.com/service-areas/ and town pages sit under it.

Your services, one per line

2. Towns and neighborhoods you serve

Paste one town per line, or a table with a header row

Columns it reads (only Town is required, in any order): Town, Group, Jobs last 12 months, Photos, Reviews, Drive minutes, Services done there, Local details. Rows copied from Google Sheets or Excel work too.

Or upload a CSV file

3. Search Console queries (optional)

Paste Queries.csv from your Search Console export

Shows how often people already search for your services with each town’s name. It sets the order. It never earns a town a page on its own.

Or upload Queries.csv

A page now call means the town has enough material for a page only it could have. The multi-location pages guide covers what to write on it, and the orphan pages walkthrough covers why the linking plan matters as much as the page.

Quick answer

The Service Area Page Planner is a free tool for roofers, lawn care, pest control and other home service contractors who want more calls from the towns around them. You list your towns with the jobs, photos, reviews and local details you have for each, and it sorts every town into page now, page later or area list. You also get the hub structure, an internal linking plan and a checklist for each page, with a CSV download, all worked out in your browser.

How to Use the Service Area Page Planner

You can start with nothing but a list of town names, one per line, and fill in the details later with the Fill in details town by town button. But you’ll get a better plan if you pull the numbers first. Here’s where each one comes from.

List your services

Type one service per line, using the names of your service pages: roof replacement, roof repair, gutters. The planner uses them to decide which service page links to which town page.

Pull every town and neighborhood you serve

Start with the service areas already in your Google Business Profile (Edit profile, then Location, then Service area), then add towns from your job records that aren’t on it. A neighborhood counts if customers call it by name.

Source: Google Business Profile help on service areas.

Count jobs per town for the last 12 months

Export your jobs or invoices from the software you schedule or bill in, keeping the customer’s city column. In Google Sheets, Insert, then Pivot table, with City as rows and a count of jobs as values, gives you every town’s number at once.

Add photos, reviews and drive time

Photos is yes if you have your own job photos from that town. Reviews counts reviews that name the town, or that you can match to a job there. Drive time is Google Maps directions from your base, in minutes.

Write down what’s different about each town

Ask your crew. Housing age, HOA approval rules, permit quirks, the hail that hit two springs running, the pest that’s worse near the river. Separate them with semicolons. Two or more counts as local proof.

Add Search Console queries if you have them

In Search Console, open Performance, then Search results, set the date range to the last 12 months, click Export and choose Download CSV. Unzip it and paste or upload Queries.csv. The planner adds up impressions on queries that name each town.

Source: Search Console Performance report help.

Run the plan and build in order

Click Plan my pages. Build the Page now towns in the order shown, add every link from the linking plan the day each page goes live, then request indexing on the hub first and the town pages after it.

Source: URL Inspection tool help.

Not sure about a number? Leave it blank. Blank counts as zero, so the planner leans cautious and a town only gets a page when you’ve actually told it about the proof.

How to Read the Results

Every town gets one of three calls, and your base town gets a fourth. Page now means at least 3 of the 4 kinds of local proof and at least one job there. Page later means 2 of 4: worth a page once you collect what’s missing, and the plan tells you what that is. Area list means fewer than 2 kinds of proof, no jobs at all, or a drive of more than 2 hours. Those towns go on your hub as plain text. Home base is the town you entered as your base, which your homepage and service pages already cover.

Kind of proof	Counts when	Score points
Work	3 or more jobs there in the last 12 months	1 for 1 to 2 jobs, 2 for 3 to 9, 3 for 10 or more
Photos	You have your own job photos from the town	2
Reviews	At least 1 review that names the town	1 for 1 to 2 reviews, 2 for 3 or more
Local detail	2 or more specifics, such as housing age or HOA rules	1 for one detail, 2 for two or more
Distance	Not a proof. Over 2 hours puts the town on the area list	1 if it’s 30 minutes or less from your base

The score out of 10 only sets the build order inside each group. The call itself comes from the proof count, so a town can’t score its way to a page on drive time alone. Ties go to the town with more Search Console impressions, if you added them.

A worked example: Acme Roofing

Click Load sample data and you’ll get Acme Roofing, a made-up roofer based in Maplewood Falls with 13 made-up places on its list. Here’s what the planner does with them.

4 pages now. Ashgrove scores 10 out of 10: 23 jobs, real photos, 7 reviews that name it, 3 local details and a 15 minute drive. Birchmont follows on 9. Cobble Hill and Ivydale both score 8, and Cobble Hill goes first because Search Console shows 74 impressions on queries naming it against 40 for Ivydale.
3 pages later. Dunmere has 4 jobs and 2 reviews but no photos and only one local detail, so the plan says to photograph the next job and write down one more specific. Kestrel Ridge has 7 jobs and photos, but no review that names it and only one local detail. Either one gets it to a page. Glenhaven has 5 jobs and lake house details, and needs photos or a review.
5 on the area list. Fernhollow is the interesting one. It has 298 impressions on searches like roofers near fernhollow. But Acme hasn’t done a single job there, so a page now would just be the town name in a template. The plan says win jobs there first. Larkspur is 135 minutes away, past the 2 hour limit Google Business Profile sets for a service area.
Maplewood Falls is the base, so it stays with the homepage.

The linking plan for the sample comes to 57 links. Ashgrove, for example, gets links from the homepage area block, the footer, the hub, three service pages, the other three town pages and its own project write-ups. That’s six different kinds of route in, so a theme change that drops the footer can’t strand it.

The linking plan and the diagram

Google finds pages by following links. Its own guidance says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site, in a plain a element with an href. So a town name inside a map widget, or a dropdown that only works with JavaScript, doesn’t count. The plan gives every new page at least two routes in from pages Google already crawls.

Homepage and footer link to the hub. While you have 12 or fewer town pages, the homepage area block and the footer link to each one too. Past 12 the footer only links the hub, so it doesn’t turn into a wall of town names.
The hub links every town page by its name, grouped by the Group column, and names the area list towns as plain text.
Service pages link to the towns where you’ve done that service. Leave a town’s services blank and the planner assumes all of them, and says so.
Town pages link back to the hub, to the services you do there, and to up to 3 nearby town pages. Those are picked from the same group first, then by similar drive time.
Project pages for jobs in a town link to that town’s page. If you don’t have project pages yet, turning job photos into project pages covers how.

The shape the planner draws for your own list. Your version appears in the results with your towns and services.

Why bother with all six routes? The orphan location pages write-up walks through a lawn and mosquito company whose five city pages sat in the sitemap with zero impressions for six weeks. The pages themselves were fine. The problem? Nothing on the site linked to the hub that linked to them. Once you’ve got your plan, the multi-location guide is the next read. It covers what goes on each page.

Why Thin City Pages Backfire

Google’s spam policy has a name for the classic contractor move of 40 pages titled Roof Repair in [Town] with the same text on each. Doorway abuse. One of the examples in the policy is “pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.” And generating lots of pages mainly to rank also falls under its scaled content abuse section.

A good town page is a different thing. It talks about jobs you did there, shows photos from those jobs and quotes a neighbor’s review. And it mentions something only a local would know, like the HOA that approves shingle colors or the original plank decking under a town’s 1960s ranch homes. That’s why the planner counts proof and ignores how badly you’d like to rank in a town.

It’s also the plain answer to how many location pages you should have. There’s no number. You build one for each town where you can write a page that helps the person reading it, which is what Google’s helpful content guidance asks for. Everything else goes on the hub.

Check your files before you mark a town as no photos. In the contractor project pages guide, one roofer’s gallery page had no job photos on it, while 73 before and after shots from five jobs sat in a shared drive.

Limits of This Planner

It only knows what you type. Inflate the job counts and you’ll get pages you can’t fill with anything real.
The 3 job and 2 detail thresholds are my rules of thumb. Google doesn’t publish one. The 2 hour and 20 area limits do come from Google Business Profile help.
Search Console only shows searches you already appear for, and it leaves out rare queries to protect searchers’ privacy, as Google explains in its performance data deep dive. A small town with no impressions can still deserve a page.
Nearby towns come from your groups and drive times, not from a map. Two towns 30 minutes out can sit on opposite sides of your base. Fill in the Group column to fix that.
The URLs are a pattern. Service page URLs are guessed from your service names. Live pages use different URLs? Keep yours. Don’t change a live URL to match this plan.
It doesn’t write the pages, check them for copied text, or check indexing. Use URL Inspection in Search Console for indexing, and the service page gap analysis once pages are live.

Service Area Pages FAQ

What is a service area page?

It’s a page about the work you do in one town or neighborhood you serve but aren’t based in. A good one shows real jobs, photos and reviews from that town and links to the services you do there. A hub page lists all your areas and links to each town page.

How many location pages should I have?

As many as you have real local proof for, and no more. Google doesn’t publish a number. That usually means fewer town pages than towns, plus one hub that names every other town they cover. Add pages as jobs, photos and reviews pile up in a town.

Are city pages doorway pages?

They can be. Google’s spam policy lists pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse. A page that only swaps the town name into a template fits that description. A page with real jobs, photos, reviews and local detail from that town is a different thing.

Can I make a page for a town I haven’t worked in yet?

You can, but it won’t have anything true to say beyond the town name. Put the town on your hub’s area list, win a few jobs there, photograph them and ask for reviews, then build the page. The planner keeps a town on the area list until you’ve logged at least one job there.

Should my home town get its own page?

Usually not. Your homepage and service pages already target your base town, and a separate page for it tends to compete with them. Put your home town jobs, photos and reviews on those pages instead.

How many service areas can I add to my Google Business Profile?

Up to 20, according to Google’s Business Profile help, and the whole area shouldn’t stretch more than about 2 hours of driving from your base. Your website can still name more towns than that on its hub page.

Should I build a page for every service in every town?

Only where you have proof for that exact pairing, such as several roof replacements in one town with photos of each. Otherwise one town page that covers the services you do there is stronger than five thin pages that each pair a service with the town name.

Why aren’t my city pages showing up on Google?

Often because nothing on the site links to them, so Google has no route in, and a sitemap entry on its own is only a hint. Link each page from the hub, the matching service pages and nearby town pages, then request indexing on the hub first in Search Console.