How to Choose the Cities for Your Washington Service Pages

Pick the towns where you already do paid work, where you'd take the next job without grumbling, and where you can write something true that only applies to that place. Use the quality of the jobs you can take and the details you can document to set the order. If the only thing you could say about a town is its name, it doesn't get a page yet.

That rules out the common shortcut of drawing a circle around the shop and making a page for every town inside it. The process below takes an evening, a spreadsheet and your job records.

Step 1: Count your jobs by town

Export the last 24 months of invoices or job records and count them by the town where the work happened, not the billing address. Put revenue in the next column. Write the list down before you look at a map, because the map in your head and the invoices don't always agree.

Here is a hypothetical example. Say an electrical contractor based in Everett pulls two years of jobs:

Town	Jobs in 24 months	Notes
Everett	140	Home base
Seattle	60	Mostly repeat customers
Kirkland	35	One builder sends steady work
Bellingham	12	Spread across the two years
Bellevue	9	Mostly small service calls
Redmond	8	Two larger jobs
Spokane	1	A referral, never repeated

Everett is the home base, so the home page or a location page already covers it. The interesting rows are the ones in the middle.

Step 2: Mark the towns you want more of

A town with plenty of past jobs can still be a town you'd rather not grow in. For each row, check three things: whether those jobs made money once you count travel time, whether you can get a crew there on short notice, and whether you'd be glad to see ten more next quarter.

In the example, Seattle and Kirkland pass easily. Bellingham is the judgment call: twelve jobs is real work, but it's further up I-5 than anywhere else on the list. If one of your electricians lives up there, or a Bellingham builder keeps calling, it passes. If every Bellingham job means a long round trip for one crew, take those jobs when they come and don't ask for more. Spokane is out. One job across the mountains is a favor, not a market.

Step 3: Map practical driving corridors

A circle on a map doesn't describe how Washington works. Roads, water and mountains do, and three patterns cover most of the state.

The I-5 corridor: I-5 runs from the Canadian border near Blaine through Bellingham, Everett, Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia to Vancouver. A business on I-5 can often reach towns up and down the freeway more easily than towns the same distance off to the side, especially where Puget Sound is in the way. Towns along your stretch of the freeway are the natural first candidates.

The Eastside: I-405 serves Bellevue, Kirkland and Redmond. For a Seattle or Everett business the Eastside is close on a map and further away at rush hour. Treat each Eastside city as its own decision. In the example, Kirkland earns a page on job count alone, while Bellevue and Redmond can wait until there's more to say about them.

East of the mountains: the Cascades divide the state into a wetter west and a drier east, and the jobs, seasons and competitors you'd meet over there may not be the ones you know. I-90 runs from Seattle over Snoqualmie Pass to Spokane. If you're based on the west side and take the occasional Spokane or Tri-Cities job, a page for that city promises local service you'd struggle to give in a January week. If you're based in Spokane, the same logic runs the other way: Spokane and the towns you reach easily first, Kennewick, Pasco and Richland only if you really work there.

One more case: Vancouver sits across the Columbia River from Portland, so a Vancouver business's real service area may include Oregon. Pages for Oregon cities follow the same rules, and what you need to work there legally is a question for the agencies, not for a marketing plan.

Step 4: Check search demand to set the order

Start with your own inquiry and job records. List the towns customers name when they contact you and compare those places with where your crews can work profitably. A place that produces suitable jobs deserves consideration even if it is smaller than a nearby city. Record the service requested as well as the town, since coverage for a routine visit may differ from coverage for a larger project.

The guide Is SEO Worth It for a Small Business in Eastern Washington? can help you compare potential jobs with the cost of reaching a town.

Start with the towns where your records give you enough material to write a useful page. Include how visits are scheduled, what services you provide and any travel limits. Review inquiries after publication before extending the approach to another town. That lets the next page benefit from questions the first one did not answer, rather than repeating the same copy across a longer list of places.

Step 5: Run the three-details test

For every town still on the list, write down three things you could put on that page that wouldn't be true on the page for the next town over. Things that count:

• The kinds of jobs you've done there, in your own words, if your invoices back them up ("mostly panel upgrades and EV charger installs, many for one Kirkland builder").
• How scheduling works there: which days a crew is usually in the area, any trip charge, how far ahead people should book.
• Photos from jobs in that town, taken by you, with the customer's permission.
• A review from a customer there, in their words.
• Who on the team covers that area.
• Local rules you deal with, such as the city's permit process, described accurately. Check with the city before you write it.

If you can't reach three, the town waits, or it becomes a line on a broader area page instead of a page of its own.

When a city page turns into a doorway page

Google's spam policies list doorway pages as a violation. A city page drifts into that territory when:

• Its text is the same as every other city page with the town name swapped.
• It targets a town you don't actually serve.
• It exists only to catch a search and sends visitors to the same form without telling them anything about that town.
• There are dozens of them and nobody at the company could tell you what's on page 37.

The fix is the work in steps 1 to 5: fewer pages, each with a reason to exist. Your Business Profile should agree with them. Service-area businesses can hide their address and set service areas on their Business Profile, and those areas should line up with the towns your site says you serve.

The guide Google Business Profile for Service-Area Businesses in Washington can help you keep website coverage consistent with your Business Profile.

A checklist for each page

Before a city page goes live, check that it has:

• A town you've worked in and want more work from.
• An opening paragraph that says what you do there and how you get there.
• At least three details that only apply to that town.
• Photos from your own jobs there.
• Real reviews or project notes from local customers, if you have them.
• Any trip charge or minimum that applies.
• The same contact details as every other page.
• Links to it from your main service pages and your service-area page.
• A match with the service areas on your Business Profile.

If you'd like a rough count of how many city and service pages your list adds up to, our service-area planner works it out for the towns you choose. It's a planning model, not a forecast.

Where to go from here

Start with the invoices, not the map. Once you have a short list of towns that pass all five steps, the local SEO work behind those pages, meaning the Business Profile, citations, reviews and links, has something solid to point at.