How many location pages to build: filtering a long list down to 31 cities

The tempting method is to pull a list of cities by search volume and make a page for each. That produces pages for places the business cannot actually serve, which is both a conversion problem and a credibility problem — someone books, and then finds out nobody can come.

The filter we used

For the hibachi site we started from the opposite end: which places can a chef actually reach, today, without the travel making the booking uneconomic. That produced 31 cities across 7 states. Search volume never entered the decision.

• Can somebody be there within the normal travel radius?
• Is there enough there to be worth a page of its own, or is it really part of a neighbouring metro?
• Can the business name something specific about serving that place?

Growing the list later

Adding a city later is cheap and safe. Publishing thirty speculative ones at once is neither — a burst of near-identical new pages is the clearest signal of scaled content there is. Add them as capacity actually arrives.