How many location pages should you actually have?
One page per place you can genuinely serve today — not one per place you would like to serve. The number is set by your delivery capacity, not by search volume. A page for a city you cannot reach converts nobody and dilutes every page that can.
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.
Part of
Location pages for a local service business, without the doorway problemHow to build city pages for a service business that operates in dozens of places, and the line between a useful location page and a doorway page.