The most common structural mistake we see on a local business site is a single Services page listing twenty things. It feels tidy. It ranks for nothing, because it is not really about any one of them, and the person searching is only ever looking for one.
1 · Search is specific, so the site has to be
'Fire door installation Camden' and 'emergency locksmith Hackney' are different searches by different people with different urgency. One page cannot be the best answer to both. Two pages can, and each can carry the detail, the price and the call to action that particular job needs.
2 · The matrix, and where it stops
Services multiplied by areas gives you the shape of the site. For a contractor we built this year that came to seventeen services across twenty-eight areas, and fifty-six pages in total. The limit is honesty: a page for an area you have never worked in is the thing Google has been explicitly warning about for years, and it will not rank anyway because there is nothing real to put on it.
3 · What makes an area page worth having
Something true that could only have been written about that place. The streets you actually cover, the jobs you have done there, how long it takes you to get there, the kind of property that is common. A page that mentions the area name four times and says nothing about it is spam with extra steps.
4 · Audience pages are the forgotten half
A landlord worrying about compliance and a facilities manager renewing a contract want different language, different proof and different prices. Giving each a page of their own usually converts better than any amount of extra area coverage.
5 · Fewer, better, always
Six pages that deserve to rank beat sixty that do not, and thin pages drag down the ones around them. If you cannot think of four honest paragraphs for a page, it should not exist yet.