City or Suburb: Where Should You Aim?

Every trade business wants to rank for the city. It is the search that sounds most impressive and it is almost always the wrong first target.

Why the city term is so hard

Three reasons stack up against you.

Everyone wants it. Every business in your trade across the whole metro area is pointed at the same phrase. That includes firms with twenty years of reviews and a marketing budget.

It is the least specific thing anybody searches. Somebody typing just your trade and the city name could be anywhere in it, needing anything. Google knows that, which is why it leans heavily on proximity to decide what to show.

Proximity is the one factor you cannot argue with. Google's explanation of how local results are ranked puts distance alongside relevance and prominence. You can improve the other two. You cannot move.

How to see this for yourself in two minutes

Search your trade plus the city name on a phone, then do it again from a different part of town, or with location set somewhere else.

The map results will change, often completely. That is proximity doing its work, and it is the clearest demonstration that there is no single ranking for a city term. There are as many results as there are places to stand in it.

Which also means that "we rank first for the city" is a claim worth very little without asking where the person was standing when they checked.

Why suburbs are the better fight

The person searching a suburb name has already narrowed it down. They want somebody near, they are more likely to be ready, and far fewer businesses are competing for that exact phrase.

You also start closer, which is the one advantage that cannot be bought.

And there is a compounding effect that gets missed: winning a cluster of suburbs is often how you eventually win the city. Google forms a view of where you are relevant from the searches you already satisfy. Businesses that dominate six suburbs tend to start appearing for the metro term without ever having targeted it directly.

Going at the city first is attacking the strongest point in the market with nothing behind you.

How to choose which suburbs

Not by population. By three things:

1. Where you actually go. If you would turn down a job there, do not build for it.
2. Where the work you want is. The suburb with the housing stock that needs what you do. Older areas for reroofing and rewires, newer developments for landscaping and fencing.
3. Where you already have customers. Reviews mentioning a place, jobs you have done there, photos you can use. You have evidence for those, which makes the page real rather than a template.

Three or four you can genuinely argue for beats fifteen you cannot.

A practical shortcut: open your invoices from the last year and count jobs by suburb. The top four are your answer, and you have photographs and customers in every one of them. Most businesses guess at this and guess wrong, because the suburb they think of first is usually where they live rather than where they work.

The trap

The reason location pages have a bad name is that most of them are the same page thirty times with the name swapped.

That does not work, and it has not for years. It also risks the opposite of what you wanted, because a site full of near-identical thin pages is a site Google trusts less overall.

A location page earns its place by containing something only true of that place: jobs you have done there, the housing or the problems specific to it, how long it takes you to get there, the areas it borders. If you cannot write two hundred words that could not be copied onto the next suburb's page, do not make the page.

What that looks like in practice, for a roofer in an older suburb: the decade the houses went up, the roofing material that went on them, what is failing on it now, two jobs you have done on that street pattern, and the ones you would not take on. None of that is transferable, which is exactly the point.

What to do if you are outside the city

Be honest about it and build outward from where you are.

Do not invent an address. A Google Business Profile with an address you cannot substantiate is the quickest way to get suspended, and getting reinstated is far harder than getting listed in the first place.

Instead, set your service area to the places you genuinely cover, and build pages for the towns between you and the city. That is a slower route and it is the one that holds.

The order I would do it in

1. The Google Business Profile, properly filled in, because it is free and it is where the map results come from
2. Your two or three strongest suburbs, with real pages
3. The services you want more of, each with its own page
4. The city term, last, once there is something underneath it

Most businesses do that list backwards and wonder why nothing moves. The whole sequence is what the local search work is, and the order matters more than the effort.

Expect this to take months rather than weeks, and expect the suburbs to move before anything else does. If nothing has shifted at all after six months of real work, that is worth looking at properly rather than waiting longer.