Field guide
Plumber Service Area Pages: Twenty Towns Is a Strategy, Not a Cage
Google Business Profile Help caps a service area business at 20 service areas, and says the whole footprint should stay within about two hours of driving from the base. Most plumbers treat that cap as a form to fill in once. It is actually a portfolio decision: 20 towns, ranked by what the work there is worth, with pages on the website that back up the ones that matter.
The trap is listing every suburb the truck has ever visited. A service area list drawn from memory includes the town that produced one low value call in 2023 and excludes the suburb where three sewer replacements landed last quarter.
Pick the 20 from the invoice file, not the map
Pull two years of invoices and count jobs and revenue by town. The top towns by revenue, not by job count, are the core of the list, because an emergency heavy town full of small tickets can outrank a quieter town where the company does its large ticket work. Fill remaining slots with towns adjacent to the core, where a crew is already driving most weeks.
Then write website pages only for the towns you actually want more work from. Whitespark's service area research is blunt that listing an area does not by itself move rankings; the profile's verified base and real signals do the work. A town page with two local job stories, the services offered there, and realistic response framing supports the listing. Twenty thin pages support nothing. See also Plumber Review Replies: Three Mistakes Owners Keep Making.
What a town page needs that a copied page lacks
Searchers in a specific town are checking two things: do you really come here, and do you do this job. A page that swaps the town name into identical paragraphs answers neither. Name the housing stock: postwar ranches with original cast iron, newer subdivisions on slab with PVC, lake houses on septic. That detail is the proof of presence a template cannot fake.
Response expectations belong there too, stated honestly: same day emergency coverage in core towns, scheduled work in the outer ring. A page that promises a 60 minute response across a two hour footprint is a review complaint waiting for its date.
Prune the list like you prune a price book
Review the areas twice a year against the invoice file. Towns that produced nothing drop off; growing suburbs where builders are handing over new subdivisions come on. Each change is small, and keeping name, hours, and base details stable around category and area edits keeps the profile out of unnecessary review cycles.
The cap is the discipline. Twenty slots force the question most plumbing marketing avoids: which towns, exactly, is this company for? Answer it with revenue data and the pages write themselves in the right order.
Frequently asked questions
How many service areas can a plumber add to a Google profile?
Up to 20, entered as cities, postal codes, or named areas rather than a radius. Google also advises keeping the overall footprint within about two hours of driving from where the business is based.
Does adding a service area make my company rank in that town?
Not by itself. Practitioner testing reported by Whitespark found that adding or removing listed service areas did not move rankings on its own. The list tells customers where you work; rankings still follow your verified location, category, reviews, and relevance.
Should every service area town get its own website page?
Only the towns you want more profitable work from, and only with real local content: housing stock, services, and honest response expectations. A batch of name swapped pages is easy to spot and does not persuade searchers or ranking systems.
What should I do with towns we rarely serve?
Drop them at the next twice yearly review and give the slot to a town producing work or growing toward you. A shorter, accurate list beats a maximal one, because every listed town is a promise a dispatcher has to keep.