On-page SEO for local SEO.
Type your own service and city into Google. If what comes back is your homepage, or a Services page carrying six other jobs, that is the whole problem, and it is the one part of local SEO that moves in weeks rather than months.
What came back
northsideplumbing.com.au › emergency-plumber-chermside
Emergency Plumber Chermside | Burst Pipes & Hot Water 24/7
Burst pipe or no hot water in Chermside? We answer the phone at 2am, quote before we start, and carry the parts for same-day repair. Licensed, insured, 214 reviews.
The same title, written the usual way
24/7 Emergency Plumber | Burst Pipes, Hot Water & Blocked Drains | Chermside
Everything past the dashed line never appears
Three parts, three different jobs
- The web address
- Says which page this is before anyone reads a word. One page, one job, one plain address containing the service and the suburb.
- The headline
- The strongest thing you control for a search like this one, and the line people scan. Put the suburb early, because the end gets cut.
- The two lines underneath
- These change nothing about your position and everything about whether anyone clicks. Answer the worry that made them search.
The cut lands around sixty characters. Written the usual way, the part that falls off the end is almost always the suburb, which is the one word the person was looking for.
Written the usual way, the suburb ends up at the end of the headline, and the end is the part Google cuts off. That is one line of text and about twenty minutes of work, which is why this is almost always the first thing we change.
The fault we find most
Six services on one page compete with each other for all six
A single Services page carrying six jobs is not six chances to be found. It is one page trying to be six things, losing to six pages that are each only trying to be one. Splitting it apart is usually the biggest single improvement available on a local site.
What most local sites have
Our Services
Blocked drains
Hot water
Burst pipes
Gas fitting
Leak detection
Bathrooms
One page. Six jobs. No single search it is the best answer to.
What we build instead
/blocked-drains
Blocked drains
/hot-water
Hot water
/burst-pipes
Burst pipes
/gas-fitting
Gas fitting
/leak-detection
Leak detection
/bathrooms
Bathrooms
Six pages. One job each. Every one of them the best answer to a search somebody is actually typing.
The old services page does not get deleted. It becomes the shortcut that points at all six, so anyone browsing still finds their way and Google sees how the six connect.
What we actually write
Every page we build for you is laid out in the same order
Not because a template is easier. Because somebody with a burst pipe reads a page in a fixed order, and the questions they need answered before they will call you are the same eight questions every time.
One service page, top to bottom
Emergency plumber, Chermside
Call 07 xxxx xxxx
Licensed · Insured · 214 reviews
What we do about a burst pipe
What it costs
Areas we cover
Real reviews, real names
Questions people actually ask
And what goes in each block
- The job and the suburb, in the first line
- Not your business name. The person is checking they are in the right place, and they give it about two seconds.
- The phone number, before any scrolling
- On a phone, at 2am, the number is the page. Everything below it exists for the people who are not ready to call yet.
- The reasons to trust you, straight away
- Licence number, insurance, how many people have reviewed you, how long you have been going. Facts, not adjectives.
- What actually happens when they call
- Written from your own words on the phone. This is the part we interview you for, and the part nobody can copy from a competitor.
- Price, or the honest reason there is not one
- A call-out fee, a range, or how you quote. Saying nothing is the single most common reason someone leaves the page.
- The suburbs, each linking to its own page
- Only the ones you genuinely work in. This is also what ties the page to your area pages instead of leaving them stranded.
- Reviews about this job, not general praise
- Three about burst pipes beat thirty about how lovely you are.
- The questions you answer on the phone all day
- Written out properly. These are also the exact things people type into Google, which is why the section earns its place twice.
Every one of your service pages follows this order, and your area pages follow a shorter version of it. That is deliberate: a customer who lands on the second page already knows where to look, and we are not redesigning a layout each time instead of writing the words.
How it fits together
Services, areas and the blog, and what links to what
Pages that connect to nothing cannot show that your site covers a subject properly, however well each one is written. And an area page you cannot write three true sentences about should not be built at all. None of this survives a site Google cannot crawl or read, and none of it builds the local reputation that reviews and local links do.
- Burst pipes
- Hot water
- Blocked drains
- Chermside
- Aspley
- Kedron
- Why your hot water runs out by the second shower
- What a plumber charges after hours in Brisbane
- How to shut off the water before we arrive
Every post links back to the service page it belongs to
Why it is shaped like this
- Nothing sits more than two clicks from the front page
- Google visits deep pages least often and people give up before they get there. Three levels is the ceiling, and we hold it as the site grows.
- Services and areas are separate branches that cross-link
- The burst pipe page links to the suburbs you cover it in, and each suburb page links back to the services you actually do there. Not every combination, only the true ones.
- The blog exists to answer questions, not to publish weekly
- Each post is a real question customers ask on the phone, and each one points back at the page that takes the booking. A post that links nowhere earns nothing.
Three services, three suburbs and three posts is the shape, not the number. It grows one true page at a time, which is slower than generating fifty and the reason the fifty stop working.
Evidence
Go Local Fiji’s service pages were split apart, rewritten around real search terms and connected with internal links across months two and three. Clicks went from 6.68K to 14.3K in the same 28-day window, and average position from 19.3 to 15.7. The gain came from climbing result pages the site already appeared on rather than from reaching new ones, which is what on-page work does when the underlying pages were always capable of ranking.
Questions
- What is on-page SEO in local SEO?
- Everything you control on the page itself: title tag, headings, URL, body copy, internal links, images and structured data. In a local context it also covers the location signals the page carries, the service area it names, the business details it shows, and whether it matches a real service-plus-place search.
- Do I need a separate page for every city I serve?
- Only where you genuinely serve the area and can say something specific about it. A page per suburb spun from one template is scaled content with no added value, which Google's spam policies name directly. Four real location pages beat twenty thin ones.
- Where should local keywords go on a page?
- Title tag, H1, the first hundred words, at least one subheading, and the URL, placed where they read naturally. Past that, repetition adds nothing. Covering the related terms and questions people actually search matters far more than density.
- Will on-page SEO help my Google Business Profile rankings?
- Indirectly, and more than most people expect. Google cross-references your profile against your site. Consistent business details, a page matching each service on your profile, and valid LocalBusiness schema all give the profile more to stand on.
- How is on-page SEO different from local SEO?
- On-page SEO is one part of local SEO. Local SEO also covers your Google Business Profile, citations, reviews and local links, most of which sit outside your website entirely. On-page work is what makes your site back up your profile instead of quietly contradicting it.
- Do I need to rebuild my website?
- Usually not. Most local sites already have enough to work with. The gains come from splitting overloaded pages apart, rewriting headings around real searches and connecting related pages with internal links, all of which happen inside the site you already own.
Send us a URL and we'll review its on-page SEO
Which of your pages compete with each other, which local terms have no page at all, and where your internal linking stops. You get the findings whether or not you work with us.