Service-plus-location keyword mapping

A heating engineer in Leeds lists eight services on his van and drives to six towns. Multiply those and you get forty-eight possible "service in place" searches, and the tempting move is forty-eight pages. A few of those cells deserve a page, most deserve a line on a broader page, and some are handled by your Business Profile with no page at all. The job of this lesson is to build the grid and make that call cell by cell.

Build the grid from customer words and real places

Start a spreadsheet. Services go down the left, places go across the top, and every cell is a candidate search.

The rows are where most people go wrong, because they copy their own menu. Customers don't search "heating solutions" or "domestic plumbing services"; they search "boiler repair", "boiler service", "new boiler", "leaking tap". Write each row as the phrase a customer with that problem would type, and split a service into two rows when customers name it two different ways for two different jobs (a repair and an install are different searches). Your Business Profile's services list, your price list and your last month of phone enquiries are the raw material.

The columns are the places you actually serve, at the level customers name. For a city that usually means the city itself plus the districts people use as addresses; for a rural patch it means the market towns. The test for each column is simple: have you done a job there recently, and would you go back. A column you can't say yes to is a place you don't serve, and a page for it is the kind of page this academy warns against.

Score each cell on demand, fit and evidence

With the grid built, each cell gets three quick judgements.

Demand is whether the combination is searched. The next lesson puts numbers on the bigger cells; for now, expect most cells to show low or zero volume in any tool. That doesn't mean nobody wants a boiler repair in Morley. It means the search is usually typed without the place and localised silently, as the previous lesson covered, and your profile catches it.

Fit is whether you could write something true and specific about that service in that place: jobs you've done there, the housing stock (a street of back-to-backs has different plumbing from a new-build estate), parking, the water hardness, the council's rules. If the only thing that would change between two pages is the town name, the cell doesn't fit a page.

Evidence is what you can show: photos from jobs in that area, reviews that mention it, a customer quote. Evidence separates a location page Google keeps from one it filters, and it is what makes an AI assistant comfortable naming you for that town.

Decide which cells earn a page

Now the rule set. It's short, and it applies to almost every local business.

1. Your home town row gets a page per service. These are your service pages ("Boiler repair in Leeds"), and the strongest of them is the one your homepage is built around. Your homepage for local search covers that choice.
2. Another town earns its own page only when it passes fit and evidence for at least your main service. That page is a location page: one page for the town, covering the services you do there, never a page per cell.
3. Small places that don't pass on their own get grouped. "Plumber in north Leeds: Headingley, Chapel Allerton and Moortown" is one honest page with real detail for each district, where three thin pages would be filtered.
4. Cells with no fit and no evidence get no page. They're served by the profile (declare your service area there if you travel to customers; Service-area businesses explains how) and by a line on your homepage listing the areas you cover.

Google's spam policies describe doorway abuse, and one example they give is multiple pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to the same place. A grid turned into one templated page per cell is exactly that pattern, which is why the decision step matters more than the grid itself.

Write the map down, one primary keyword per page

The output is a keyword map: a list of pages, each with one primary keyword and the variants it also covers. "Boiler repair Leeds" carries "Leeds boiler repair", "boiler repair in Leeds" and "boiler repairs Leeds" without separate pages. A location page for Wakefield carries "plumber Wakefield" as its primary keyword and lists the services beneath it as headings.

Two checks before you move on. First, no two pages share a primary keyword, or they compete with each other and Google picks one, often the wrong one. Second, every primary keyword has a page that is actually about it, not a homepage that mentions it in passing. The general version of this discipline is in Mapping keywords to pages; the local version adds the place column and nothing else.

What to take away

• The grid is services in customer words down the side and places you really serve across the top; every cell is a candidate search, not a candidate page.
• Score cells on demand, fit and evidence, and expect most cells to show little search volume because the place is usually typed silently.
• Home-town services get a page each, other towns get one honest location page when they pass fit and evidence, and small places get grouped or left to the profile.
• One primary keyword per page, with word-order variants folded in, so your pages never compete with each other.

Next

With the grid decided, put real numbers and intent on each cell in Local keyword research, step by step.