01One profile, a real base, and a list of at most 20 places
Google's guidelines give a business with a central office one profile for that office with a designated service area, and tell service-area businesses to hide the address from customers. Separate profiles are allowed only for separate locations, each with its own service area and its own staff, so a second profile for a town where you only send a crew now and then does not fit. You name the areas by city, postal code or another type of area, up to 20, and Google asks you to remove any you do not serve. The overall area should not extend farther than about two hours of driving from where you are based. If you do have a staffed office that receives customers during its stated hours, Google lets a hybrid business show that address as well.
- One profile for your base, with the address hidden if customers do not visit it
- Up to 20 named areas, none you do not serve, inside about two hours of driving
- A second profile only for a second location with its own staff and its own service area
- Check in the editor whether your county is offered as a single area, which would spend one slot instead of many
02Distance is measured from your base, so pick towns by the work you have done
Google defines distance as how far each business is from the customer who is searching. Your profile has one base, so a customer in the town next to it is close and one at the far end of the county is not, whatever the list says. Google's help page on service areas says they help people find your profile. It does not say they change your ranking, so do not expect twenty names to make you equally visible in each. Choose the places on evidence: sort the last twelve months of finished jobs by town, then add the enquiries you could not take because the site was too far. Put the towns with finished jobs first. A town where you have done nothing is somewhere you hope to work, and the list is for places you serve.
- Sort twelve months of finished jobs by town and start the list there
- Leave out places you have never worked, however big they are
- Expect to be strongest near your base: distance is one of Google's three factors
- Note the enquiries you turned down for distance, they show where the real edge of your area is
03Town pages: real when the job is on the page, a doorway when only the name changes
Google's spam policy defines doorway abuse as pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries that lead users to intermediate pages less useful than the final destination, and one of its examples is multiple pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. Forty pages with the town name swapped are exactly that. A town page is a different thing when it describes work done there: the job, the street or district, what the client asked for, photos, how many weeks it took, the number to call. Our test: swap the town name, and if the page still reads true, delete it. Write one only for a town where you have at least two finished jobs to show. That threshold is ours, not Google's.
- A page per type of job first: roof, extension, renovation, whatever you actually sell
- One page that lists every town you serve, as plain text
- A town page only with real finished jobs, real photos and the client's permission
- If swapping the town name leaves the page true, it is a doorway
04Name, phone and address: the same everywhere
Use one name and one number everywhere. The name is the one on your van door, quote and invoice, with no town or trade keyword added, because Google's guidelines say unnecessary information in the name is not permitted. Google asks for a phone number that connects to your individual business location, so pick a local number you control and print the same one on the van, the site and the profile. Our electricians post covers the name rules in more detail.
- Name as on the van, quotes and invoices, with no town or trade keyword added
- One local number you control, the same on the van, the site and the profile
05Reviews: ask at handover, from every town, inside Google's rules
Every review lands on the one profile, so a county of customers builds a single body of evidence. Ask at handover, when the client is looking at finished work, with the same message for every client. Offering free or discounted work in exchange for a review is strictly prohibited by Google. Our post on getting more Google reviews has the wording and the rules in full.
- Ask at handover with the profile's review link or QR code
- No discount, gift or free work in exchange for a review
06Where PROOF48 is the wrong choice for a county contractor
FOUND costs 297 EUR a month and covers the profile, schema, five target keywords, two AI blog posts a month and a monthly ranking report. Five keywords is a small number for a county: two trades across six towns is already twelve searches. FOUND is a start on the core ones, and anything wider is a conversation to have before you subscribe. Search builds over months, so if you need work this month, ads are the faster route. If most of your work comes through tenders or repeat contracts with developers, local search is probably a minor channel for you, though we have not measured it. Our plans do not answer phone calls. And none of our eight published builds is a contractor.
- FOUND covers 5 target keywords: one trade and a few towns, not a whole county of searches
- Need work this month: ads first, SEO builds over months
- Work arrives by tender or developer contracts: local search is likely a small channel
- No website yet: a site of up to about five pages is 500 to 2,500 EUR, built in 48 hours, paid after the preview. A page per job type plus project pages goes past five and is scoped separately
Not a contractor: a salon with one address, and what carries over
None of our eight builds is a contractor, and none is a service-area business. The nearest local SEO work is SCP Shine & Style, a salon on Strada Baba Novac in Sector 3, Bucharest, which is the opposite of a firm that covers a county. Two things from that build carry over. Every service got its own page with its own copy and media, and a landmarks line on every page names the real area around Dristor and Titan. For a contractor the counterparts are a page per type of job and a plain list of the places you have actually worked. We do not publish the salon's enquiry numbers because we do not measure them, and we have no contractor results to quote.
See the build: SCP Shine & StyleQuestions, answered
Can I make a Business Profile for every town I work in?
No. Google says there should be one profile per business, and a second one is allowed only for a separate location with its own service area and its own staff. Listing the towns inside one profile's service area is how you cover them.
How many towns can I list, and how far can they be?
Up to 20 areas, named by city, postal code or another type of area. Google says the overall area should not extend farther than about two hours of driving from where you are based, and that you should remove any place you do not serve.
Do I need a page for every town?
No. One page listing the towns you serve plus a page per type of job is a better start. Add a town page only when you have real finished jobs there to show, because near-identical town pages match Google's description of doorway abuse.
Can PROOF48 promise page-one results for a contractor?
No. Google says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and nobody controls positions. We set up the profile, pages and schema, report each month what moved, and promise no position and no number of calls.
Where PROOF48 fits
For a contractor who covers a county, local SEO is one profile with a real base and a list of the towns you have worked in, a page per type of job, town pages only where finished jobs back them, the same name and number on the van and online, and reviews asked for at every handover. PROOF48's FOUND plan, at 297 EUR a month, covers the profile, schema and five target keywords, and we say plainly when ads or a first website should come first.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Cosmin has worked in online marketing and software development since 2018, and has built with AI every day since January 2023. He still writes code from scratch daily, in Python, React, Rust and C#. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, so every opinion on this blog was paid for in real builds, not in theory.