Home page versus service area pages

[Huckage]

Forgive my ignorance here, but I am having a difficult time making a call on this. Here's my question:

I am working with a local business, an air conditioning contractor. He has a headquarters in a certain city and his home page ranks for that specific city, though not too terribly well at the moment. I am creating service area pages for neighboring cities of course, though they are more difficult to rank due to not actually being headquartered in those cities.

Anyhow, my question is, should I create a service area page for the city they are located in or simply use the home page for that specific city? Right now I have gone ahead and created a service area page for the main city and it's slowly started to appear in the SERPs. I am conflicting, however, with the home page now in the rankings. Should I wait this out or should I go back to using the home page as the service area page for that particular headquartered location?

Hopefully that all makes sense, I've been hunting for a clear cut answer for a long while now and finally ended up here. I am hoping someone has some insight on this, I greatly appreciate any information you may have regarding this.

Thank you,
Huckage

 

[Huckage]

Just to add a little to this, I am targeting slightly different keywords/phrases with the two pages and mostly eliminated the city from the home page to reduce conflicts... just curious if anyone has any insight. Thanks.

 

[Huckage]

So is this something no one has any insight on or is it simply a dumb question?

 

[djbaxter]

Not a dumb question but there are a few other threads already addressing similar issues:

Multiple Locations: Use Location Page or Home Page? | Help & Support for Google Local

Hi, it's been a while since I've worked with a multiple location business. What's best . . . use the home page URL for citations and listings OR the website page specific to that location, for example: domain.com/locations/city/?

www.localsearchforum.com

Multi Location: Home Page Competing with Location Page | Local Search

Hello, I'm looking at a guy's website where he has three location pages set up and is also trying to optimise the Home page for one of the location pages. As a result both the location page and the home page have the same Meta titles and keywords although the content is different. I'm thinking...

www.localsearchforum.com

Two Locations - Two location pages? | Local Search

Hi, I hope you can help? If a client has a main office and then opens another location in another city. Should we create two location pages or just one? Should the home page be retained as the main office? Or is it better to add a location page for the main office too now? If we created two...

www.localsearchforum.com

Would You Create Location Pages, or Use Home page to create citations? | Local Search

I have a client and they are expanding, they are in process of getting new locations up to 3. The main location is in a smaller city, and i want to clean up the citations and create new ones, now my main concern is should i create and use a location page ? or i can just use Home page for all...

www.localsearchforum.com

 

[Huckage]

I obviously need to work on my forum searching skills, thank you djbaxter for the guidance. I suppose in a sense then it was a dumb question, as it had already been answered.

Thank you again.

 

[djbaxter]

No it's still not a dumb question. Searching forums is only half skill and part knack/experience. And if it were a dumb question, other people wouldn't have asked it previously (indeed questions about this go back to 2017 or earlier).

As a hint, sometimes it's quicker to do a Google search and append site:.localsearchforum.com to the end of your search query. This forum is well indexed in Google and Google search doesn't have some of the limitations of the forum search.