GEO courseModule 5 of 10: Local and ReviewsLesson 5.4
The Areas You Cover: Service Areas, Area Guides and “Near Me”
How clearly you show which places you really serve, and whether your area pages contain the kind of first-hand local knowledge an AI can actually use, rather than "a vibrant, sought-after location with excellent transport links".
Why it matters
If your site says "the whole county", your profile lists two villages and your footer lists three others, AI can't tell where you work. Template area pages give it nothing to quote.
The evidence
Evidence: Practitioner view
Google's guidance on first-hand content and scaled pages (official), one vendor study on location (US), and practitioner advice for area pages. No study of area guides in AI answers.
Do this first
List every place name on your website, Business Profile and fact sheet, and make them match.
01What it is
Ask a stranger with a map app for the best chip shop and you get a name. Ask someone who’s lived on the street for ten years and they tell you which one has the shortest queue and which one shuts on Mondays.
Think of it like
A local's hand-drawn map with notes in the margins. A printed map shows the roads. The notes show where to actually park.
02Why it matters
To the people searching
People ask "what's it like to live in [area]?", "which part of [town] suits families?" and "letting agents covering [postcode]". Sellers and landlords want an agent who knows their road, not just their county.
buyers
Choose areas and streets based on commute, schools and lifestyle.
tenants
Ask where to rent on their budget, near a station or their work.
sellers
Judge whether you really know their road and its buyers.
landlords
Want typical rents for their kind of property, in their area.
To Google, Bing and AI
Evidence: Practitioner viewLocation changes answers. In BrightLocal's study, moving across the same town changed which businesses were named (only about 36% to 47% overlap between points), and Claude says it may use your approximate location from your internet connection. Google asks for first-hand, non-commodity content, and says creating a page for every variation of a search, at scale, breaks its spam policy, so templated town pages with the name swapped are a risk, not a tactic.
An agent example
An independent agency replaces eight templated "Homes in [place]" pages with three detailed guides for the places it really covers. Each names streets, gives a station walking time it actually timed, a dated rent range, the three questions buyers ask most, and a "what our negotiators say" section signed by a named member of staff. It lists the same six places on its Business Profile, fact sheet and footer.
03Your turn
Check yours, then fix it
- 1List every place name on your website, Business Profile, fact sheet and portal profiles.
- 2Are they the same list? Are they places you genuinely cover?
- 1Take an area page and replace the place name with another town.
- 2If it still reads true, it's generic.
- 3Count named roads, stations, parks and landmarks. Fewer than five suggests it's thin (our rule of thumb).
- 1Ask "best estate agent in [town]", "estate agent near [station or postcode]" and "estate agent near me".
- 2Repeat on a phone on mobile data, from another part of your patch.
- 3Log where you were each time.
Read this area guide from an estate agency. List every sentence that could have been written by someone who has never visited. Then list the kinds of local detail a resident or negotiator could add.
- 1Write one list of the towns, neighbourhoods and postcode districts you really serve.
- 2Use it on your fact sheet, Business Profile service areas, branch pages and footer.
- 3Never use a virtual office or fake address to look closer to somewhere.
- 1Name streets, and say which suit which buyers or tenants.
- 2Give walking times you actually tested, and when.
- 3Give typical prices and rents by property type, with the date and where they came from.
- 4Add what only someone who works there knows: parking problems, noisy streets, new developments.
- 5Sign it with the name of the team member who wrote or checked it, and date it.
- 1For schools, flood risk and crime, link to the official source and date it. Don't summarise from memory.
- 2Avoid wording that stereotypes who lives in an area.
- 1Merge templated town pages into fewer real guides, and redirect the old addresses.
- 2Ask your web provider to stop any auto-generated town pages.
Here are my notes from a 20-minute chat with our negotiators about [area]. Turn them into an area guide with headings for: what it's like, which streets suit whom, getting around, typical prices and rents (I'll add figures), and the questions buyers ask most. Use only what's in my notes. Mark any gaps as [ADD].
Then: Refresh area guides twice a year, noting what changed, and test your "near me" prompts from the same three places each quarter.
04Keep it up
Review area guides twice a year. Re-test local prompts from three places each quarter.
That's lesson 5.4
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