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Why doesn't my website builder site show up in other towns?

Because of how many pages it has, not what it was built with. A site put together from a template ends up five or six pages long: home, about, services, gallery, contact. Google gives every town its own list and fills it from pages about that town. Five pages can only be about one town, so that's the only list you're on.

The page count is the whole problem

A template hands you a shape, and the shape is a small brochure. It's a fine brochure. Somebody who already has your name can read it and decide to call you, which is what it was designed for.

It was never designed to be forty pages about jobs in towns. So when you search your work in the town twenty minutes away and find nothing of yours, the tool didn't fail. You're looking for a page that doesn't exist.

What Google is looking for instead

One page whose whole subject is one job in one town, with your name and number on it, saying what that work involves and what's different about it there. Google picks a page to answer a search, and it picks the one that's about the search.

A services page that names nine jobs and no towns doesn't answer any of those searches cleanly. Neither does a home page with a row of town names in the footer, which is the fix most builders suggest and the one that does the least.

Why people don't just add the pages

Because it's forty or a hundred pages of real writing, and each one has to be different enough from the others to be worth keeping. Two hours a page is a fair estimate, and that's the wall every do-it-yourself site hits.

The shortcut, copying one page and swapping the town name, is the version Google reads, compares to its twenty near-identical brothers, and skips. You end up with a hundred pages and the same one town. That is the outcome people describe as the pages not working, and it is the pages being the same page.

What to check on the site you have

Before blaming the tool, check three things: that your site loads quickly on a phone, that your name, number and service area match your Google listing exactly, and that Search Console shows Google has your pages.

If those are fine and you still only show up at home, it's the page count, and no setting inside any builder fixes that. It's writing, and it's the same writing whatever the site was built with, which is why switching tools on its own changes nothing.

One customer's before and after

A concrete coating company

River Falls, Wisconsin. Same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site.

more often on Google
3,864 to 22,885
5.9x
more visits from Google
106 to 284
2.7x
Towns they show up in
Wisconsin and Minnesota
27

What this means for you

Count the pages on your site, then count the jobs you do multiplied by the towns you'd drive to. The gap between those two numbers is the reason the phone only rings from one town. Decide whether that writing is a job for you or for somebody else, and be honest about it.

Bindingstone writes and runs the whole set, a page for every job in every town you drive to, on a site you own, so the page count stops being the thing holding the phone still.

Ready to show up in every town you work in?

Your site can be live in about ten days. After that, the towns you drive to can find you.