Location pages for a three-county service area: where do you draw the line?

We're a general and electrical contractor in Washington State, working across Skagit, Snohomish and Island counties, and we're building a new website. The open question is location pages.
The area mixes a few larger cities with a lot of small towns, plus two islands (Whidbey and Camano). People search by town name, so the easy answer is a page for every town. I'd rather not publish 30 pages that only differ by the town name.
The options I'm weighing:

• County pages only, with the towns we serve listed on each
• Pages for the larger towns, and county pages for everything else
• A page per town, but only once we have real work there to show: project photos, a review, notes on what's different about working in that town

For those who've done this for service-area businesses: what decided which towns got their own page, and what content kept those pages from being thin? Did town pages ever bring in calls from places you didn't want to serve?

 

For a general contractor, you sure know a lot about SEO! What's your background? Most business owners don't know a thing about any of that and end up hiring SEO gurus for it. Did you start the business first and then learn SEO or vice versa?

 

Contractor first. I tend to end up doing our own tech (we run our own phone system, for one), and lately I've been reading a lot here and using AI tools to research and draft, so I know just enough to ask better questions. On the town pages, I'd still rather hear from people who've actually built them.

 

Your third option is the one I would go with, and it is basically how I have seen this work best for contractors. A page for every town sounds tidy on paper, but in practice most of those pages end up saying the same thing with the town name swapped, and they rarely earn a call. I would start with county pages as the main hub, then give a town its own page only when you can put something real on it, like a job you actually did there, a photo from that site, a review from someone in that town, or a note about getting there, like ferry access for the islands. The larger towns will usually qualify on their own, the small ones can sit on the county page until you have that proof. That way every page you publish has a reason to exist, and you can add more over time as the work comes in.

 

County hubs first, then a town page only when there's a real job, photo or review to put on it. That's the plan we'll follow.
The access note is a good tip for Island County in particular. Whidbey is reached by ferry from Mukilteo or over the Deception Pass bridge, while Camano is a bridge from Stanwood, so the two islands need different notes even though they sit in the same county.

 

That makes sense when nothing changes from area to area. For a contractor the county does change one thing customers ask about: permits. Unincorporated areas go through the county's permit office and the cities run their own, so who pulls the permit, what it needs and how long it takes can differ between Skagit, Snohomish and Island.
That's the kind of difference we'd put on a county page. Where we have nothing different to say, we'll do what you did and just list the areas.

 

I'd make the service boundary clear on each page: which towns you cover, which jobs justify the travel, and whether ferry scheduling affects availability. Add a town or postcode field to the quote form and track qualified enquiries by area, so you can spot a page attracting work you don't actually want. For the permit sections, explain who handles the application and date the information rather than promising a fixed approval time, since that can change by jurisdiction and job.

 

fwiw there isn't really a duplicate content penalty for that kind of thing, google just picks one of the near identical pages and ignores the rest. so a list across the site is fine, you're not losing much either way

 

One way to decide when a town gets its own page, rather than guessing up front: launch with the county pages and watch the queries in Search Console for each one. When a town name keeps showing up in the queries that land on a county page, and you also have a finished job there to show, that's your signal to give the town its own page. You know there is search demand and you have something real to put on it.

When you do split one off, link to it from the county page and from the project write-up for that job, and take the town out of the county page's headings so the two aren't competing for the same search. Otherwise Google can keep showing the county page for that town and the new page sits there with no impressions for months.

 

That's a cleaner rule than any of the options I listed: county pages at launch, and a town gets its own page only when Search Console keeps showing that town name landing on the county page and we have a finished job there to write up. It fits with NinjaSitePartner's idea of a town field on the quote form, so we'd have our own count of where requests come from, not only impressions.
AmberEcho730, good to know there's no real penalty. Thirty pages where Google shows one and ignores the rest was the outcome I wanted to avoid anyway.
One follow-up on naming: Island County is really two islands, Whidbey and Camano, and my guess is more people search the island names than the county. Would you title that page by the islands (one page for both, or one each) and keep the county name in the body, or keep the naming the same across every county page?

 

I'd name it the way people search. Whidbey and Camano only connect through the mainland, Camano by the bridge at Stanwood and Whidbey by Deception Pass or the ferries, so they behave like two separate service areas and someone searching one rarely means the other. If you have work on both, one page each titled by the island, with Island County in the intro and body, is what I'd do. If one island has much less work, start with a single Whidbey and Camano page and split it later with the same Search Console rule. The other county pages can keep county naming. Matching how people search matters more than keeping every title the same.

 

That matches how the driving works too. Camano's only way in is the bridge from the Stanwood side, and Whidbey splits again: the north end comes in over Deception Pass and the south end is a ferry ride from Mukilteo.
So we'll start with a page for each island, titled by the island with Island County in the intro, and let Search Console tell us later whether Whidbey needs a north and south split. The mainland pages keep county naming.