How many pages should a home-service website have?
Short answer
As many as it has distinct things a customer searches for, and no more. That usually means one page per service a customer would look up by name, one per city you can say something specific about, plus a homepage, about page and contact page. Google doesn't reward a page count.
A home-service website should have as many pages as it has distinct things a customer searches for, and no more. For most established companies that works out to one page for each service a customer would look up by name, one for each area you can say something specific about, and the few pages every business needs. The count falls out of that list, so there’s no number to aim for.
Why there’s no target number
Google doesn’t rank a site higher for having more pages. It ranks individual pages against individual searches. A 30-page site where every page answers one search well can outperform a 300-page site where most pages repeat each other. Page count gets quoted in proposals because it’s easy to count and easy to invoice, though it tells you nothing about whether the phone rings.
How to work out the pages you need
Start from what customers search, and ignore how many pages a competitor has published. Each row below is a reason for a page to exist.
| Page type | It earns its place when |
|---|---|
| Service page | A customer would search for that job by name, and you want that job. Water heater replacement and drain cleaning are separate searches, so they are separate pages. |
| Service area page | You really work in that city and can say something about working there that isn’t true of the next city over. |
| Answer page | Customers keep asking the question, and no existing page answers it. |
| Homepage, about, contact | Always. They tell a visitor who you are, where you work and how to reach you. |
A hypothetical plumbing company in La Mesa that offers eight services and works in six East County cities would land at around twenty pages by this method. A larger company with more trades would land higher. Both numbers are fine. How the pages are grouped and linked, the site architecture, matters as much as how many there are. Whether every city you serve needs a separate web page is a separate question.
When more pages make things worse
Three pages that all target AC repair in slightly different words compete with each other, a problem called keyword cannibalization. Fifty city pages with only the city name swapped give Google nothing to tell them apart, and can read as pages built for search engines and not for people. There’s a plain upkeep cost too. Every page you publish is one more to keep accurate when your services or hours change, and a site full of stale pages makes a poor first impression.
When too few pages hold you back
The common case is a single Services page that lists everything the company does as a row of bullet points. That page can’t rank well for a dozen different jobs, because it says almost nothing about any of them. If you install tankless water heaters and want more of those jobs, a customer searching for one needs to land on a page that explains what is involved and which homes it suits, then says how to book.
How I decide whether to add a page
Google Search Console shows which searches each existing page appears for, so I look there before adding anything. If a service gets searched and the only page of yours that shows is the homepage, far down the results, that is a gap worth a new page. If an existing page already appears for the search, I improve that page and don’t build a rival to it. Then I measure again about two weeks after the change, and the page stays only if it earned its place.