Showing your service area on the website

Travel never appears in a quotation line a customer enjoys reading. It is nevertheless the item that most reliably costs money in the trades: driving time is paid time, the vehicle is not on site during it, and the fitter starts later and finishes earlier. The same job at fifteen and at seventy kilometres has the same material input and the same working time at the property — and a contribution margin that differs considerably. A business that does not put its area in writing decides this question afresh every time, usually on the phone, usually between two appointments and without a calculator.

The second factor is the customer. 87 percent (Bitkom 2025) of the businesses surveyed observe that customers have become noticeably more price-sensitive; the survey covers 504 trade businesses in Germany. For the presentation of a service area the consequence is plain: a surcharge for a long journey cannot be added at the end of a quotation without provoking a discussion. It belongs on the website before anyone picks up the phone. Then it is a rule of the game rather than a surprise — and the price question is settled where it costs nobody working time.

The third factor is the competition within the radius. In Germany 1,038,126 (ZDH 2025) businesses are entered in the trade registers and in the register of trade-like occupations. Within a radius of fifty kilometres there are correspondingly many businesses in the same trade, and distance alone rarely decides. The job usually goes to the business that is visible in the neighbouring town — not to the one that would in theory drive there too. Visibility within the area is therefore not a marketing question but a question of workload in a given direction.

Describing a service area with a single figure is tempting and in practice rarely right. „Radius of 40 kilometres“ sounds tidy but is either too narrow or too wide, depending on what is at stake. For a two-hour maintenance job that distance does not pay; for a job that ties up two weeks, twice that distance pays as well. An area that knows only one boundary therefore forces you either to lose money or to turn away enquiries that would have added up.

Two or three zones with different promises carry more weight. The core zone is the area in which you work at short notice and without a surcharge. The extended area covers places you drive to regularly when a job reaches a certain size. Beyond that the edge deliberately stays soft: not a refusal, but a condition. That way you do not lose the worthwhile exception who lives past the boundary but brings a building project for which the journey clearly pays.

The table has a side effect that is often underestimated: it doubles as an instruction for the office. Whoever answers the phone no longer has to weigh things up but reads off which zone applies and which condition goes with it. That makes refusals matter-of-fact and commitments binding — and it ensures that two members of staff answer the same enquiry the same way.

A location page earns its name when someone who knows the place nods while reading. That does not take literature but four details that apply only to this place: the journey there and how long it takes, work actually carried out there, a structural or local particularity and a contact person with hours. All four already exist in the business. They only need writing down once, and by someone who has worked there rather than someone filling in a template.

The local particularity is the part that makes a page unmistakable. The old town has different requirements from a new development; streets built in the fifties carry different pipework from a house from 2015; a district on a slope brings access questions a crew knows and a text template does not. No outsider can write such sentences — and that is precisely why they work. How much text such a page needs and how it fits into the structure is covered in the article on SEO for tradespeople.

A common objection is that nobody could take the trouble to write a separate text for every place. That is true — and it is the actual point. The trouble is the selection. Whoever takes it ends up with fewer pages, but each of them has a reason to exist. Whoever does not ends up with many pages and no reason.

Between a boundary and a focus lies little in language and a great deal in commercial terms. „We only work within a radius of 30 kilometres“ is a door swinging shut. „Our focus is a radius of 30 kilometres; beyond that we work by arrangement“ is the same statement with a handle on it. The second version costs nothing but keeps open the job two villages away that runs for three weeks.

It matters just as much that the wording suits the trade. An emergency service needs a tighter, firmly worded radius, because nobody wants to negotiate exceptions at night. A joinery with long lead times can draw its area widely, because the journey barely registers against production time. A business offering both on the same site separates them visibly — otherwise the wide radius applies at two in the morning as well.

Sentences like these are written once and used everywhere: in the form, in the footer, in the office reply template and in the business profile. That consistency is not an end in itself. Anyone who reads one radius in a directory and another on the website takes one of the two to be wrong — and calls elsewhere in case of doubt.

A defined area does not automatically produce a good page structure. It needs an order of work, otherwise either too many location pages appear or a single page has to say everything at once. The following five steps can be worked through in an afternoon if the job list of the past two years is on the table.

This order has an uncomfortable side effect that is worth having: it forces an honest answer to the question of where the business actually works. Many businesses discover in the process that their perceived area and their real area lie twenty kilometres apart — usually in favour of what is close by.

The effort depends on the number of location pages, not on the depiction of the area itself. Zones, graphic and travel rule are part of a new website, which we implement at a fixed price from 1,490 euros net; a relaunch of an existing site starts at 2,900 euros net. Anyone wanting ongoing work on local visibility — adding location pages, maintaining the profile and directories, aligning details — should reckon with local visibility from 290 euros per month, cancellable monthly, no minimum term.

On top of that comes running the site: website support from 49 euros per month and hosting in Germany from 15 euros per month, both cancellable monthly, no minimum term. Which zones and location pages make sense for your business can be settled in a short conversation — the job list of the last two years is enough as a basis, and you can reach us through the contact page.