How much work has to exist in a city before that city deserves its own page — and what to do when it does not. The thresholds below are the ones the platform computes and warns on, not a set written for a marketing page.
The failure mode this standard exists to prevent is specific: a client asks for a page for every city on their service-area map, the agency builds forty, and thirty of them have almost nothing behind them. Those thirty do not rank, and they drag on the ten that would have.
The rule of thumb is one line: publish a city page when the work in that city could fill it. Everything below is that idea with numbers attached.
Fewer than 3 check-ins in the city, or no reviews from it at all.
Do not publish a page for this city yet. There is not enough of a record of work to say anything a homeowner could not get from your home page.
At least 3 check-ins and at least one review, but short of 8 check-ins or 3 reviews.
Hold the page. This is the band that looks like a doorway page to Google, because the jobs behind it are too few to make it read as genuinely about the city.
At least 8 check-ins and at least 3 reviews from the city.
Publish. There is enough distinct work — different addresses, different photos, different customers — that the page is about the city rather than about the city's name.
At least 20 check-ins and 8 reviews, with a check-in inside the last 90 days.
Publish, and treat the city as a priority for rank tracking. Depth and recency are both present.
The line to remember is 8 check-ins and 3 reviews. Below it, hold the page. The platform reports where every city stands, and warns in the WordPress admin when a page is published for a city that has not cleared the bar.
The counts are a floor, not a finished page. Four things the thresholds cannot see.
Two or three sentences that could only have been written about this place — the neighbourhoods you actually work in, the housing stock, what goes wrong there that does not go wrong elsewhere. If the paragraph would read identically with another city's name in it, it is the thing the doorway-page policy is about.
Hard water in one suburb, 1970s ductwork in another, a permit office with its own rules. This is the knowledge the crew already has and nobody has written down, and it is the least copyable content on the page.
A city that cleared the bar two years ago and has had nothing since is a stale page. The Strong band asks for activity inside 90 days for that reason. Recency is a ranking input and a credibility one.
Three adjacent suburbs with four check-ins each will do better as one page about the area than as three thin pages. Fewer, fuller pages beat more, emptier ones every time.
The standard exists so the pages you do publish are worth publishing. That is the whole trade.
