The verdict
A clinic service page named two towns that appeared nowhere in the site-wide service area or on the Business Profile. One site telling two stories about where it works. Nobody wrote it deliberately; a page got written in a good week and the rest of the site never caught up. It is one of the easiest contradictions to find and one of the most common.
A service page on a clinic site named two neighbouring towns. The footer, the contact page and the Business Profile all named a different set, and neither of those two towns was in it.
Nobody decided that. Somebody wrote a good page one afternoon, named the places patients actually travel from, and no other part of the site was ever told.
How it happens
Service pages get written by whoever knows the service. Service areas get set once, at setup, by whoever built the site. Those are different people, working years apart, and nothing connects the two.
The page is usually the more accurate of the two. It was written by somebody with patients in front of them. The service area was a form field.
Why it is worth fixing rather than shrugging at
Because the two together are a statement about where the business operates, and a business that gives two answers has not answered.
Google’s guidance on service areas is that setting your service area helps people find your Business Profile and shows customers where you can provide your products and services. That is the profile’s answer. The site is giving a different one on a page that ranks.
And the guidelines for representing a business ask you to represent the business as it is in the real world, using information the business uses consistently. Consistently is the operative word, and it is the test this fails.
How to find it in ten minutes
The sweep
- Write down the service area as the profile states it. Every town, in order.
- Search the site for place names. A site search for each town, plus a crawl for capitalised words next to “serving”, “near”, “areas” and “surrounding”.
- List every town the site names anywhere. Service pages, location pages, the blog, the footer, image alt text.
- Compare the two lists both ways. Towns on the site and not the profile, and towns on the profile and not the site.
- Ask the practice which list is true. Do not assume the profile wins. It usually should not.
The two failure modes it exposes
A town on the site that the practice does not serve, usually left over from an old arrangement or a practitioner who has left. That one is a correction.
A town the practice genuinely serves that the profile has never mentioned. That one is an omission, and it is the more common of the two by some distance.
My note: I would not add a town to a service area just because one page mentions it. The page might be the thing that is wrong. The point of the sweep is to force somebody at the practice to state the real answer once, not to reconcile automatically to whichever list is longer.
What to do once you have the true list
Fix the profile and the footer to match it exactly, then go back through the pages that disagreed. A service page naming towns that are now in the service area is fine and useful. A service page naming towns that are not is a page to edit.
If a town matters enough to be named repeatedly, it probably wants a page rather than a mention scattered across three service pages, and that page belongs in the header rather than the footer, which is covered in location pages belong in the header menu.
This is the same comparison as the services sweep, run on places instead of treatments. The method is in the services list on your profile should come from your sitemap.
The short version
- A service page named two towns the profile never mentions. One site, two stories.
- Nobody did it deliberately. Different people, years apart, nothing connecting them.
- The page is usually more accurate than the form field.
- Sweep both lists and compare in both directions.
- Omissions outnumber errors. Towns served but never listed.
- Ask the practice which list is true. Do not reconcile to the longer one.
- A town named repeatedly wants a page, not three passing mentions.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where the profile and the site get read against each other.
