Which town gets links first when you serve a dozen of them
Walk down the questions in order. The first one you answer yes to tells you where the next basket goes.
Rule of thumb
Fund the town you could actually serve tomorrow
A link brings attention. If a branch has no spare crew, the attention turns into missed calls. Capacity decides before rankings do.
- Capacity first
- Page quality second
- Visibility third
- Revenue per job breaks the ties
The tree, written as a table
| If this is true | Then do this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A branch is full and cannot take new work | Skip it for now | More calls would only lengthen the waiting list |
| The town page is thin or a copy of another | Rewrite it before any link | A link cannot repair a page that has nothing to say |
| The page gets impressions but sits on page two | Fund it first, 2 or 3 placements | It already has some visibility to build on |
| The page gets no impressions after 8 weeks | Check indexing, then content, then competition | The cause may not be missing links |
| Two towns tie on all of the above | Choose the higher revenue per job | The same attention is worth more there |
| Everything looks equal | Start with the smaller town | Weaker competition tends to show results sooner |
How to fill in the numbers
Open Search Console and export the last 90 days of queries and pages. Filter by the town folder or by the place name in the URL, which gives you clicks, impressions and average position for each page. Easy enough.
Then add two columns that Search Console cannot see. One is spare capacity, meaning how many extra jobs the branch can take next month, and the other is revenue per job, which tells you how much attention is worth in that town. Both come from your own office. No tool has them.
Be wary of ranking towns by population alone. A town of 80,000 with five rivals may cost more to crack than a town of 12,000 with none, and the smaller one might pay just as well. Check rivals before size.
Cross-check rivals with Ahrefs or Semrush if you have a seat, counting the domains that link to the top three results for the town query. A gap of 5 or 6 referring domains is a smaller job than a gap of 60. Know the gap.
Write the final order on one page and date it, say 28 October 2026, so that when the next quarter arrives you can see what you decided and what you got wrong. Memory is a poor record. Paper is better.
A worked example, clearly invented
A fictional tutoring group has five centres. Town A shows 900 impressions and sits on page two. Town B shows 40 impressions and its centre is full, Town C has a thin page, and Towns D and E are tied on everything else that you can measure. Invented, of course.
Following the table: skip Town B because it is full, rewrite Town C before spending, fund Town A first, and choose between D and E by revenue per job. The numbers are made up. The order of reasoning is what we want you to copy.
If you want a pacing guide for what follows, see the timeline for multiple locations, which spaces the baskets out over twelve weeks so that each change can be read on its own. It helps.
Scoring sheet, one line per town
- Impressions on the town page in the last 90 days
- Average position, from Search Console
- Spare crew capacity next month, as a number
- Revenue per completed job, from your own books
- Number of real rivals on the first results page
- Maximum spend for the town, in dollars
Edge cases we hear about
What if every branch is busy?
Then links are not your bottleneck. Spend on hiring or scheduling first, and keep a small basket ready for the first branch that frees up. Waiting costs nothing and avoids paying for attention you cannot serve.
Should the head office page get links too?
Often yes, since it can lift the whole site. But a head office page rarely wins a town query. Keep it on a separate small budget so it does not eat the money meant for the ranked towns.
Can one placement help two towns?
Only if the article honestly covers both and the target page does too. Normally one link points to one page. Splitting one placement across two destinations dilutes both and reads oddly to a reader.
How often should I re-rank?
Once a quarter is plenty. Each ranking needs at least eight weeks of fresh data, and reshuffling weekly just produces noise. Link to the week-by-week timeline for pacing.