How big is a page-one fence company website? A median of 88 pages in metros and 20 in small cities

A fence company owner who wants to rank on Google usually hears the same advice: build a bigger website, with a page for every fence type, a page for every suburb and a weekly blog, because the companies on page one have hundreds of pages. The page counts in that advice tend to come from big metros, and they are handed to owners in every size of town.

We measured it. On October 1, 2026 we captured the top ten organic Google results for “fence company” plus a city in 22 US cities, 11 large metros and 11 small cities, opened every result, and measured the website of every fence company that appeared. Three searches failed, leaving 19 cities and 158 page-one results.

The short answer: the page-one fence company site is modest, with a median of 88 pages, and 20 in small cities. Size did not sort the list. And a fence company was more likely to hold a page-one slot through its own Yelp, MapQuest or Facebook page than through its website.

The number to write down first

Open your sitemap (usually your domain followed by /sitemap.xml) and count the page addresses in it. Then compare against the fence companies that actually made page one in markets like yours:

	Large metros	Small cities
Fence company sites measured	21	9
Median pages	88	20
Middle half of sites	68 to 363	14 to 90
Median pages under a blog path	1	0

The difference between the two groups is significant on a rank test, which is the point: a metro benchmark is the wrong yardstick in a small town. Across all 30 sites, 60 percent carried fewer than 100 pages, 30 percent fewer than 50, and 20 percent fewer than 25. One small-city company held position 1 with a 14-page site. The largest site, at 4,581 pages, belongs to a franchise brand whose sitemap covers locations across the country.

For comparison, the top ten HVAC sites we measured last month carried a median of 378 pages, and page-one pest control sites carried 266 in metros and 39 in small cities. Fence companies on page one are smaller than both.

Site size did not sort page one

The belief also says bigger moves you up. That did not show up either. The rank correlation between page count and position was 0.015 across 30 sites, which is no relationship at all. By position band:

Position	Sites	Median pages
1 to 3	12	89
4 to 6	11	74
7 to 10	7	68

Blogs told the same story. The median site had 1 page under a blog path, 43 percent had none, and among the 16 sites with dated blog entries the median number of posts in the last twelve months was 1. Neither blog volume nor recency related to position.

Thirty sites can only reveal a strong relationship, so this is not proof that size does nothing. It is evidence that the fence companies on page one did not get there by out-building each other.

What the sites do say is concrete. Of the 30, 26 name the materials they install (vinyl, chain link, cedar, ornamental iron and so on) and 18 offer a free estimate. The median site carries 3 of the 6 features we checked. Only 7 of 30 had a page dedicated to the city they ranked in: 6 of 21 in metros and 1 of 9 in small cities.

Who actually holds page one

The site size question describes a small group, because fence company websites held only 31 of 158 page-one slots, 20 percent. Here is what held the rest:

What the result was	Large metros	Small cities
A fence company’s own website	21 (28 percent)	10 (12 percent)
One company’s own profile or post on a directory or social platform	29 (38 percent)	37 (45 percent)
Directory list page, review roundup or forum thread	18 (24 percent)	26 (32 percent)
Lead generation, unverifiable, retailer, government or other	8	9
Total slots	76	82

The second row deserves an owner’s attention. Directory results are usually treated as one block of competition, but 66 were not lists. They were one named company’s Yelp page, MapQuest listing, Facebook page or post, Nextdoor page, Instagram profile, Better Business Bureau profile or similar: a slot that company holds on page one without its website. MapQuest, Yelp and Facebook supplied most of them. Those profile slots outnumbered fence company website slots in 5 of 9 metros and 8 of 10 small cities.

In small cities the website route was thin. Half of them (5 of 10) had no fence company website on page one at all, and 8 of 10 had two or fewer. Every metro had at least one, and the median metro had 2. Where a fence company site did appear, the first one sat at a median position of 2.

So the belief being tested, that page one is a contest of big fence company websites, describes one slot in five. In small cities it describes about one in eight.

What an owner can do with this

Two moves, in order.

First, treat your listings as page-one assets, because in most of these cities they are. Search “fence company” and your city and note which company profiles appear. If your own MapQuest, Yelp, Facebook or Better Business Bureau page is missing, unclaimed or out of date, fix it: in small cities that is the most common way a company reached page one.

Second, measure your site against the companies on page one in a market your size, not against a metro guide. In a small city that means a few dozen pages that name what you install, where you work and how to get an estimate. Adding pages for their own sake is not what separated the sites in this sample.

What changed in verification

The first pass of this study reported a different finding.

• Three cities never returned fence results. Atlanta and Cheyenne returned the same general pages about the word “company” at the same positions (an encyclopedia entry, a dictionary, a carmaker, music videos), and Nashville returned pages about the word “fence,” including a finance firm and a photo festival with that name. Google had dropped part of the query, so those 26 slots leave the analysis with the reason recorded in the dataset rather than counting as “not a fence company.”
• The screen kept listing sites with huge sitemaps. The first pass kept 56 subjects, reported a median of 288 pages, and found a significant correlation in which bigger sites sat lower on the page. Opening every kept site showed why: a local listing site, a review platform, a news site’s business directory and a referral service had passed the screen, with sitemaps from several thousand to over a million addresses, and they ranked low. With them and the other corrections removed, the median fell to 88 and the correlation vanished.
• Some fence companies were not fence companies. Three sites describe themselves as referral or lead services, three showed no local phone number or street address, and three answered with a bot challenge or not at all. Each is excluded under its own reason; the last group means fence company counts may be understated by up to three slots.

Limits: what this can and cannot tell you

• Organic results only. Google usually shows a map pack above the organic results for a local search. We did not measure it here.
• One capture. Results were read once, on one day, from one location setting per city. Rankings vary by device, personalization and time.
• A small group for site size. 30 sites, 9 of them in small cities. The figures are descriptive, and the small-city median rests on 9 sites.
• Classification is a judgment. Profile versus list was decided from the address of each directory result, and lead generation sites from their own description. Every row and its reason is in the dataset.
• Range restriction. Every site measured already ranks. This cannot say what separates fence companies on page one from those that are not, only what the ones that made it look like.
• Three of 22 cities lost to searches where Google dropped part of the query, so the sample is 19 cities, 9 of them metros.

The number to write down

A median of 88 pages for a page-one fence company site in a metro and 20 in a small city, no sign that bigger ranks higher, and more slots held by company profiles than by company websites. Count your sitemap, then check which of your listings already sit on page one.