Should a house cleaning company link its Google listing to a city page?

Local search advice has a standard line about the website button on a Google Business Profile: do not point it at your homepage. Point it at a page built for the city, a location or service-area page, and tag the link with UTM parameters so you can count the visits. The reasoning is that Google reads the page the listing links to, and a page that names the city makes the listing more relevant to “house cleaning” plus that city.

We tested it. On September 30, 2026 we searched Google Maps for “house cleaning service” in 22 US cities, 11 large metros and 11 small cities in the Eastern and Central time zones, and followed the website link on every listing in the top 20. After removing businesses that are not house cleaners, 395 listings remained, and 335 of them linked to a website of their own.

The advice is mostly followed by franchises. 251 of those 335 links, 75 percent, go to the homepage. Of the 81 that go to a city or location page, 67 belong to franchise or multi-city brand locations. Among independent companies, the 14 that link to a city page sat at a median position of 9, and the rest at 10, a difference this sample cannot tell apart from zero.

Your benchmark

Open your own listing, tap Website, and read where it lands. Then do the same for the three listings above you. Here is what the 22 cities looked like:

Where the website link goes (395 listings)	Listings	Median position	Top-three slots (of 63)	Median reviews
Homepage	251	10	38	65
A city or location page	81	8	22	221
No website link at all	53	13	2	9
A social page, directory or booking platform	7	11 to 18	1	7 to 16
Another inner page, such as a contact page	3	14	0	21

If your listing links to your homepage, you are in the majority, and so are 38 of the 63 businesses holding a top-three slot. The city-page group does sit a little higher, but it carries more than three times the reviews, and most of it is brands.

The city-page links are a franchise habit

We tagged 71 listings as chain or brand locations: national franchises, plus brands that appeared in two of our cities or that run locations in other metros by their own websites. 67 of the 71 linked to a page for their territory. A franchise does not make that choice city by city. The brand’s website has a page for every location, and every listing points at its own.

Independent companies almost never do it. Of 264 independents linking to their own site, 14 (5 percent) link to a city page. Most of those pages are the obvious kind, a path such as “house-cleaning-services-nashville-tn”.

Independent companies with their own site (264)	City-page link	Homepage or other page
Listings	14	250
Median position	9	10
Median reviews	93	61

The correlation between a city-page link and position among independents was -0.045, not significant. Split them into thirds by review count, so volume is held roughly constant, and none of the three thirds showed a significant relationship either. With only 14 independents in the city-page group, this sample can rule out a large effect, not a small one.

Metros and small cities

Large metros. Nearly every metro listing links to a website: 216 of 220. A third of those links, 71, go to a city page, and 60 of the 71 are brand locations. Among metro independents the two groups sat at the same median position, 11, and the correlation was -0.01.

Small cities. Here the picture changes because the brands thin out and so do the websites. Only 119 of 175 small-city listings link to a site of their own, 68 percent. Ten small-city listings link to a city page and 8 of them are in the top three, at a median position of 2. That looks like a strong result until you read the names: 7 of the 10 are franchise locations, 5 of them from one national brand. The city-page group has a median of 88 reviews; small-city listings linking to a homepage have 16. Three small-city independents link to a city page, and two of them are in the top three: a story about three businesses, not a pattern.

What sits under the whole list is reviews

Review count went with position across the sample, a rho of -0.242 on 383 listings with reviews, and it is what the city-page listings have in common. Chain locations carried a median of 232 reviews against 45 for independents, and they took 18 of the 63 top-three slots while making up 18 percent of listings.

The 53 listings with no website link at all, 49 of them in small cities where they are 28 percent of the list, sat at a median position of 13 and held 2 top-three slots. They also had a median of 9 reviews, so this sample cannot say whether the missing site or the thin review count does the work.

UTM tags

61 of the 335 links (18 percent) carried UTM parameters, the tracking tags that label the listing’s visits in analytics. Among independents it was 22 of 264, at median positions of 11 tagged and 10 untagged, a correlation of 0.003. Tags are for measurement; nothing here suggests they move a listing.

What changed in verification

Three corrections changed the numbers above, and one changed the finding.

Two-city brands. The first pass tagged only national franchises as chains. Reading every domain that appeared in more than one market, and opening a few more sites, found brands running locations in two or more metros, and every one of them links each listing to a city page. Tagging them raised chain locations to 71 and halved the group of independents linking to a city page. On the first pass the pooled correlation between a city-page link and position was significant; after the correction it was -0.08, not significant.

Links Google had wrapped. In Abilene, every website came back as Google’s own redirect address, and the engine read 10 real websites as missing. Unwrapped, Abilene’s position 1 is a local company linking to its Abilene page. The engine now unwraps these; no earlier study had one.

Neighbor trades. 45 of 440 results were excluded, all in small cities, where Google fills a thin list with adjacent trades: janitorial and commercial cleaning firms, pressure washers, carpet cleaners, restoration companies, dry cleaners and a few others. Each is in the dataset with its reason.

What to do with this

• Do not rebuild your site to change the link. Among independents a city-page link did not go with a better position, and most businesses in the top three link to a homepage.
• If you serve several towns and already have a page for each, linking a listing to its town page is harmless. It is what the franchises do, and they rank because of their reviews, not their links.
• Make sure the link exists. In a small city, more than a quarter of listings have no website at all, and they sit near the bottom. It is the cheapest fix on this page.
• Tag the link if you want to count the visits. Do it for your analytics, not for position.
• Put the effort into reviews. That is what the listings at the top had in common.

Limits: what this can and cannot tell you

Measured: where the website link points on 395 house cleaning listings in the Google Maps top 20 for one query in 22 cities on one weekday afternoon, classified from the link’s path, with review counts, ratings and positions, and with brand locations tagged and every comparison repeated on independents and inside review thirds.

Not measured: what is on the linked page, how good it is, or whether the homepage itself names the city. A homepage that says “house cleaning in Nashville” in its first line may do everything a city page does. We classified pages from the address alone; a page named for a neighborhood or a territory number was read by hand.

Small groups: 14 independents link to a city page. That is enough to rule out a large effect and too few to rule out a modest one.

Range restriction: every listing here already appears in the top 20. The study can say whether the link sorts the list, not whether it helps a business get onto it.

Other explanations: franchise status, review volume and city pages travel together, and business size, which we did not measure, plausibly drives all three.

The number to write down

Three in four house cleaning listings that link to a website link to the homepage, including 38 of the 63 in the top three. The city-page links are a franchise habit, and among independents they sat at a median position of 9 against 10. Check that your listing has a link, tag it if you want the count, and spend the time on reviews.