Do you need a page for the city you want to rank in? We measured 97 pest control companies

Every local operator who has ever taken a call about their search rankings has been sold the same page. You need a page for the city you want to rank in, and then a page for every suburb you serve, because Google cannot rank you for a place you never name. The package is priced by the page, so the advice scales neatly for whoever is selling it.

We wanted to know whether the companies already sitting on page one look like that. On September 23, 2026 we captured Google’s top ten organic results for “pest control” in 22 US cities, 11 large metros and 11 small cities, then read each company’s published sitemap and homepage directly. That produced 193 results. After screening out directories, publishers, retailers and results that had nothing to do with the trade, 97 distinct pest control companies remained, and 71 of them served a sitemap we could read.

Here is the number to measure yourself against, and then the part where the answer depends on what you agree to count.

Sixty-two percent keep a page for the city they rank in

Of the 71 companies whose sitemap we could read, 44 keep at least one landing page built around the city they ranked in. That is 62 percent. Turned around, more than a third of the companies on page one rank in a city that appears nowhere in their URLs as a page of its own.

By position, the share climbs:

• Positions 1 to 3: 77 percent, 17 of 22
• Positions 4 to 6: 62 percent, 18 of 29
• Positions 7 to 10: 45 percent, 9 of 20

That gradient is real but weak, and it sits right at the edge of what this sample can settle. The rank correlation on having the page is 0.244 across 71 companies, which clears our significance bar by a hair. The correlation on how many such pages a company keeps is 0.203 and does not clear it. Among independent companies alone, 50 of them, the correlation is 0.265 and the sample cannot tell us whether that is a real effect or noise. Nobody should read these numbers as “add the page, move up three spots.”

The count matters more than the share for anyone planning work. The median page-one company keeps one city landing page. Three quarters of them keep three or fewer. You reach eight only in the top tenth of the sample. The advice to build a page for every suburb describes the busiest decile of page one, not its middle.

The answer moves with the rule, so here are all three

A city page is easy to picture and hard to define. We counted three ways on the same 71 sitemaps.

The loosest rule, any URL anywhere on the site whose path names the city, gives 73 percent. A middle rule, a URL naming the city that is not a blog post, gives 68 percent. The rule we lead with, a URL where one path segment is built out of the city plus service and place words, gives 62 percent. So “/pest-control-missoula” and “/locations/texas/dallas/” count, and “/summer-pests-in-atlanta/” does not, because a headline word is sitting in the slug.

We arrived there by getting it wrong twice. The first pass counted any URL with the city in it, which swept in posts like a piece about a food truck with the city in the headline. The correction overshot: it required the city to stand nearly alone in the path, which threw out “/pest-control-missoula”, a page any owner would call a city page. Reading the matched and missed URLs by hand is what settled the rule, and the spread between 62 and 73 percent is the honest width of the answer.

Small cities run a different page one

Split the sample by market size and the tactic splits with it. In large metros, 73 percent of measurable companies keep a city landing page. In small cities, 50 percent. That gap holds up as a rank test, 0.378 across the 71.

Site size moves the same way, and further. The median page-one site in a large metro carries 266 pages. In a small city it carries 39. Page one in Dubuque, Pocatello or Corvallis is not a smaller version of page one in Dallas. It is a different competitive set, where a nine page site can hold second place, and where half the companies above you have never built a city page at all.

Most location pages belong to brands

Twenty-four of the 97 companies are national or regional brands with offices in many cities. They hold 21 of the measurable sitemaps, and 76 percent of them keep a city landing page against 56 percent of independents.

The gap widens on the other measure. Pages filed under a locations or service area folder, the programmatic version of this tactic, have a median of zero across the sample, and 46 percent of companies have none at all. Among brands the median is 14, and the largest single library we found runs to 1,717 of them. If you have read that top-ranking sites keep hundreds of location pages, that is true, and it is a description of franchise infrastructure rather than of what an independent operator did to rank.

Independents get there another way. Fifty-five percent of the homepages we read link to a service area page at all, and the median homepage carries 1,135 readable words, three superlatives and one checkable number.

What the search itself did to the sample

Two of the 22 markets never returned a pest control company. In Phoenix, page one for the query came back as music videos, a web framework and a cryptocurrency wallet. In Tampa, it returned a Rust parser, a PHP testing framework and a newspaper column about an unwelcome visitor. The word in the query beat the trade in the query, and three of those results survived our first screen because their domain contains the word pest. They are excluded by name in the published dataset, and 20 markets carried the study.

Across all markets, 35 percent of the results captured were not pest control companies. Yelp took 22 of those slots, YouTube 10 and Facebook 9.

Twenty-six of the 97 companies served no readable sitemap. Opening them by hand showed that most are not sites without sitemaps but sites behind bot protection, answering with a challenge page. Those companies are missing from every city page figure above rather than counted as lacking the page, and they are not evenly spread: 82 percent of metro companies were measurable against 65 percent in small cities, and 88 percent of brands against 68 percent of independents.

What we measured and what we did not

We measured URLs, not pages. A sitemap tells us that a company files a page under the name of a city. It does not tell us whether that page has real content, whether it was written for the reader or spun from a template, or whether it is the reason the company ranks.

We measured only companies that already rank in the top ten. A sample drawn from page one cannot say what separates ranking companies from companies that do not rank, because every company in it already ranks. The 45 percent at positions 7 to 10 with a city page are a fact about page one, not about the whole trade.

We captured one search per market on one day, from a US default location, and results move by location, device and time. Sitemap counts are what a site publishes, not what Google indexes. And 26 companies are missing from the sitemap measures, in a pattern that favors metros and brands, so the true share for small city independents is the least certain number here.

The full dataset, every company, every matched URL and every exclusion with its reason, ships with this article.