Short answer
Suburb pages work, because distance matters far less in the ordinary results than in the map pack. But they only work when each one says something genuinely true about that area. Forty pages with the name swapped is the pattern Google has been discounting for years.
This comes up constantly, usually because somebody has been offered a package of fifty location pages for a suspiciously low price. The short answer is that the idea is sound and the usual execution is not.
Why they work at all
Remember that a search result has two separate parts.
The map pack is driven heavily by how far you are from the person searching. A page on your website cannot change where your van is parked, so it will not get you into the map three suburbs over.
The ordinary results below the map are driven by whether you have a page that genuinely answers what was searched. Distance matters far less there.
So when somebody in an outer suburb searches plumber plus their area, you can absolutely appear in the second part even when the first is out of reach. That is what suburb pages are for, and it is a real opportunity.
Why most of them fail
Because they are the same page forty times with the name swapped.
If you can produce the next page with a find and replace, there is nothing on it that a search engine has not already seen. Google has been discounting this pattern for years, and worse, it is the exact signature of the rank and rent and lead generation sites that clutter up trade searches. Building your site that way makes a real plumbing business look like one of them.
What a real suburb page has on it
Something true and specific that you could only write if you actually work there:
- The housing stock and what that means. Villas with original galvanised pipe, a newer subdivision where everything is on the same fittings, a hillside area with pressure issues.
- Jobs you have genuinely done there, with photos.
- How long it takes you to get there, and whether you cover it after hours.
- Anything locally specific: a common issue with a particular era of build, a council quirk, the way one area floods.
Write five of those and you will beat forty templated ones comfortably.
How many should you have?
As many as you can say something real about. For most plumbers that is somewhere between five and fifteen.
Start with the suburbs you actually want more work in, which is not necessarily the ones you currently get the most calls from. The page is a tool for shifting where your work comes from, so point it at where you want to be.
The honest limitation
A suburb page will not fix being genuinely too far away.
If you are forty minutes from somewhere, you can rank in the ordinary results there and still lose most of the emergency work to somebody local, because emergency callers use the map and the map uses distance. Planned work is where these pages earn their keep, because somebody booking a bathroom next month will happily wait for the right plumber.
That is the realistic version. Suburb pages are worth building, they are part of proper local SEO, and anybody selling you fifty of them for a flat fee is selling you the version that does not work.