You’re faintly visible in nine places when you need to be solidly visible in one.
Open the menu on almost any home services site in Nassau or Suffolk and you’ll find the same nine things:
- Boilers
- Heating
- Gas lines
- Plumbing
- Water heaters
- Drain cleaning
- Water heaters
- Bathroom remodels
- Emergency service
Each one gets its own page on your site. Each page runs about four paragraphs and a stock photo of a van.
That list is an honest description of what your business does. You take whatever work comes in, which on Long Island is how you keep two trucks busy in February.
Nobody sat down and decided to be thin about nine things. It happened one page at a time, usually the week after a customer asked whether you handle something you’d never thought to put on the site.
A study published this summer gives us a useful way to see what happens when brands spread their visibility across a topic instead of building enough depth to become consistently associated with it.
Showing Up Once Doesn’t Count as Showing Up
Semrush, working with Kevin Indig, spent the first six months of this year watching what ChatGPT said across 1,094 separate buying categories in the US. The sample ran past 50,000 brands.
What makes it useful is how strict they were about what counts as winning.
Each category got five prompts covering the arc somebody travels before they spend money: a definition, a comparison, the alternatives, whether it applies to their situation, and the buying decision itself.
To be credited with the category, you’d have to get named in four of those five. You’d also have to finish at least 5 percentage points clear of whoever came second.
In 15.2% of the 1,094 categories, one brand cleared that bar.
In 53.7% of them no brand turned up in even three of the five questions. Nobody was home. The rest had a front-runner without enough daylight to call it settled.
So you can show up in an AI answer, feel good about it, and still be nowhere.
Get named once for “what does a sump pump replacement cost” while a national cost guide fields the other four questions, and you’ve bought yourself a cameo.
Why Thin Service Pages Dilute Your Authority
If the goal is to become consistently associated with one kind of job, spreading your useful knowledge across nine thin service pages works against that goal.
You’ve taken one page’s worth of real knowledge, divided it by nine, and collected nine cameos for the trouble.
And the geography makes it worse. “Serving Nassau and Suffolk County” is a sentence I see on every third site, probably including yours.
What you’re quietly claiming is authority over nearly three million people across two counties and a couple hundred hamlets. No two-truck operation owns that, including yours.
It reads as reassurance to your homeowner and as noise to everything else, for the same reason dropping a town name into a page never made it local.
The trap is that adding pages feels like you’re making progress.
The request I get most often is to rank for more services. So three more service pages go up, and now you’ve got twelve thin ones instead of nine.
Your site got bigger and your business got no easier to find, because depth was never a function of page count.
That is a big part of how I approach local SEO for Long Island businesses: identifying the services actually worth owning and building enough coverage around them to become genuinely relevant.
It isn’t only a trades problem. An elder law attorney in Nassau lists Medicaid planning, trusts, guardianship, estate administration, and real estate closings, a paragraph apiece.
Nowhere on that site is there an answer to the thing people actually call about, which is usually some version of “my mother is going into a nursing home in six weeks and the house is in her name.”
Why Lower-Competition Local Topics Create an Opening
Semrush split the categories in half by how much AI search demand each one got. In the busy half, 11.3% had a clear owner. In the quiet half, 19% did.
Low demand looks like the opening there. For a software company it is one, and going after those categories is a real strategic move.
If you’re a plumber in Bay Shore it’s not a move at all, because Search Engine Land’s write-up adds the part that matters: the busy half accounted for 98% of all AI search volume in the sample.
So the quiet half, the half where ownership actually sticks, is the remaining 2%.
Nothing you sell is in that busy half. “Oil to gas conversion in Massapequa” is not a high-volume topic by any national measure, which is exactly why nobody has bothered to claim it.
The quiet part of the market is where you already work, every day, and almost nobody here is using that.
Two percent of national search volume sounds like nothing until you remember that national volume was never your target. You need the phone to ring in two counties.
Then there’s what happens after you get there. The size of the lead mattered more than having one.
When a front-runner got knocked off from one month to the next, the gap it had been holding was typically 1.3 percentage points. When it stayed put, the gap was 2.9.
Businesses with a clear hold on their category stayed first in 90.4% of month-to-month comparisons.
For you that’s an unusual proposition. With paid ads, you stop spending and the phone stops ringing the same afternoon.
Work that gets you named for one specific job keeps paying after you stop doing the work. That’s the whole reason to do it in the slow months rather than the busy ones.
What Topical Authority Looks Like for a Local Business
Say you’re a heating contractor and the job you want more of is oil-to-gas conversion.
The housing stock in Levittown, Massapequa, and a dozen towns like them is full of oil burners. The ticket is substantial, and your homeowners have a genuine pile of questions before they’ll commit.
Write down the questions they actually ask you on the phone:
- What’s involved in converting, and how long is my heat off?
- What does the gas company charge to bring the line in from the street, and who pulls the permit?
- Does the chimney need to be lined, and how do I know?
- What happens to the old oil tank — is it removed, filled, abandoned in place, and what does that cost?
- My boiler is only twelve years old. Is this worth doing now or should I wait?
This is what “going deeper” actually means. It isn’t writing five versions of the same service page. It’s answering five different questions someone has to resolve before they can confidently buy that service.
That last one decides whether you get the job, and I have never once seen it answered on a Long Island heating contractor’s website.
The national cost guides won’t answer it either. The honest answer depends on the tank, the chimney, the street, and the township, which is to say it depends on things you know and they don’t.
Five real pages on those five questions, with your actual numbers and the conditions that move them, beats nine pages of “Quality Oil to Gas Conversions — Serving Nassau and Suffolk Since 1998.”
It also beats it for your homeowner, who is trying to make a four-figure decision and currently getting a price range wide enough to be useless.
Then pick the next job and do the same thing.
Why Building Topical Depth Now Matters
Six months isn’t long enough to know how this settles.
What those six months do show is that clear category leaders tended to hold their position. Once you have a real lead in a category you tend to keep it, and more than half of these categories still have nobody making a claim at all.
That window closes quietly, and it closes first in the categories somebody bothered to go deep on.
The advantage is temporary and it’s sitting right there. Most of your competition is still adding pages.
Before You Add Another Service Page, Do This
Open your website’s services menu and write down every job you list. Then open your last thirty invoices and write down what you actually got paid for.
Compare the two lists.
You’ll probably find you’re advertising nine or ten things and making real money on three or four. Those three or four are the only ones worth covering properly, and the rest are diluting them.
Find the Jobs Your Website Should Actually Be Built Around
Send me your service list and the jobs that generated your last 30 invoices. I’ll look at where your website is spread too thin and which services are worth building deeper search visibility around.
