Do you cover my area?
What trades and home service businesses need to publish
A wasted enquiry frustrates both sides. This should be answerable in two seconds.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “Do you cover my area?”
- “what postcodes do you cover”
- “do you travel”
- “are you local to me”
- “service area”
What a complete answer contains
For trades and home service businesses specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 4:
- 1
The actual postcodes or towns you cover, listed
- 2
Whether you travel further for larger jobs, and any additional charge
- 3
Whether the call-out fee changes by distance
- 4
Who you recommend if they are outside your area, which costs you nothing and earns goodwill
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
We cover all BS postcodes and BA1-BA3. Beyond that we travel for jobs over £500 with a £30 travel surcharge. Outside our area, the Gas Safe register's find-an-engineer tool will show you registered engineers near you.
Which page should own it
Areas covered page
What silence costs
Out-of-area enquiries waste your time and theirs. A clear list removes both.
More questions trades and home service businesses get
Related
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
use case
Answer customer questions from your own content
Answering questions well means answering them from something true. RubyRep retrieves the relevant passages from your site before it writes anything, and cites the page it used, so an answer can always be checked.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.