Should your Google listing link to the homepage or a city page? Nine trades, 22 cities

The website field on a Google Business Profile comes with a standard piece of advice: do not point it at your homepage. Point it at a page built for the city or the location, because a page that names the city is said to make the listing more relevant to your trade plus that city. And tag the link with UTM parameters so the visits can be counted. We tested the first half of that on house cleaners in September and found three in four links went to the homepage. This article follows the website button on every listing the series has captured on one list of 22 US cities since then.

Nine trades, the same 11 large metros and 11 small cities, captured on nine days between September 29 and October 17, 2026: roofing, house cleaning, garage door repair, locksmiths, dentists, moving, hair salons, physical therapy and HVAC. That is 3,792 results, 3,438 businesses after each study’s own exclusions, 498 of them chain, franchise or health system locations, in 198 trade-by-city lists. No new searches were spent: every row is the exact dataset its own article shipped, and the link was classified from its address by one rule for all nine trades.

The advice is mostly not followed, and where it is followed, it is mostly followed by chains. Of the 3,060 listings that link to a site of their own, 2,386 (78 percent) link to the homepage and 637 (21 percent) to a location or city page. 412 of those 637 city-page links, 65 percent, belong to chain locations. Among independent businesses, 90 percent link to the homepage, and the 225 that link to a city page sat at a median position of 9 against 10 for the homepage group, a gap this sample of 2,566 independents cannot tell from zero.

Find your trade

Open your own listing, tap Website, and read where it lands. Then find your row. The homepage, city-page and UTM columns are shares of the listings that link to their own site.

Trade	Listings	Link to own site	Homepage	City or location page	City-page links that are chains	UTM tags	No link
Locksmiths	282	89%	90%	10%	9 of 24	8%	10%
Hair salons	424	74%	90%	9%	16 of 28	4%	13%
Dentists	430	97%	87%	12%	25 of 48	25%	3%
Roofing	422	91%	85%	14%	20 of 53	19%	9%
Garage door repair	335	92%	82%	18%	29 of 54	26%	8%
HVAC	407	94%	81%	18%	24 of 68	37%	6%
House cleaning	395	85%	75%	24%	67 of 81	18%	13%
Moving	359	86%	66%	33%	74 of 102	39%	13%
Physical therapy	384	95%	47%	49%	148 of 179	24%	4%

The homepage share runs from 90 percent (locksmiths and hair salons) down to 47 percent (physical therapy), and the order of the rows is the order of chain share: physical therapy is 46 percent health systems, physician groups and regional chains, moving 23 percent franchises, house cleaning 18, locksmiths and salons 3 and 4. The city-page share of a trade’s top 20 is, to a first approximation, its chain share.

Among independents linking to their own site, the city-page share runs from 4 percent (hair salons) to 16 percent (physical therapy), with HVAC at 13, moving 12, garage doors 10, roofing 9, dentists and locksmiths 6, house cleaning 5. Among chain locations it runs from 48 percent (garage doors) to 100 (locksmiths, dentists, salons). A franchise does not choose a landing page city by city. The brand’s site has a page for every territory and every listing points at its own.

The top three link to the homepage too

In the 585 top-three slots across 198 lists, 416 link to a homepage, 133 to a city or location page, 25 to nothing, 8 to a booking or social page and 3 to another inner page. Of the 133 city-page slots, 87 are chain locations.

Pooled across all 3,060 own-site links the city-page group does sit a little higher, a median position of 9 against 10 and a rank correlation of -0.037, significant on this many rows and tiny, and it carries more reviews, a median of 245 against 171. Split the links into thirds by review count, so volume is held roughly constant, and the gap reads 10 against 12, 8 against 10 and 8 against 7, none of the three significant.

On independents alone the correlation is -0.009 on 2,566 listings, not significant, and the thirds read 11 against 12, 8 against 10 and 9 against 8. Trade by trade, the independents’ correlation is significant in 1 of 9 trades, and that one runs the other way: the 15 independent locksmiths linking to a city page sat at a median position of 13 against 9. Inside review thirds within each trade, 1 of 27 tests cleared the bar. The correlation runs from -0.137 (physical therapy) to 0.132 (locksmiths), negative in 5 trades and positive in 4.

By market size. In the 11 metros, 1,883 of 1,952 listings (96 percent) link to their own site, 24 percent of those links go to a city page, 289 of the 443 city-page links are chains, and independents with a city page and with a homepage sat at the same median position, 11, a correlation of -0.003. In the 11 small cities, 1,177 of 1,486 listings (79 percent) link to their own site, 16 percent of those links go to a city page, 123 of 194 are chains, and the 71 independents with a city page sat at 6 against 8, a correlation of -0.049 that is not significant. The middle review third there (37 to 161 reviews) was the one place in the study where independents with a city page cleared the bar, 14 of them at a median position of 3 against 7, a story about 14 businesses.

The link that matters is the one that is missing

The group that sat lowest was not the homepage group. It was the 303 listings with no website link at all: a median position of 13, 25 of 585 top-three slots, and a median of 22 reviews. In the metros that is 57 listings, 3 percent. In the small cities it is 246, 17 percent, running from 4 percent of small-city dentists to 32 percent of movers, 28 percent of house cleaners, 25 percent of locksmiths and 22 percent of salons. The correlation between having a site of your own and position is -0.215 among small-city independents, significant, and -0.03 in the metros, where nearly everyone has one. The no-link group also has the fewest reviews, so this design cannot say whether the missing site or the thin review count does the work.

UTM tags are a chain habit as well

694 of the 3,060 own-site links, 23 percent, carry UTM parameters, the tags that label the listing’s visits in analytics. 290 of the 494 chain links do, 59 percent. 404 of the 2,566 independent links do, 16 percent: 19 percent in the metros and 10 percent in the small cities. By trade the independents’ rate runs from 3 percent (hair salons) to 33 percent (HVAC). Tagged links sat at a median position of 9 against 10 among independents, a correlation of -0.033 that is not significant, and the tagged group carries a median of 505 reviews against 139, so the tag marks the larger business, not a better listing.

What changed in verification

The uniform rule calls a link a city page when its path names the market city, the town on the address or a location word. It read 86 own-site links as “another inner page,” and reading all 86 by hand changed 51 rows between the first run and the one that ships: 39 were location pages under paths the rule cannot know (franchise territory numbers, neighborhood names, a state or region as the whole path, a brand’s store locator), 7 were the root page of a free site builder, counted here as the homepage, 4 went to a scheduling or link-in-bio service that two source studies had passed as the business’s own site, and one “location word” match was false, a salon named City Cuts. The pooled city-page share moved from 20 to 21 percent and no finding changed.

The check that a roll-up is reading the right run: for house cleaning, it recomputes 81 city-page links, 61 UTM tags, 53 listings with no link and 67 of 71 chain locations on a city page, each matching that study’s September article. The homepage count reads 252 against the article’s 251 because one free-builder root page that study called an inner page is a homepage here.

What to do with this

• Do not rebuild your site around the link. Among 2,566 independents in nine trades, the city-page group sat within a position of the homepage group in both market sizes, and the only trade where the difference was significant ran the wrong way.
• If you already have a page for each town you serve, linking a listing to it is harmless. It is what the franchises do, and they hold the top three because of their reviews.
• Make sure the link exists. In a small city, one listing in six has no website link, and that group sits at position 13 with 22 reviews.
• Tag the link if you want the count. Six in ten chain locations do and one in six independents do. It moved nobody.

Limits: what this can and cannot tell you

Measured: where the website button pointed on 3,438 Google Maps top-20 listings in nine trades and 22 cities, classified from the link’s address by one rule with the 86 inner-page links read by hand; review counts, ratings and positions; chain locations as each source study tagged them; every comparison repeated on independents, inside review thirds, and per market size.

Not measured: what is on the linked page. A homepage whose first line names the city may do everything a city page does, and a city page may be an empty template. We did not open the pages.

Nine snapshots, not one: the captures ran on nine days, at different hours, two of them on days when a closed-for-the-day effect was in play (hair salons on a Monday, HVAC on a Saturday), which moves who sits where inside a list by a few places and does not change where a listing links. The chain tag is each trade’s own definition. 36 listings showed no review count and are missing, not zero. 354 results were excluded by the nine studies with their reasons kept in the dataset.

Range restriction: every listing here already ranks 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 was not measured, plausibly drives all three.

The number to write down

78 percent of top-20 listings that link to a website link to the homepage, 71 percent of the top three do, and two in three city-page links belong to a chain. Among 2,566 independents the city-page group sat at 9 against 10. Check that your listing has a link at all, tag it if you want the count, and spend the time on reviews.