Page count: what earns a page, and what dilutes the site

One page per service you would quote separately, where the scope, price band or buyer differs. One page per city you can evidence — a handful, not forty, where you have jobs, photos and specifics. One to three proof pages, where you have the material. Three or four for about, contact and legal. And as many answers to buying questions as you can answer well, each answering one question fully.

The merge test and the split test. Merge when two pages share scope, price and buyer — drain cleaning and drain unclogging are one page carrying both phrasings. Split when the work, the price band or the decision differs: emergency and scheduled work are different purchases.

A page for a service you cannot evidence. It is the thin-content problem with a service name on it, judged against Google's helpful-content guidance.

Template-generated duplicates — archive, tag and pagination routes serving the same content at several addresses. The fix is canonicals.

And city pages with the name swapped. Google's spam policies give as an example pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. Forty of those is slower than four good ones and carries a risk the four do not.

The number is an output, not a target. An agency that opens with you-need-fifty-pages has decided the answer before reading the business.