Should I buy a .com or a country domain?

Buy a generic domain — .com, .dev or .co — unless you are certain the business will only ever serve one country. A ccTLD such as .co.uk sends a strong local signal and permanently hard-codes your geo-targeting to that country.

Should I build a page for every town I serve?

Only where you can write three genuinely specific paragraphs about that town — completed jobs, named areas, local requirements, real photographs. Pages differing only by place name are doorway pages, which is a policy violation rather than a grey area.

What is a canonical tag for?

A canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the preferred version when the same content is reachable at several addresses. It consolidates ranking signals onto the URL you nominate, rather than letting the engine choose for you.

SEO

Do I need hreflang?

Only if you have genuinely equivalent pages for different languages or regions. One English site serving several English-speaking countries needs none — and declaring hreflang="en" and x-default both pointing at the same URL is inert.

Answered by Anas Bin Masud 150 words 3 sections

The three rules if you do need it

Every page in the cluster references every page, including itself
Annotations must be reciprocal, or the pair is discarded
The pages must be genuine equivalents, not merely related

Code format

Language is ISO 639-1, region is ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2
en-GB is valid; en-UK is not, and it is the most common single error
Language alone is valid; region alone is not
One x-default per cluster

The content question comes first

hreflang is a technical answer to a content decision. If your country pages differ only by a place name in the title, you have built doorway pages, and hreflang will advertise the duplication rather than resolve it.

The longer version

This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, hreflang, and the honest answer that most sites do not need it covers it in about 2 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who answered this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.