Location pages exist for one reason: if you serve twelve areas, you want to appear when someone searches your service plus each of those areas. The obvious move — duplicate the page, change the city name — is also the move Google explicitly treats as a doorway page. Done at scale it can take down the whole site.
Here is how to build them so they earn their place.
The test Google is applying
Not is this page unique, but does this page exist for the user or for the ranking. A page that says something specific and true about serving that area passes. A template with a swapped noun does not.
The practical version of that test: if you removed the city name, would anyone be able to tell which page they were on? If not, the page is not real.
What must genuinely differ per page
- Actual work in that area. A project, a photo, a named neighbourhood, a delivery time. One real detail beats five paragraphs of generic text.
- A review from a customer there. The most valuable element on the page, and the hardest to fake.
- Local specifics that affect the service. Travel time, society or building approval processes, typical property sizes, parking, whatever genuinely varies.
- The pricing reality if it differs by area.
- Locally-relevant FAQs — the questions people from that area actually ask.
What can stay the same
Not everything has to be rewritten. Your process, your guarantees, your credentials, your contact details and your general service description can be shared. The rule is that the shared material should be the minority of the page, not the whole of it.
If removing the city name makes the page indistinguishable from eleven others, it is not a location page. It is a doorway.
How many location pages to build
Fewer than you want to. Three excellent pages for your three real markets will outperform twenty thin ones, and they will not put the rest of the site at risk.
Build a page for an area only when you can answer yes to both: do we genuinely serve here, and do we have at least one real, specific thing to say about working here? If the answer to the second is no, the page waits until you have done a job there.
Structure that works
- H1 with service plus area, written the way a person would say it.
- Opening line that proves you are actually there — a recent project, a number of customers, a neighbourhood name.
- Specific proof — photos, a case, a review from that area.
- The service detail, shared across pages, clearly written.
- Local FAQs.
- A clear next step with a form or phone number, not a link to a generic contact page.
Internal linking
Link location pages from a parent service page, and from each other where it makes sense — neighbouring areas genuinely are related. Do not build a footer block listing forty cities; it is a well-known doorway signal and it dilutes every page you link from.
Measuring whether they worked
Check each page individually in Search Console after three months. You are looking for impressions on the service-plus-area query. A page with no impressions after a quarter is not ranking and probably was not worth building — either improve it with real content or remove it.
A page with impressions but no clicks is a title and description problem, which is a much easier fix.
Want help deciding which areas justify a page? Start with a free audit.
Questions people ask
Are location pages considered doorway pages?
They are when the only difference between them is the place name. Google treats near-identical pages built purely to catch each city as doorway pages, and at scale that judgement can affect the whole site, not just those pages.
What has to be different on each page?
Work you have actually done there, named projects or clients, local pricing or travel conditions, the specific areas and landmarks you cover, and anything genuinely local about how you deliver the service. Swapping a city name in a template is not enough.
How many location pages should I build?
One for each place you can write about honestly, which is usually far fewer than the list of places you would accept work in. Start with the areas where you already have jobs to point at, and add pages as the evidence appears.
Do location pages need their own internal links?
Yes. Link them from the parent service page and from a visible area index, not only from the footer. Pages reachable only through a footer list tend to be crawled rarely and treated as low value.