TL;DR
A clinic I audited served four named areas. Four honest pages was an afternoon’s work. A page per suburb across the metro would have been a month and a liability. The difference is not effort. It is whether each page is a document about somewhere or a net with a place name in it.
A clinic I audited served four named areas. Four honest pages was an afternoon’s work. A page per suburb across the metro would have been a month, and a liability.
The difference between those two projects is not effort or scale. It is whether each page is a document about somewhere, or a net with a place name in it.
Google’s actual line
Worth quoting rather than paraphrasing, because the folklore is vaguer than the policy. Google’s spam policies define doorway abuse to include “having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page” and “creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy.”
Notice what is not prohibited: having a page about a place. What is prohibited is a set of near-identical pages whose only job is to catch a place name.
So the question is never “are location pages allowed”. It is whether this one is a document or a net.
The test
Could you write the second page without looking at the first?
If the honest answer is no, if you would open page one and change the nouns, you are building the thing the policy describes, and you will build forty of them because that is the only way the approach makes sense to whoever proposed it.
They also fail as a set. Forty thin near-duplicates drag down the two or three that would have been fine standing alone, which is the part people do not expect. The downside is not that thirty-seven pages underperform. It is that all forty do.
What makes one real
Things that are true of that place and nowhere else. On a local service business that is more available than people assume:
- Why you are actually there. Which practitioner covers it, how long you have worked there, what proportion of your work comes from it.
- Local specifics that affect the service. Housing stock and its typical problems for a trade. Parking and transport for a clinic. Which hospital, which court, which school catchment: whatever the service actually intersects with.
- Work you have done there. Anonymised if it must be, but specific. This is the part nobody can copy.
- Honest coverage limits. Saying you serve the north of a town and not the south is more credible than claiming the whole metro, and it costs you nothing you were winning anyway.
How many
As many as you can write properly. For most single-location businesses that is somewhere between three and six.
If the honest answer is “we would travel anywhere”, that is not a content strategy. Write the areas where you genuinely work and let the rest be covered by the main service pages, which have no distance constraint on them.
The expectation to set before anybody writes
Location pages do not put you in the map pack. The pack ranks your Business Profile, and Google names relevance, distance and prominence as what decides it, adding that there is “no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” A page is not one of those three inputs.
What a location page competes in is the ordinary results, where distance does not apply. That is a real opportunity and it is a different one. Scale changes the numbers, not the diagnosis, and forty pages is a scale decision dressed up as a strategy.
The short version
- Location pages are not prohibited. Near-identical pages funnelling to one destination are.
- The test: could you write the second without looking at the first?
- They fail as a set. Forty thin pages drag down the three good ones.
- Make it true of that place: who covers it, what is different, work you have done.
- Honest coverage limits are more credible than claiming the metro.
- Three to six, written properly.
- They will not get you into the map pack. Different competition entirely.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Local SEO covers the pages, the profile and the pack. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
