A Page for Every Suburb

Where the line actually is

Three genuine pages about three places you work is sensible.

Forty pages produced from a template with a place name substituted is a different thing with a name: doorway pages, which exist to capture searches for a place rather than to serve anybody who arrives.

The line is not a page count. It is whether the pages are distinguishable from each other by anything except the place name.

A business could legitimately have twelve area pages if it genuinely works in twelve places and can fill each one. Almost none can, which is why the number and the problem correlate.

Why it stopped working

Search engines have targeted this pattern specifically and have said so publicly for years.

The reasoning is straightforward from their side: a set of near-identical pages differing by location wastes a searcher's time, since whichever one they land on gives them the same generic content.

Detection is not difficult when the pages share ninety percent of their text.

So the outcome is usually that none of them ranks, rather than a dramatic penalty, and the business concludes that local pages do not work when what did not work was those pages.

The signals you have crossed the line

• The pages were generated rather than written.
• You could swap the place names and nobody would notice.
• No photographs are specific to any of them.
• They are not in the navigation, because there are too many.
• Nobody has read them since they were published.
• Most have never had a visitor.

The second is the test that settles it. If the pages are interchangeable, they are one page pretending to be forty.

What happens to a business that does this

Rarely a dramatic collapse, which is part of the problem, because the cost is invisible.

The pages do not rank, so the effort produced nothing.

The site now carries forty thin pages, which dilutes it: internal links spread across pages with no value, and the proportion of the site that is substantial falls.

Anybody who does land on one reads something generic and forms an impression of a business that automates its writing.

And the pages have to be maintained, so a price change or a phone number update is now a forty-page job that will not get done, leaving inaccuracies scattered across the site.

A worked example

A cleaning company had ninety-two suburb pages, produced by an agency four years earlier, each about two hundred and fifty words.

Over twelve months, six had received any visitors at all and none had produced an enquiry.

Two contained a phone number changed three years earlier, which nobody had noticed because nobody had opened them.

They deleted eighty-eight and redirected them to a single coverage page listing all the areas served.

The four kept were the ones where they genuinely had regular work, and those were rewritten with real content over the following two months.

Traffic to the site rose slightly rather than falling, because nothing of value had been removed, and two of the four rebuilt pages began ranking within a quarter.

What to do with pages you already have

The situation most businesses reading this are in.

Pull twelve months of data and list every area page with its visits and enquiries.

Keep the ones with genuine traffic or genuine work behind them, and commit to rewriting those properly.

Delete the rest and redirect them, not to the homepage, but to a coverage page or the relevant service page, which is a better destination for anybody who does arrive.

Removing eighty pages feels alarming and is almost always neutral or positive, because pages with no traffic and no links contribute nothing to lose.

The coverage page alternative

What to build instead, and it is usually better than what it replaces.

One page listing every area you cover, plainly, with any relevant detail about travel, minimum charges, or response times by distance.

That page can rank for coverage-style searches, it answers the question a customer actually has, and it is one page to keep accurate rather than forty.

It also handles the long tail honestly: somebody searching for a small place you serve occasionally can find that you cover it, without you having pretended to specialise there.

Where a place graduates to genuine regular work, it earns its own page at that point, built properly.

Scale changes the answer

Worth acknowledging because the advice differs by size.

A national franchise with two hundred genuine branches should have two hundred pages, and each is a real location with an address, staff, hours, and photographs. That is not the same activity at all.

A multi-site retailer, a chain of clinics, or a utility with regional operations are in the same position.

The failure mode is a single-location business generating pages for places it has no presence in, which is what this pattern almost always is in a small business.

The question to ask is whether something exists in that place, or whether only the page does.

The counter-case

There is a defensible middle position worth stating.

A business with genuine but uneven coverage might reasonably have a strong page for its three main areas and brief, honest sections within a coverage page for another dozen, which is neither forty thin pages nor pretending the dozen do not exist.

Some businesses also serve places where competition is so thin that even a modest page ranks, and while that works, it works because nobody else is there rather than because the page is good.

That is worth knowing rather than relying on, because a competitor arriving with a real page will take it, and the position was never defensible.

Building something that would survive a competitor doing this properly is the standard worth aiming at.

The audit

1. Count your area pages and pull twelve months of data.
2. Swap two place names and see if anything else differs.
3. Keep pages with traffic or genuine work behind them.
4. Delete the rest and redirect to a coverage page.
5. Build one coverage page listing every area.
6. Rewrite the survivors properly.
7. Add new area pages only when a place earns one.

Step two takes a minute and answers the question this article exists to ask.

Building the ones that should exist is covered in serving three cities from one van.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.