How Far Down Should Your Location Pages Go?

The temptation and the trap

Location pages work, which leads to the reasonable-sounding conclusion that more of them work better. One page per city becomes one per suburb, then one per neighbourhood, and a business serving a metro area finds itself with forty pages to write.

The trap is that granularity only helps where it corresponds to something real. Forty pages with the same three paragraphs and a swapped place name do not give you forty positions. They give you forty weak pages competing with each other, and a site that looks manufactured to anyone who clicks two of them.

The first test: do people search that way?

Search language varies by region and it is not a matter of opinion, it is checkable.

In some markets people search by municipality because the municipalities are meaningful and well known. In others they search by neighbourhood, because that is how residents describe where they live. In others they search by the metro name regardless of where they are, because the smaller names carry no weight.

Checking is straightforward: type your service plus each place name and see whether the results are genuinely local or whether the engine substitutes the larger area. If the results for a neighbourhood look identical to the results for the city, that neighbourhood is not a distinct search market and a page for it will not find an audience. The same method is set out in more detail in keyword research for a single location.

The second test: do you have anything to say?

This is the one that decides most cases, and the answer is usually visible immediately.

Open a blank page and try to write four hundred words about your work in that specific place, without naming a competitor and without repeating what is on the city page. If you have done jobs there, know the housing stock, know which problems recur locally, and have a review from a customer there, the page writes itself.

If you are reaching after two sentences, the page should not exist. That is not a writing problem to be solved with more effort; it is the correct signal that you do not yet have a relationship with that area, and a page claiming otherwise persuades nobody. What genuinely local content looks like is set out in service area pages that work.

What granularity cannot fix

A neighbourhood page will not put you in the map results for a neighbourhood you are nowhere near. Proximity governs the map pack, and no amount of content changes where your business physically is.

What location pages compete in is the organic results below the map, where proximity matters less and relevance matters more. That is a genuine opportunity and it is a different opportunity from the one most people think they are buying. Understanding which of the two you are competing in prevents a lot of disappointment about pages that were doing their job perfectly well in the results they could actually reach.

A sensible progression

• Start with the places you work most. Three to six pages, each backed by real jobs and real detail. This is where nearly all of the available value sits.
• Add one at a time, as the work justifies it. A page follows the jobs rather than leading them, so the material exists before the page does.
• Go a level deeper only where the search language supports it, and only for areas where you have concentrated work.
• Prefer depth to breadth. Six strong pages consistently outperform twenty-five thin ones, and they are far less work to maintain.

The maintenance argument

Rarely considered at the point of creation and it decides the sensible number.

Every location page needs its examples refreshed, its reviews updated, and its details kept accurate. Six pages is a manageable annual task. Forty is a project nobody will do, so they sit unchanged for years, gradually becoming a set of pages describing work you did in 2023 with a phone number you changed in 2024.

A useful rule is to create only as many as you would genuinely update once a year. That number is almost always smaller than the number that seemed appealing at the planning stage, and it is the one that still looks credible three years later.

If you already have too many

Consolidation is usually better than deletion. The strongest pages absorb the useful content from the weak ones, and the weak ones redirect into them.

That preserves whatever value the thin pages had accumulated, removes the duplication, and leaves a smaller set of pages that are each worth reading. It is a tidier outcome than deleting forty pages and hoping nothing was pointing at them.

Frequently asked questions

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