A location page earns its place only if it says something true about that town: who covers it, recent jobs there, travel times and local questions. Pages that merely swap the name should be rewritten or merged.

Nine pages, one paragraph

A trade business serving nine towns has a page for each. Every page opens with the same paragraph, the town's name dropped into the gaps.

The services are listed in the same order, with the same three reasons to choose the company, the same stock photograph and the same form. Only the headline and a few mentions of the town change.

Somebody who reads two of them notices within a sentence. Somebody who reads one learns nothing about whether the company actually works near them.

And Google, which reads all nine, sees one page written nine times.

Why the pages were made this way

The idea behind them is sound. People search with a town's name, and a page about that town is a reasonable thing to show them.

The shortcut is where it goes wrong. Writing nine different pages takes time, swapping a name takes minutes, and some plugins will generate the pages automatically from a list of towns.

The result looks like coverage from the inside and like padding from the outside.

What swapped pages cost

The fourth carries the real risk. Google's guidelines warn against doorway pages, and pages aimed at particular towns or regions that all lead the visitor to the same place are one of the examples they give.

What is genuinely local

Most businesses know far more about each town than their location pages say. The material is in the job records and in the heads of the people who do the work.

Who covers it: the crew or technician who works there most, where they are based, and how long it takes them to arrive.

What you have done there: recent jobs, by neighbourhood or street, with photographs and a sentence about each.

What is different about the work: the age and style of the houses, local rules and approvals, the soil, the water, the weather.

And what customers there ask. A question that comes up in one town and never in another is exactly what a location page is for.

Travel, timing and cost

Practical details differ by town more often than businesses admit.

Travel time changes how soon someone can come out, and sometimes the price. If a town an hour away carries a travel charge, or gets visits only on certain days, say so on its page.

Customers prefer an honest note about timing to a page implying a technician is around the corner. The ones who book anyway arrive with the right expectations.

A worked example

A window and door installer with three crews had a page for each of nine towns across the Fraser Valley, written in one afternoon from a single template.

The pages were nearly identical, and Search Console showed most of them appearing in search results only rarely.

The owner listed what the crews actually knew. In one town, most houses were split-levels from the 1970s with aluminium sliding windows; in another, townhouse complexes where a strata council has to approve every replacement.

A third had newer subdivisions where the original windows were already failing at the seals.

Three pages were rewritten around those facts, with photographs of local jobs, the crew lead's name and the questions customers there kept asking.

The six towns with nothing particular to say were folded into one service area page, with their old addresses redirected to it. The strata page is now the link the office sends whenever a council member calls.

How many pages to keep

Fewer, better pages beat more, thinner ones.

Write a page for a town when you work there often enough to have jobs, people and answers to show.

Every other town can go on a single service area page that lists them all, with a map or a plain description of the area covered. That page is honest, useful and one place to keep current.

When a town later earns enough work to fill a page, give it one then.

Keeping shared details in one place

Some information genuinely is the same everywhere: the warranty, how quotes work, the product range.

Rather than repeating it on every location page, link to the page where it lives. Three local sections and a link to the warranty read better than a page padded with the warranty in full.

Repeated blocks are also where errors hide. When the warranty changes, it should change in one place.

Writing in the town's own terms

Use the names local people use: neighbourhoods, roads, landmarks, and the local word for the kind of house.

Avoid forcing the town's name into every sentence. It reads as written for a machine, because it was, and adds nothing a reader wants.

The headline and the page title should name the town and the service once each. The rest of the page earns the town's name by being about it.

The counter-case

Not every business needs location pages at all.

A business serving one town, or a compact area where every part is much the same, is better served by a strong service area section on its main pages.

A business with a branch in each town has a different job. Each branch page needs its own hours, staff, parking and directions, and those details make it local almost by themselves.

But for a business tempted to multiply pages by swapping names, the rule holds: write the pages you can fill with something true, and merge the rest.

Rewriting them

  1. Read two location pages side by side.
  2. List the towns you work in most often.
  3. Collect local jobs, photographs and questions for each.
  4. Write full pages only where you have material.
  5. Merge the rest into one service area page.
  6. Redirect removed pages to that page.
  7. Link shared details instead of repeating them.

Step three decides everything that follows. A town with real jobs, photographs and questions behind it produces a page worth reading; a town without them produces the old template again.

Writing down the questions customers actually ask is the same habit behind a glossary for a trade full of jargon.

Frequently asked questions

What is wrong with swapping the town name?

Readers notice the repetition, the forced sentences say nothing about the town, and Google sees near-identical pages that it may filter out as duplicates or treat as doorways.

Are town pages against Google's guidelines?

Not in themselves. Google warns against doorway pages, and near-identical pages aimed at different towns that lead to the same place are one of its examples.

What makes a location page genuinely local?

Who covers the town and how quickly, recent jobs there with photographs, what is different about the work locally, and the questions customers in that town ask.

How many location pages should I have?

One for each town where you have enough jobs, people and answers to fill a page. List every other town on a single service area page.

What should happen to merged pages?

Redirect each removed page permanently to the service area page, so links and search results that pointed at it still land somewhere useful.

Should shared details appear on every page?

No. Link to the page where the warranty or quote process lives. Repeated blocks pad every page and hide errors when something changes.

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.

Location pages that differ only by town?

Send us two of them. We will tell you which towns deserve a full page and which to merge.

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