Thin Pages You Created for Every Town

Why these exist

They were recommended, widely and for years, and they worked for a period.

The reasoning was straightforward: people search for a service alongside a place name, so a page combining the two matched the query.

Businesses were sold packages of them, forty or eighty at a time, generated from a template with the place name substituted.

Nobody was being dishonest. The tactic was standard, effective, and has been steadily less effective for several years.

What this week changed

The reasoning for keeping them, rather than the pages themselves.

Previously a set of thin town pages was mostly harmless: they ranked for very little and sat there costing nothing.

With a sitewide signal in play, pages judged unhelpful may affect how the rest of the site performs, which makes doing nothing a position rather than a default.

Forty near-identical pages built from a template are close to the clearest illustration of content made for search engines rather than people.

Which means the question is no longer whether they help, it is whether they are costing something.

Where the line sits

• Identical but for the place name: remove.
• A paragraph of local filler: remove.
• Genuinely different content: keep.
• An area you actually work in: possibly keep.
• An area you have never worked in: remove.

The third is the test. A page saying something true only of that place, which a reader there would find useful, is a legitimate page regardless of how it came about.

What a legitimate area page contains

Since some businesses genuinely serve distinct areas differently.

Local conditions that change the work: housing stock, ground conditions, weather exposure, common construction from a particular era.

Different regulations, permits, or authorities, which vary by municipality and genuinely matter.

Actual jobs you have done there, with photographs and enough detail to be recognisable.

Travel or scheduling differences, such as whether you cover it weekly or by arrangement.

A page containing two or three of those is worth having. A page containing the place name in six locations is not.

Most businesses can write three or four such pages honestly, not forty.

The coverage page alternative

What replaces the forty, and it works better than they did.

One page listing every area you serve, plainly, with any relevant detail: which areas carry a travel charge, which are covered on which days, and where the boundary actually falls.

That answers the question a searcher actually has, which is whether you come to them, and it does so on one page rather than forty.

Name the areas in ordinary language, including the informal names people use, since those are what get typed.

Link it from the footer and from the service pages, and reference the areas naturally within the service pages themselves.

A business listing with the service area set correctly does more for local visibility than the forty pages ever did.

A worked example

A business had sixty-two location pages produced in 2018, covering towns across a wide region including several they had never worked in.

Checking the figures, four had received meaningful traffic in a year and the rest had almost none between them.

Of the four, two had produced enquiries and two had not.

They kept the two that converted and rewrote them properly with local detail and photographs of actual jobs. They wrote one coverage page listing everything.

The other sixty were redirected to the coverage page or the relevant service page.

Traffic fell by a small amount, enquiries were unchanged over the following quarter, and the site became something one person could maintain.

Check before removing

The same discipline as any pruning, and skipping it is how this goes wrong.

Check each page for traffic over the last year, for links from other sites, and for whether it has produced enquiries.

A page with almost no traffic that produced two jobs is not a page to delete, and that pattern is more common with location pages than people expect.

Where a page has any of those, keep it and improve it rather than removing it.

Record everything before starting, since a set of removals this size will move the traffic figures and you will want to know by how much.

Do not simply rewrite the template

The response that is offered and does not work.

Rewriting forty templated pages into forty slightly different templated pages produces forty pages of the same kind.

The problem is not the wording, it is that there is not forty pages of material about forty towns.

Anybody offering to fix this by spinning the text into unique variations is proposing the original tactic with more steps.

The honest answer is that you have three or four pages of real local material, and that is how many pages you should have.

Redirect to something specific

The detail that decides whether removing sixty pages costs you anything.

Each removed town page should redirect to the page a person arriving there actually wanted, which is usually the relevant service page rather than the coverage page.

Somebody who searched for a service in a town wanted the service, and the town was how they qualified it.

Sending them all to the coverage page gives them a list of place names rather than the thing they were looking for.

Where a page covered several services for one town, the coverage page is the right destination, and that is the smaller share of them.

The counter-case

Location pages are not inherently wrong.

A business with genuine premises in several places should have a page for each, with the address, hours, staff, and photographs, and those are proper pages.

Larger businesses serving genuinely distinct markets can support more of them, since they have more to say.

And removing a page that quietly produces two jobs a year to satisfy a principle is a bad trade.

Check the figures, keep what converts or has links, write the ones you have material for, and put the rest on one coverage page.

What to do

1. List every location page and its traffic.
2. Check each for links and enquiries.
3. Keep the ones that earn their place.
4. Rewrite those with genuine local detail.
5. Write one coverage page.
6. Redirect the rest to the relevant page.
7. Set the service area on your listing.

Step seven does more for local visibility than the whole exercise, and it is a setting rather than a page.

Where the line sits in more detail is covered in a page for every suburb.

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.