At some point, most businesses that serve more than one town consider location pages. The idea is simple: if you want to appear for “roofer Formby”, “roofer Ormskirk” and “roofer Maghull”, you create a page for each.
Done well, location pages can help people in those areas find you and trust that you really work there. Done badly, they’re dozens of near-identical pages with the town name swapped out, and they rarely achieve much beyond making the website harder to maintain.
Here’s how to tell the difference.
First, do you actually need them?
Location pages make most sense when one of these is true:
- You have physical branches or offices in different places. Each should have its own page, and ideally its own Google Business Profile linked to it.
- You serve a wide area and have genuinely different things to say about working in each place, such as local projects, local staff or area-specific issues.
- Customers in different areas search and buy differently, for example different property types, regulations or seasonal demand.
If you’re a single-premises business covering a handful of nearby towns, a clear “areas we cover” section on your service pages and a well-set-up service area in your Google Business Profile may be enough. More pages isn’t automatically better.
Three common mistakes
Mistake one: the find-and-replace page
This is the classic. One page is written, then copied fifty times with the town name changed. Google’s guidance on spam specifically mentions “doorway” pages: pages created to rank for similar searches that funnel people to the same place without adding value. Mass-produced location pages are a textbook example.
At best, Google ignores most of them. At worst, they drag down how the site is seen overall. They also do nothing for the reader, who can tell straight away that the page wasn’t written for them.
Mistake two: writing about the town, not the service
The opposite problem is padding each page with tourist-guide filler. “Southport is a seaside town known for its pier and Lord Street.” Your customer already knows. They want to know whether you can fix their problem, how quickly, and whether you’ve done it nearby before.
Mistake three: pages for places you don’t really serve
Creating pages for towns forty miles away, in the hope of picking up work there, tends to disappoint. Local results lean heavily on the searcher’s proximity to the business, and a web page can’t change where you are. If you’d rather not travel there, don’t create the page.
A good location page would still be worth reading if search engines didn’t exist. If it only makes sense as a ranking trick, it probably won’t work as one either.
What a good location page includes
Each page should contain information that’s specific to that place and useful to someone there. Depending on your business, that could be:
- Real local work. Genuine examples of jobs in that area, with photos, described briefly. Only use real ones.
- Reviews from customers in that area, where you have them and are able to show them.
- Practical details. Typical response times, whether there’s a call-out charge, parking or access notes, the team who covers the area.
- Local specifics that affect the job. Common property types, conservation areas, coastal weather, hard water. Whatever genuinely changes the work.
- For branches: address, map, opening hours, local phone number, staff, directions and parking.
- Clear links to the relevant service pages and a simple way to get in touch.
If you can’t come up with at least a few genuinely different things to say about a location, that’s a strong sign the page shouldn’t exist yet.
How to structure them on your site
- Create a simple “Areas we cover” page listing and linking to each location page.
- Keep URLs tidy and consistent, for example /areas/formby/.
- Link from each location page to your main services, and from service pages to relevant locations where it’s natural.
- If you have several branches, link each Google Business Profile to its own location page rather than the homepage.
- Start with your most important areas. Five good pages beat thirty thin ones.
What about service plus location pages?
Some businesses create pages like “boiler repair in Crosby” for every service and every town. Multiply ten services by twenty towns and you have two hundred pages, almost all thin. For most small businesses this is a bad trade. If there’s a particular service and area combination that’s genuinely important and you have plenty to say about it, one well-built page can make sense. Build those individually, based on real demand, not as a grid.
Reviewing what you already have
If your site already has a stack of templated location pages, check Search Console for which ones actually get impressions and clicks. Improve the ones that matter, and consider merging or removing the ones that don’t, redirecting their URLs to a sensible alternative. It feels counterintuitive, but trimming thin pages can make a site easier for Google to understand.
Need help with multiple locations?
If you’ve got several branches or a large service area, our multi-location marketing service covers location pages and profiles together. For single-site businesses, it’s usually part of our local SEO work.
