The location pages we get asked to fix are nearly always one page copied fifteen times with the town name swapped. “Looking for a reliable plumber in Lennox Head? Our Lennox Head plumbers…” and then the identical paragraph for Alstonville, Wollongbar, Byron Bay and Lismore. Google has a name for this, and it’s in the spam policies.
That doesn’t make location pages a bad idea. Done properly, they’re among the most useful pages a service business can have, for customers as much as for search. The difference is whether the page would still be worth reading if Google didn’t exist.
What Google objects to
Google’s spam policies describe doorway abuse as sites or pages “created to rank for specific, similar search queries” that send people to intermediate pages less useful than the final destination. One of the listed examples is having “multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page”.
Read that closely. The problem isn’t having a page about Ballina. It’s a page that exists only to catch a search and push people somewhere else, or one so similar to its siblings that it adds nothing. The same policy page covers scaled content abuse, which is where forty AI-generated suburb pages now sit.
In practice, copy-paste location pages mostly go one of two ways. Usually Google ignores them: they sit in Search Console as “Crawled – currently not indexed” or “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” and never earn an impression. Less often, a site leans on them so hard that the whole site seems to suffer. Neither outcome is worth the afternoon it took to make them.
The test: would this page exist without Google?
Before you create a location page, ask whether you’d be happy for a customer in that town to read it. Then ask what it tells them that your service page doesn’t.
Good answers sound like this. You have an office, clinic or depot there with its own address, hours and phone number. You do a lot of work there and can show it with jobs, photos and local reviews. Something about the service is genuinely different there, such as travel fees, response times, the age of the housing or which days you’re in town. Or you run visiting clinics there on set days.
A bad answer is “we want to rank there”. That’s a reason, but it isn’t content.
Two kinds of location page
A real location, where you have premises
This is the easy case. A practice with clinics in two towns, or a business with a shopfront and a separate workshop, should have a page for each site. Each needs the full address, a map, opening hours, parking and access notes, the phone number for that location, who works there, photos of the actual building, and which services are offered there (they’re often not identical).
Each premises should also have its own Google Business Profile, and the website link on that profile should point to its location page rather than the homepage. These pages almost write themselves, because the information really is different.
A service area, where you travel
Harder. If you’re a tradie based in Ballina working across the Northern Rivers, you have no address in Byron Bay, so the page has to earn its place some other way.
Be realistic about what it can do. A location page rarely gets you into the Google map results in a town where you have no address, because those results lean heavily on where the business is. What it can do is rank in the ordinary results below the map for searches like “concrete resurfacing Byron Bay”, and reassure someone that yes, you really do come out their way.
What to put on a service-area page
This is the material that makes a page specific. You won’t have all of it for every town, and that’s the point: if you can only fill one or two of these for a town, it probably doesn’t need its own page yet.
- Jobs you’ve done there. Two or three short write-ups with photos: the problem, what you did, the suburb (never the customer’s street address). This is the best thing you can put on a location page.
- Local reviews. Reviews from customers in that town, embedded from Google or quoted with permission.
- Travel and timing. “We’re in Lismore most Tuesdays and Thursdays” or “No travel charge within 30 minutes of Ballina, and we’ll quote travel upfront beyond that.” Only what’s true for your business.
- Local conditions that change the job. Older fibro homes, salt exposure near the beach, flood-affected properties, acreage with long cable runs, steep blocks. Write about what you actually see on jobs there.
- Local processes. If your work involves council approvals, say which council covers that town and link to its website rather than paraphrasing rules that change.
- Who to contact. If one team member looks after that area, introduce them.
Then link to the relevant service pages, and back to a central “Areas we service” page. If your service pages are thin, fix those first. They do most of the heavy lifting, and our guide to one page per service explains why.
Before and after
This is the kind of opening we replace on almost every site we audit.
Before: “Are you looking for the best concrete resurfacing in Alstonville? Our Alstonville concrete experts provide quality concrete resurfacing services to Alstonville residents. Call our Alstonville team today!”
After (as a concrete business might write it from its own job history): “We resurface a lot of driveways and pool surrounds around Alstonville and Wollongbar. Many of the slabs we see up here are decades old, with hairline cracks and mould worked into the surface, so most jobs start with a proper grind and crack repair before any sealer goes down. A few recent jobs are below.”
The first version uses the town name five times and tells the reader nothing. The second uses it once and shows you know the area. It also naturally picks up the related words people search, like driveway, pool surround and sealing, without trying.
How many location pages to start with
Fewer than you think. Start with the three to five towns where you already get the most work and can fill a page with real jobs. Add others as you complete work there, not all at once.
To pick them, open the Performance report in Search Console and filter queries containing each town name. Towns that already bring impressions are where a dedicated page has the best chance. Our article on keyword research without paid tools covers this and other free ways to find out what locals search.
Building them so they’re easy to keep up
On WordPress we build location pages from a shared Elementor template, so the layout, enquiry form and trust badges stay consistent while the words on each page are written separately. For a business with many premises, a custom post type with fields for address, hours and phone keeps the data tidy and makes the schema easier to generate. Our article on dynamic content in Elementor Pro walks through that set-up. A shared template is fine. Shared paragraphs aren’t.
The technical basics are simple enough to do on any site:
- Use clean addresses such as
/areas/byron-bay/or/locations/lismore/. - Link every location page from the “Areas we service” page and from the menu or footer, so none are orphaned.
- Write a separate title tag and meta description for each, mentioning the service and town naturally.
- Add LocalBusiness schema only for real premises. Never invent an address in a town you just visit.
If you already have a stack of copy-paste pages
Don’t delete everything overnight. Check Search Console for which location pages get impressions and clicks, and keep and rewrite those. For the rest, either rewrite them with real material or remove them and set a 301 redirect from each to the most relevant service or areas page, so old links and bookmarks still land somewhere sensible.
Then choose the three towns you most want work from, and start taking photos on every job there. Six months of real jobs is better location page material than anything you could write today.
Sorting out which pages to keep, merge or rewrite is a common first job in our SEO work, and on a new website build we set the structure up so it scales without turning into a doorway farm.