What is a location page, and when is it worth having one?
A location page is a page about your work in one specific town, and it is worth having when you do enough work in that town to fill it with things that are true of nowhere else. A gardener based in Chippenham who does half their work in Corsham, Calne and Melksham has a website that only ever says Chippenham. Someone searching “gardener in Corsham” finds nothing, because “and surrounding areas” is not a page about Corsham.
That is the real case for these pages and it has not changed. What has changed, or at least what most advice on this subject still gets wrong, is the volume. The standard recommendation you will find elsewhere is to build a page for every town you would drive to. That is the recipe for a doorway page, and Google names it in its spam policies.
What you need before you start. Access to edit your website, or whoever edits it for you. A realistic list of the towns you regularly work in, not the ones you would theoretically travel to. Photos from jobs in those areas if you have any — phone photos are fine. Reckon on an hour or two per page. This is a writing job, not a technical one.
What Google’s spam policies actually say about doorway pages
They define the practice in two sentences, and most bulk town-page advice describes it almost exactly. Google’s web search spam policies, last updated 28 August 2026 and checked on 15 September 2026, carry a section headed Doorway abuse:
“Doorway abuse is when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that aren’t as useful as the final destination.”
It then lists four examples. Two of them are what a town-page plugin does:
- “Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.”
- “Creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy.”
Read the first one again. Twenty pages, one per town, each a paragraph of nothing with a button pointing at the same contact form: that is “pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page”. The policy is not describing a shady tactic from 2012. It is describing the standard local SEO package.
A correction worth noting. Google renamed this section. Older advice, and the earlier version of this guide, calls them “doorway pages”, which is still how people search for the term. The current policy heading is “Doorway abuse”. Nothing about the substance changed, but if you go looking for a page headed “doorway pages” on Google’s site, you will not find one.
The second policy that catches town pages
The same document has a section on scaled content abuse, which is “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users”, and whose first listed example is “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users”. If the plan is to ask an AI tool for forty town pages, that is the policy, quoted.
And there is a third, which catches the footer rather than the pages. Google’s definition of keyword stuffing includes the example “blocks of text that list cities and regions that a web page is trying to rank for”. The forty-town list in the footer is that example.
What actually happens if you are on the wrong side of it
Google states that “sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all”, and that it detects violations “both through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action”. A manual action is a human decision that appears as a notice in Search Console.
Be clear about the likely outcome, though, because the scare stories oversell it. A manual action against a five-page plumber’s website is rare. The ordinary result is duller: the pages are crawled, judged near-identical, and never rank for anything. There is no separate “duplicate content penalty” in Google’s documentation, so be suspicious of anyone who says there is. The risk is the policies above, plus the plain fact that thin pages do not compete.
The test: is this a location page or a doorway page?
One test, applied to a finished draft: cover up every mention of the town name and read the page. If it could be about anywhere else you work, it is a doorway page. That is it. It takes thirty seconds and it is more reliable than any checklist.
If you want something more diagnostic, count the sentences that would become false if you swapped the town. On a page that earns its place you should find six or seven: a named job, a street or estate, an access note, a travel pattern, something about the local building stock, a review from someone who lives there. On a doorway page you will find one, the heading.
The other half of the test is the reader. Google’s definition turns on pages that are “not as useful as the final destination” — meaning the visitor would have been better off somewhere else on your site. So ask: does someone in this town learn anything here they could not learn from the service page? If the honest answer is no, the honest fix is to delete the page and name the town properly on the service page instead.
How many location pages should a small business have?
Between none and three, for most of the small businesses I look at. That is a smaller number than you will read anywhere else, so here is the reasoning.
- One town, customers come to you: none. A hairdresser with a salon in Harrogate needs no location pages at all. The homepage, the service pages and the Google Business Profile all name Harrogate, and that is the whole job. Building “Hairdresser in Knaresborough” will not put you in the map pack in Knaresborough, for reasons in the next section.
- One base, a genuine second and third patch: one or two. Write the page for the town where you already do real work and have photographs, not the one you wish you worked in.
- Genuinely mobile, no premises, work spread across a district: three to five. This is the case where these pages do the most, and it is covered below.
- More than five: only if you have the material. The constraint is never ambition, it is evidence. If you cannot talk about a town for five minutes without pausing, you cannot write the page yet.
Villages almost never justify their own page. Hardly anyone searches “plumber in Lacock”, and someone in Lacock searches for the nearest town anyway. Group them into the town page: “We cover Corsham, Box, Lacock and the villages between.” One honest sentence instead of three empty pages.
If you are not sure which towns to start with, Google Search Console will tell you. Its performance report shows the searches your site already appears for, town names included. A town where you are flickering on to page three with no page about it is your first candidate, because the demand is already proven.
What a service-area business with no shop front should do differently
Start with the Google Business Profile, because it covers up to 20 towns without a single new web page, and a location page cannot do what it does. Google’s help page for service-area and hybrid businesses, checked on 15 September 2026, sets out the rules:
- “You can set up to 20 service areas based on the cities, postcodes or other areas that you serve.”
- “The boundaries of your overall area shouldn’t be more than about two hours of driving time from where your business is based.”
- “You can’t set your service area as a radius distance around your business.” If you set one that way years ago, you cannot edit it — you have to specify cities, postcodes or named areas instead.
- A service-area business “can only have one profile for the whole area that they serve”, and if you do not serve customers at your address, Google tells you to remove the address from the profile.
Those last two matter more than the cap. You cannot open twelve profiles for twelve towns, and a profile showing a home address nobody visits is against Google’s guidelines for representing your business, which ask you to “make sure that your address and/or service area is accurate and precise”. Getting the profile right is the highest-value hour available to a mobile business: how to set up a Google Business Profile.
Why a location page will not get you into the map pack
Because the map results are not decided by your website. Google’s guidance on local ranking says “local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity”, and defines distance as “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching”. Your address is fixed. No amount of writing changes it.
This is the honest limit of the whole exercise, and almost nobody says it: a location page competes in the ordinary blue-link results, not in the map pack. If a searcher twenty miles away only looks at the three map results, your page will not reach them. What it can win is everything below the map pack, the searches with a question attached, and the answers an AI assistant builds by reading pages rather than measuring distance. A real prize, but a different one.
What actually differs from town to town
Six things, reliably, and none of them is the adjective in front of your company name. This table is the difference between a page that survives and a page that gets filtered out.
| What changes | What it looks like on the page | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Real jobs done there | “Hedge reduction on Pound Pill, an overgrown plot cleared for turf out towards Neston” | Nobody else can write this sentence. It is the strongest thing on the page. |
| Travel time and pattern | “Twenty-five minutes from us; we are usually in the area on Tuesdays and Fridays” | Answers the question every customer actually has: will you come, and when. |
| Building types and local conditions | “A lot of the older stone terraces here have no cavity, so the fix is different” | Proves you have worked on their kind of property, not just in their postcode. |
| Parking and access | “The lanes off the High Street are narrow, so we bring the smaller van” | Practical, specific, and impossible to fake from a desk. |
| Actual postcodes and areas covered | “SN13 and the villages around it: Box, Lacock, Gastard” | Matches how people describe where they live, and keeps the villages out of separate thin pages. |
| Photos taken in that town | Two or three job photos with a recognisable local backdrop | The one element that cannot be templated at all. |
And what does not change, which is most of what people put on these pages: your qualifications, your insurance, your guarantee, your years trading, your process, your promise of a friendly reliable service. Keep them by all means, but they contribute nothing to whether the page is a location page or a doorway page. They are identical on every version.
A worked example: one electrician, three towns
Take an electrician based in Chippenham who genuinely works in Corsham, Calne and Melksham. Here is exactly what differs across the three pages and what is copied verbatim.
| Corsham | Calne | Melksham | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heading | Electrician in Corsham | Electrician in Calne | Electrician in Melksham |
| Travel | 15 minutes; in the town most weeks | 20 minutes; usually Wednesdays | 25 minutes; booked a week ahead |
| Housing and what it means | Older Bath stone terraces, a lot of rewires where the consumer unit is under the stairs | Big 1970s and 1980s estates, mostly consumer unit upgrades and EV charger installs on driveways | Newer estates plus riverside properties, where RCD tripping after damp is the common call |
| Named jobs | Full rewire on Pound Pill; EICR for a landlord on the High Street | Three EV chargers on the same estate last spring; shop lighting on the Strand | Fuse board replacement off Spa Road; garden office supply near the canal |
| Access note | Narrow lanes, park on the street, no van access to some rear gardens | Driveway parking on most estates, straightforward | Flood-risk properties need the consumer unit position checking |
| Postcodes and villages | SN13, Box, Gastard | SN11, Derry Hill, Cherhill | SN12, Shaw, Beanacre |
| Review quoted | From a Corsham customer | From a Calne customer | From a Melksham customer |
| Photos | Two from the Pound Pill rewire | One EV charger install | None yet — add after the next job |
| Identical on all three: 18th Edition qualification, NICEIC registration, public liability cover, free written quotes, the two-year workmanship guarantee, the contact form, the phone number, the services list. | |||
Seven of the eight rows differ, and every difference is a fact he already knows. That is 350 to 500 words per page, and it took a conversation, not a copywriter. Notice too that the Melksham page is honestly weaker: no photos yet, fewer named jobs. That is a sign the pages are real. Three equally strong pages usually means a template.
A structure you can follow
- Heading: service and town, nothing else. “Electrician in Corsham”. The single most important line on the page.
- Opening paragraph: how long you have worked there, how often you are there, what you mostly do there. Three true sentences.
- The local detail: the six things from the table above. This is the body of the page and the reason it exists.
- Services you offer there, each one linked to its own service page. The location page is not the place to explain the work itself.
- Photos and a review from that town.
- Trust and contact: qualifications, insurance, guarantee, and a clear way to get in touch.
Give it a plain web address like /electrician-corsham or /areas/corsham, and write it its own page title and meta description. One town written properly, then the next one on another day. Writing all five in one sitting from a shared skeleton is how copy-paste pages happen, every time.
Already have thin town pages? How to fix them
Improve them rather than delete them, at about twenty minutes a page, weakest first. Most sites built in bulk arrive with a set of these and they are usually the cheapest meaningful improvement available, because the pages already exist and are already indexed.
Take the weakest one and ask one question: what is actually different about working in that town? There is always an answer. The housing is older, so the wiring needs updating more often. It is your furthest patch, so you batch jobs on Thursdays. You did the flat roof on the pub. Parking is dreadful, so you quote accordingly. Write that down, add a named job or two, and the page stops being a duplicate.
Delete a page only in one case: when you do not work in that town and have no plan to. A page for somewhere you have never been cannot be rescued by editing, because there is nothing true to add.
If you use an AI tool to help, use it on your words, not instead of them. Talk through a town, record what you say, and let the tool tidy it into paragraphs. That is not scaled content abuse, because the substance is yours and it is true. Asking for “twenty location pages for a plumber in Wiltshire” is the policy quoted above, and the pages will read like it.
How to link them in, and how to tell whether they are working
Pages nothing links to rarely get found, so link them from the menu or footer under “Areas we cover”, and from the service pages. Where your rewiring page says you cover Corsham, Calne and Melksham, make each town name a link, and link back the other way. Then request indexing for each new page in Search Console; if you have IndexNow set up for Bing, Bing finds out on its own.
The measure is specific: does each page start appearing for your service plus that town? In Search Console’s performance report, filter by page and select one location page. You will see the exact searches it appears for and how often it is clicked. Expect the first movement within a few weeks, and judge it properly after two or three months.
Two readings tell you what to do next. Impressions but no clicks means a better title and description, not more content. No impressions at all after a couple of months means more genuine local detail, or the page should not have been written. If nothing on the site shows up, the problem is bigger than town pages: why isn’t my website showing on Google.
These pages also compound in a way few things on a website do. Every job in a town gives you another sentence and another photograph for that town’s page. The businesses that win service-plus-town searches are almost never the ones who built thirty pages in a weekend. They are the ones with four pages that have been quietly growing for three years.
Common questions
- What is a location page?
- A page about your business's work in one specific town, such as "Garden maintenance in Corsham" or "Electrician in Burton Latimer". It exists because people search with a place attached, and a homepage that says "and surrounding areas" gives that search nothing to match. A location page only works if it contains things that are true of that town and nowhere else: real jobs, real streets, real travel notes, photographs taken there.
- What are doorway pages in SEO?
- Google's spam policies define the practice, under the heading Doorway abuse, as when "sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that aren't as useful as the final destination." One of its listed examples is "having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page". Town pages that all say the same thing and push everyone to one contact form are the example, almost word for word. Checked 15 September 2026.
- How many location pages should I create?
- For most small service businesses, between none and three. If you work in one town, none: your service pages and your Google Business Profile do the whole job. If you genuinely work across several towns, write a page for the one or two you could talk about for five minutes without pausing, and stop there. Thirty thin pages are a liability. Three real ones are an asset, and you can always add a fourth when you have done enough work somewhere to fill it.
- Will Google penalise me for duplicate town pages?
- There is no specific duplicate content penalty, but there are two spam policies that near-identical town pages can fall under: doorway abuse, and scaled content abuse, which covers "many pages generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users". Google says sites that violate its policies "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all", and that enforcement can come through automated systems or a human manual action. The realistic outcome for most small sites is quieter: the pages simply never rank.
- How many service areas can you have on Google Business Profile?
- Twenty. Google's help page for service-area and hybrid businesses says "you can set up to 20 service areas based on the cities, postcodes or other areas that you serve", and adds that "the boundaries of your overall area shouldn't be more than about two hours of driving time from where your business is based". You cannot set it as a radius any more; it has to be cities, postcodes or named areas. A service-area business is also allowed only one profile for the whole area it serves. Checked 15 September 2026.
- Are location pages the same as service pages?
- No, and they answer different searches. A service page is about one job, usually anchored to your home town: boiler repair, rewires, end of tenancy cleaning. A location page is about your work in one town and may cover several services there. They should link to each other. If you only have time for one kind, write the service pages first, because a location page with nothing to link to is a signpost pointing at an empty field.
- Do location pages work for mobile businesses like dog walkers or mobile hairdressers?
- Yes, and they matter more here than almost anywhere else. Customers search mobile services with a town attached, because they need someone who comes to them. A business with no premises also gets less help from map results, since Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and distance is measured from the searcher to the business. For a mobile business, the website page is often the only thing that can carry a town name at all.
- What if I don't have photos from every area?
- Publish without them and add them as jobs come up. A phone photo taken before you pack up is exactly the habit that makes these pages stronger over the years. In the meantime, lean on the details you do have: named jobs, streets you know, access and parking notes, reviews from customers in that town. Never use a stock photo of somewhere else, because people recognise their own town and they will know.
Related guides
Sources, all checked 15 September 2026. Doorway abuse, scaled content abuse, keyword stuffing and the enforcement wording: Google Search Central, “Spam policies for Google web search”, page states last updated 28 August 2026. The 20 service areas cap, the two hours of driving time guideline, the end of radius service areas and the one-profile rule: Google Business Profile Help, “Manage your service areas for service-area and hybrid businesses”. “Make sure that your address and/or service area is accurate and precise”: Google Business Profile Help, “Guidelines for representing your business on Google”. Relevance, distance and popularity: Google Business Profile Help, “Tips to improve your local ranking on Google”. The real search phrasings behind the headings and questions on this page came from 1,114 Google UK autocomplete probes run on 15 September 2026 across 28 seed phrases with alphabet and modifier expansion, returning 626 unique predictions. Neither Google nor Bing publishes search volumes for those predictions, so no volume figures are quoted here; the predictions show that a phrasing is searched, not how often. The towns, jobs and postcodes in the worked example are illustrative, not a real client.