How many location pages should I have?

As many towns as you can describe with genuinely different, locally specific content, and no more. If you serve twelve towns but can only write real detail about four of them today, publish four. A thin page for the other eight does nothing for you and can be read as doorway spam, which risks the pages that do work.

Is it a doorway page if I just change the town name?

Yes. A set of near-identical pages with only the place name swapped is the textbook case Google uses, and since September 2024 it sits under a spam policy labelled doorway abuse. The test is whether you could regenerate the page with find-and-replace. If you could, a classifier can spot it too.

Do I need a physical address in every town to rank there?

No, but you do need to genuinely serve the area and say so clearly. Google leans on proximity for local results, so you will always rank strongest near where you actually are. A service-area business can still earn a town page by describing real work there, real reviews and a clear travel radius, rather than faking an address, which breaks the guidelines.

What should the reviews on a local page be?

Reviews from customers in that town or the neighbouring areas, named by neighbourhood where you can do it without exposing anyone. A review that mentions a specific estate or job does more work than a five-star quote that could be from anywhere. Pull them from your Google Business Profile so they match your public reputation.

Where do the FAQ questions come from?

The questions people in that place actually ask you, not questions you invent to fit keywords. Check your call notes, your inbox and your quote conversations for that area. Local quirks, parking, access, a conservation rule, a common fault in that building stock, make the best questions because no competitor's template will have them.

Will more town pages always mean more traffic?

No, and assuming so is how sites get into trouble. Volume only helps when each page is genuinely useful on its own. Past that point you are adding thin pages that compete with each other and can pull down the credibility of the whole domain, so a few strong pages beat a pile of spun ones.

What should a local landing page actually say?

Updated September 30, 2026 · 8 minute read

The short answer

Say the things only someone who works in that town would know: the neighbourhoods you cover, the jobs common there, reviews from those streets, an embedded map, and answers to what locals actually ask. A page that just swaps the town name into one template is a doorway page, and Google treats those as spam.

What Google sees when you spin up 30 town pages

The pattern is easy, which is why it is everywhere. You serve twelve towns, so you build twelve pages: write one, swap the place name in. Chester becomes Wrexham, the H1 changes, the phone number stays. By Friday you have a page for every town on your van's route.

Google has a name for this. It calls them doorway pages, and in September 2024 it folded them into a spam policy it now labels doorway abuse. The definition is a set of near-identical pages built to rank for the same service across different places, existing to catch traffic rather than help the person who lands there. Google's John Mueller has said plainly that generating city landing pages by bolting a town onto a keyword is against the guidelines.

The tell is simple. If you could regenerate the whole page by find-and-replacing one word, so can a spam classifier. Thin location pages do not just fail to rank. They can drag down the credibility of the rest of your site with them.

The same page, spun and earned

It helps to see the difference side by side, because the spun version always looks reasonable on its own. The problem is only visible across the set.

A spun page says: "We are the leading roofer in [Town]. Our expert team offers roofing services in [Town] and surrounding areas. Contact us today for a free quote in [Town]." It is grammatical, on-topic, and says nothing. Ten of them say nothing ten times.

An earned page says: "Most of our Prestwich work is on the terraced Victorian stock off Bury New Road, where the original slate has usually gone twice and the valleys fail first. We keep reclaimed Welsh slate to match, because the conservation officer for that patch will ask." One paragraph, and it could not be about anywhere else.

How to tell which one you have written

Could you swap the town name and have it still read true? If yes, it is spun.
Does it name a real street, estate or landmark a resident would recognise?
Does it describe a job specific to the building stock or trade in that place?
Would a local read it and think the writer has actually worked there?
Is there anything on the page that is not on your other town pages?

The parts a real local page is built from

A page that earns its place is not longer than a spun one. It is more specific. Every block below exists to prove, to a reader and to a search engine, that you operate in this place rather than merely wanting the traffic from it.

None of this is padding. Each element answers a question the visitor already has, which is also what Google rewards: pages that satisfy the person who arrives, not pages built to be arrived at.

What belongs on the page

Genuinely different body copy per town, written about that town rather than templated around it.
An embedded map centred on the area you cover, so the visitor can place you.
Reviews from customers in that town or its neighbours, named by area where you can.
An FAQ built from the questions locals in that place actually ask you.
Clear contact details, service list, hours, and how far out you travel.
Internal links to your related service pages and to any nearby-town pages that are also real.

Write the things only a local would know

This is the whole job, and it is the part most pages skip. The specifics that make a page unrepeatable are the same specifics that make it useful, and you already have them in your head from doing the work.

Name neighbourhoods and estates, not just the town. Name the landmark everyone gives directions from. Describe the jobs that recur there, because the building stock, the soil, the age of the drains and the local rules genuinely differ street to street. A plumber knows which estates were built on the same run of pipework. A roofer knows which conservation area will reject anything but natural slate. Put that on the page.

Specifics worth naming

The neighbourhoods, estates and postcodes you actually work in.
The building stock and the faults it is prone to, by area.
The jobs that come up most in that town, and roughly what they run to.
Parking, access or permit quirks that affect how you quote or turn up.
Local rules, a conservation area or a council requirement, that shape the work.

A template that scales without becoming spam

You can still work from a structure. The rule is that the structure is shared and the substance is not. Keep the skeleton consistent so pages are quick to build and easy to read, then fill every content slot with material that could only have been written about that one place.

In practice that means a shared layout with per-town fields you are not allowed to leave on the default. If a town does not yet have real reviews, a real map pin, and at least a few hundred words of genuinely local detail, it does not get a page yet. A missing page ranks nowhere, which is neutral. A thin page can be counted against you, which is worse than nothing.

Build them at the speed you can make them real, not the speed you can clone them. Three towns you genuinely serve, described properly, will out-rank thirty spun ones and will not put the rest of the site at risk.

The shared skeleton, filled per town

H1 naming the service and the town, in sentence case.
An opening paragraph about your work in that specific place, written first rather than last.
Two or three real local jobs or scenarios, with the detail that pins them to that area.
The map, the area-specific reviews and the local FAQ.
Contact, hours, service list and travel radius.
Internal links to the matching service page and to genuinely related town pages.

Wire the page into the rest of the site

A local page sitting on its own is a weaker signal than the same page linked sensibly into your site. Link each town page to the service page it belongs under, and link the service page back out to the towns. Where two towns are genuinely adjacent and you serve both, link them, because that mirrors how you work and how someone nearby will search.

Keep the contact and service details consistent with your Google Business Profile. For local ranking, Google weighs relevance, prominence and proximity, and mismatched hours, addresses or service descriptions across your site and profile chip away at all three. The page and the profile should tell the same story, because they describe the same business.

Common questions

How many location pages should I have?: As many towns as you can describe with genuinely different, locally specific content, and no more. If you serve twelve towns but can only write real detail about four of them today, publish four. A thin page for the other eight does nothing for you and can be read as doorway spam, which risks the pages that do work.
Is it a doorway page if I just change the town name?: Yes. A set of near-identical pages with only the place name swapped is the textbook case Google uses, and since September 2024 it sits under a spam policy labelled doorway abuse. The test is whether you could regenerate the page with find-and-replace. If you could, a classifier can spot it too.
Do I need a physical address in every town to rank there?: No, but you do need to genuinely serve the area and say so clearly. Google leans on proximity for local results, so you will always rank strongest near where you actually are. A service-area business can still earn a town page by describing real work there, real reviews and a clear travel radius, rather than faking an address, which breaks the guidelines.
What should the reviews on a local page be?: Reviews from customers in that town or the neighbouring areas, named by neighbourhood where you can do it without exposing anyone. A review that mentions a specific estate or job does more work than a five-star quote that could be from anywhere. Pull them from your Google Business Profile so they match your public reputation.
Where do the FAQ questions come from?: The questions people in that place actually ask you, not questions you invent to fit keywords. Check your call notes, your inbox and your quote conversations for that area. Local quirks, parking, access, a conservation rule, a common fault in that building stock, make the best questions because no competitor's template will have them.
Will more town pages always mean more traffic?: No, and assuming so is how sites get into trouble. Volume only helps when each page is genuinely useful on its own. Past that point you are adding thin pages that compete with each other and can pull down the credibility of the whole domain, so a few strong pages beat a pile of spun ones.