The pitch you have probably heard
"We will build you a page for every town you cover, so you rank everywhere." It sounds sensible. If one page ranks for Oldham, thirty pages should rank for thirty towns.
Then somebody generates thirty pages that are word for word identical except the town name, and links them from a list in the footer. This is one of the most widely sold pieces of SEO work in the trades, and it is the one most likely to do harm.
We build three area pages for our own site, not thirty, and we have talked clients out of the bigger number. This guide argues against work we could easily charge for.
Why it fails
Google has a name for pages created mainly to funnel search traffic rather than to help anyone: doorway pages. Its spam policies describe them as multiple sites or pages targeting specific regions or cities that funnel users to one destination. Thirty templated town pages is close to the textbook definition.
The consequences range from mild to serious:
- Most likely: the pages simply do not rank. Google indexes a couple, treats the rest as duplicates, and ignores them
- Common: they compete with each other and with your main service page, so nothing ranks well
- Worst case: a manual action for spammy content, which affects the whole site rather than the offending pages
Even in the mild case you have paid for thirty pages that do nothing, and diluted your own site in the process.
The test that settles it
Ask one question about a proposed town page:
Would this page still be worth reading if the town name were removed?
If yes, it has real content and deserves to exist. If removing the town leaves generic filler, you do not have a location page, you have a template with a variable in it.
A second, blunter test: put two of your town pages side by side and count the sentences that differ. If the answer is one, so will Google's.
How to do it properly
Local pages absolutely can work. They have to earn their place.
Fewer pages, real content
Three genuinely different pages beat thirty templated ones. Pick the towns where you actually do most of your work.
Write about the place, not just in it
Every town has a different market. One is saturated with competitors. Another has businesses that are barely online. A third is full of footfall trade with no website. That difference is your content, and it cannot be generated.
Include things only a local would know
- The neighbourhoods and villages within that town you actually cover
- Housing stock, which genuinely matters for trades. Victorian terraces and 1990s estates need different work
- Real jobs you have done there, with detail
- A review from a customer in that town
- Parking, access, travel time, anything practical
Add one town at a time, when you earn it
The honest sequence is to do work in a town, collect a review and a photo, then write the page around it. A page with real local proof outperforms twenty generated ones, and it cannot be replicated by a competitor buying the same package.
If you cannot write four hundred words about working in a town without repeating your other pages, you are not ready for that page yet. Cover the area from your main service page instead.
What to do instead of thirty pages
- Sort your Google Business Profile. For local searches this outranks everything on your website. Set your service area to the towns you cover and you appear in map results without a single extra page
- Name your towns naturally on your main service pages. A sentence listing where you work does much of the job
- Build one strong area page for the town you most want work in. See whether it performs before building a second
- Create an areas hub listing everywhere you cover, in text, without spawning a page each. That is exactly what we do
- Get reviews mentioning locations. A customer writing "came out to Royton same day" is local signal you did not have to write
If you already have thirty of them
Do not panic, and do not delete everything at once.
- Identify the handful that get any traffic at all. Search Console will tell you in a minute
- Improve those with genuine local content
- Consolidate the rest into one areas page, and 301 redirect the old URLs to it rather than leaving them to 404
- Check for a manual action in Search Console under Security and Manual Actions. If there is one, fix the pages before requesting a review
Consolidation almost always improves things. Fewer, better pages concentrate the value rather than spreading it across thirty thin ones.
Ours are here if you want to see the difference in practice: Manchester is about competing in a saturated market, Oldham is about competitors being invisible, and Bury is about footfall trade with no website. Three towns, three genuinely different arguments, plus one hub covering everywhere else. Related reading: what local SEO actually is.