Local landing pages that are not thin doorway pages

Every business that serves more than one town eventually receives the same advice: build a page for each one.

It is tempting because it is easy. Take the service page, swap "Kettering" for "Corby", repeat forty times. It is also the most reliable way to produce pages Google's own spam policies describe — doorway pages, created for search engines rather than users, funnelling people to the same destination.

The tactic is not wrong because it is local. It is wrong because of *what most people build*. There is a version that works, and the difference is not subtle once you see it.

What makes a page a doorway page

Google's spam policies describe doorway pages as sites or pages created to rank for specific similar queries, where the pages lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.

The practical test, which you can apply to your own pages honestly:

If someone in Corby read your Corby page and someone in Kettering read your Kettering page, would either learn anything the other did not?

If the answer is no — if the only difference is the place name and a rearranged sentence — you have not made two pages. You have made one page and forty copies with a variable in it. The reader gains nothing from theirs existing, which is precisely the definition.

A second test that catches the near-miss: could you delete the town name and still tell which page you were on? If not, the page contains no local information.

Why the thin version fails on its own terms

Set the policy aside for a moment. The tactic underperforms even where it is not penalised, for three reasons worth knowing.

It does not touch the map results. Location pages are web pages, ranked by the ordinary system. The map results are ranked from your Business Profile, and no quantity of location pages affects them. Most local searches with immediate intent are answered by the map, so the tactic aims at the smaller prize. How the local pack differs from organic results sets out why.

The pages compete with each other. Forty near-identical pages targeting near-identical queries is a textbook cannibalisation problem — Google has to pick one, the signals split across all of them, and none of them is strong.

They convert badly. A visitor who arrives on a page that clearly does not know anything about their town notices. Generic reassurance about "proudly serving Corby" reads exactly as automated as it is.

What a location page needs to earn its place

The rule is simple to state and genuinely demanding: the page must contain something true about that place that is not true about the others.

That is the whole standard. Everything below is a way to satisfy it.

Work you have actually done there

The strongest material and the most under-used. Jobs completed, with specifics: the street or district, what the problem was, what it cost roughly, what was unusual about it. Photographs of your own work. Named local landmarks near the job, because they are true.

A firm that has worked in a town for six years has more genuinely local content than it can use, sitting in its job records.

Things that are actually different about serving there

Travel time and whether you charge for it. Parking or access constraints. The housing stock — a town of Victorian terraces creates different plumbing work from an estate built in 2015. Local regulations, conservation areas, permit requirements. Which of your services are most requested there.

People from there

Reviews and testimonials from customers in that town, attributed to the town. Real ones, not invented — a location page with fabricated testimonials is a worse problem than a thin one.

Practical local detail

Where you are relative to them, how long you take to arrive, which parts of the town you cover and which you do not. A map. Genuinely local contact detail if you have one.

What it should not contain

A paragraph about the history of the town copied from an encyclopedia. Everyone does this, it fools nobody, and it is the clearest signal that the page had nothing real to say.

How many pages should you actually build?

Fewer than you want to.

The honest rule: build a location page only where you have enough real material to fill one. For most businesses that is a handful of places — the ones they genuinely work in most — not every town within an hour's drive.

| Situation | Build a page? | |---|---| | You work there weekly, have photos, reviews, completed jobs | Yes | | You have worked there a few times and could write specifically about it | Yes, and keep it short and true | | You would serve it if asked but never have | No. Cover it in a service-area list instead | | You chose it from a map because it has search volume | No |

A business with six genuinely local pages will outperform the same business with sixty thin ones, and will not be carrying the risk.

The towns that do not warrant a page are not lost. List them on a service-area page, cover them in your Business Profile service areas, and let the map results do the work they are better suited to.

Where the local specifics actually come from

The objection to everything above is always the same: *we do the same job in every town, there is nothing local to say.* Usually that is not true — the specifics exist, they are just in people's heads rather than written down.

Six places to find them, in the order they tend to produce the most.

Your job records. What did you actually do in that place, how often, and what came up? A firm that has completed forty jobs in a town knows things about that town's housing stock, access, parking, and typical problems that no competitor's template contains.

The people who do the work. Ask the team what is different about working there. You will get answers immediately — the streets where the parking is impossible, the estate where every property has the same fault, the area where the soil or the water or the wiring behaves differently.

The local building stock. Property age and type drive an enormous amount of variation in trades and property services, and it varies by neighbourhood in ways that are genuinely useful to say out loud.

Local rules. Councils differ on permits, conservation areas, waste, parking restrictions, licensing. Where this affects the job, it is both specific and genuinely helpful, and it is the sort of thing a national competitor will never write.

Your customers there. Real reviews from that area, real photographs of real jobs, named streets or districts where the customer is happy for you to say so.

Travel and coverage, honestly. What it actually costs and how long it takes to get there, whether there is a call-out difference, which parts you cover and which you do not.

An hour with those six questions and one member of staff produces more genuine local material than a week of rewriting a template. If it produces nothing at all — if the honest answer really is that this place is indistinguishable from everywhere else you work — then that is the answer, and the page should not exist.

A test before you publish

Read the page as if you were a customer in that town who has never heard of you. Then ask:

1. Does this tell me anything about my area that a generic page would not?
2. Would I believe this business has actually worked here?
3. Is there evidence, or only assertion?
4. If I removed the town name, would I know where this page was about?
5. Would I be annoyed to discover this page exists for forty other towns?

Question five is the one people skip and the one that predicts the outcome most reliably.

What to do if you already have forty thin pages

This situation is common and recoverable.

Identify the ones with real material behind them. Usually a small number — the places you actually work. Improve those properly.

Consolidate the rest. Redirect them to a single service-area page that lists the towns honestly. One good page listing thirty areas is better than thirty pages saying nothing.

Do not simply delete them and hope. Redirect them so the few links and any accumulated history point somewhere useful.

Expect a dip, then recovery. Consolidation usually costs a little traffic briefly and returns more than it took. If the thin pages were producing nothing, there is very little to lose.

The general method for deciding what to keep is in content refreshes: what to update and what to delete.

Where the effort is better spent

For most local businesses the honest ranking of effort is:

1. Complete and maintain the Business Profile — free, fastest return
2. Collect reviews steadily
3. Build a small number of genuinely local pages
4. Earn a few local links

That order is set out in full in how to promote a local business online. Location pages sit third, not first, which is the opposite of how they are usually sold.

If your catchment is genuinely wider than your rankings can reach — a real constraint, given how strongly distance affects the map results — then the choice is between accepting a smaller area and appearing on platforms that already hold those results. We run one of those, so weigh it accordingly: the prices are public on the rankings board, and the argument against is in what pay-to-rank cannot do.

Common questions

Is a page per town automatically spam? No. A page per town *with nothing distinct on it* is the problem. The pattern is not the offence; the emptiness is.

How long should a location page be? Long enough to say the true things and no longer. A specific 400-word page beats a padded 1,200-word one.

Can I use the same page template? Yes. Template is fine; identical content is not.

Should the town be in the title tag? Yes, if the page is genuinely about that town. That is descriptive, not stuffing.