Do You Need A Page For Every Town You Serve?

Somebody has probably told you that you need a page for every town you work in. Thirty pages, one per city, and you'll show up in all of them.

This used to work and now it mostly doesn't, and the version of it that still works looks different enough from the version people sell that it's worth explaining properly, especially since I have four of these pages myself.

01What the old version was

Write one page. Copy it thirty times. Swap the town name. Publish.

Google has a name for this: doorway pages. Pages built to catch a search and funnel everyone to the same place, with nothing on them that's actually about the thing they claim to be about. They're explicitly against the guidelines, they get demoted, and at scale they can drag down the site they're attached to.

The tell is simple. If I hid the town name, could you tell which page you were on? If not, neither can Google, and neither can the person reading it.

02The test that actually decides it

Here's the question, and it's the only one that matters: could you write something true about this town that you couldn't write about the next one over?

Not "we proudly serve the residents of X." Something real. The housing stock is older there so you mostly do repipes rather than new installs. Half that town's businesses are seasonal because of the tourist trade, so their websites need to say different things in January than in July. You know the building inspector. There's one road in and it changes how you schedule.

If you can answer that, the page should exist and it'll earn its place. If you can't, the page will be filler, and filler pages don't help you. At best they do nothing, at worst they teach Google that your site is mostly padding.

03Which means the real limit is your knowledge

Not your service area. You might drive to fifteen towns and only have genuine things to say about four of them.

That's fine. Four real pages beat fifteen hollow ones, and you can add more as you actually work in a place and learn something about it. A page written after you've done six jobs somewhere is much better than one written speculatively because a checklist said thirty.

Four real pages beat fifteen hollow ones.

I have four, Orlando, Saint Cloud, Kissimmee and Winter Park, and they make genuinely different arguments, because the businesses in them have different problems. Kissimmee's page is about customers who book ahead from somewhere else. Winter Park's is about businesses that get judged on appearance before a word is read. Those aren't the same page with a name swapped, and if they were I wouldn't have published them.

There's a test in the code for this, which sounds excessive for four pages and isn't: it strips the town name out of every page and fails the build if any two then match. It exists because the temptation to churn out the fifth and sixth is real, and a rule you have to actively break is better than one you have to remember.

04What belongs on one

If you pass the test, here's what the page needs.

The specific thing you know. Lead with it. This is the reason the page exists and it should be in the first paragraph.

Proof you've actually been there. Photos of jobs in that town. Reviews from people in it, if you have them.

What you'd do first for a business there, or, for a trade, what the common job is there and why. Something that couldn't be copied onto the next page.

A route onward. Links to the towns next door and to what you actually sell, so the page sits inside the site rather than beside it.

What it doesn't need is a paragraph about how you're proud to serve the community, or a list of every service with the town name appended to each one. Everybody has read those and nobody has ever been convinced by one.

05The thing that beats all of it anyway

Location pages help with the blue links. They do very little for the map block, which is ranked by distance, your listing, and your reviews, and the map block is what people tap.

So if you're choosing between writing eight town pages and finishing your Google Business Profile properly, finish the profile. It isn't close. The pages are worth doing after that, not instead of it.

And if you're a service-area business, make sure your listing says so and lists the areas honestly. That does more for "do you cover my town" than a page does.

06How I'd decide

Write down the towns you genuinely work in. Cross off the ones you'd drive to but never have. For each one left, try writing three sentences that are true about that town and false about the others.

However many survive, that's how many pages you should have. It might be one. That's a legitimate answer, and one honest page plus a finished listing will beat thirty hollow ones every time.

If you want the pages written properly, that's part of what the Custom Build package does, and if it turns out you only need one, I'll tell you that and build one. Tell me where you work and we can find out which it is.