Location pages for trades: when a page per town helps, and when it becomes a doorway page

Ask a tradesperson how to rank in the next town over and the usual answer is “make a page for it”. So sites now launch with a page for every town and suburb the business covers: thirty, fifty, sometimes a hundred of them, each padded out to look substantial.

Some of those pages help. Many quietly do the opposite. The difference is not how many there are or how long they are. It is whether each one says something true about working in that place.

This guide is for UK trades: cleaners, builders, roofers, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, anyone who serves an area rather than a shop counter. It sits alongside local SEO for tradespeople, which covers the wider picture.

What a location page is for

Someone in Horsforth searching “boiler repair Horsforth” wants to know three things quickly: do you work here, what does it cost, and have you done jobs like mine nearby. A good location page answers those for that place, and gives Google a relevant page to show for that search.

What a location page does not do is beat distance. Google says its local results weigh relevance, distance and prominence, and a page on your site cannot move your van closer to the searcher. For the map results, your Google Business Profile and your reviews do far more. We explain the three factors in relevance, distance and popularity.

Where location pages go wrong

Google’s spam policies describe two patterns that catch over-built location pages.

Doorway pages. Google’s own example is multiple pages for different cities or regions that are substantially the same and exist to catch searches. Change “Leeds” to “Wakefield”, keep everything else, and you have built a doorway.

Scaled content abuse. Since the March 2024 update, Google treats producing many pages mainly to manipulate rankings as spam, whether they were written by hand, from a template or with AI. Rewording one page fifty times so that each version looks different does not change what it is.

Fifty pages that say the same thing are not fifty chances to rank. To Google they can look like one attempt to game it, repeated fifty times. The risk is not only that those pages fail to rank. Weak pages at scale can count against how Google sees the whole site.

There is a second, plainer problem. Pages for towns you rarely work in invite calls you do not want, and a customer who reads “we are in your area every week” and then waits three weeks will not leave you a good review.

The swap test

Here is a quick way to judge any location page, yours or a competitor’s.

Take the page for one town and mentally swap in the name of another. If the page still reads as true, it is not a location page. It is the same page with a different label.

A page that passes the swap test contains things that are only true of that place:

• The properties. Terraces with small yards, new-build estates with block paving, stone cottages with natural stone patios. These change what the job involves and what it costs.
• Jobs you have actually done there, with before and after photos taken there.
• Reviews from customers in that area, named as they appear on your Google profile.
• Practical details: the postcodes you cover, parking and access, the nearby places you also serve.
• Local questions customers there really ask, answered plainly.

If you cannot write most of that for a town, that town does not need its own page yet.

How to build a set that works

1. Start small. Pick the five to ten places where you do the most work and have the most photos and reviews. Build those properly.
2. Put everywhere else on one page. A clear “areas we cover” page listing every town and postcode district is useful to customers and honest about your patch.
3. Add a page when you have earned it. When you have done enough jobs in a new area to show real work and reviews there, give it its own page.
4. Keep each page fed. Add new job photos and new reviews as they come in. A location page that changes over time looks, correctly, like a business that works there.
5. Only list places you will travel to at the speed the page promises.

Fixing a site that already has too many

If your site launched with dozens of near-identical town pages, you do not need to panic, and you should not just delete them.

• Keep the pages you can make genuinely local, and improve them with real jobs, photos and reviews.
• Merge the thin ones into your areas-covered page or a few regional pages, such as north Leeds or the Wharfe valley.
• Redirect every removed address to the page that replaces it, with a permanent redirect, so nothing that linked to it breaks.
• Watch Google Search Console over the following weeks to see which pages Google indexes and shows.

If someone has just built a site like this for you, it is worth asking how the location pages were written and whether you really cover every place listed. Our post-launch checklist has the other questions to ask at the same time.

The short version

A location page earns its place by being true about a place: the work, the photos, the customers, the details. Make a few of those, list the rest honestly, and put the effort you save into your Google Business Profile and your reviews, which is where local customers are deciding anyway.