Building location pages that are not thin duplicates

There is a template most agencies still sell. One page per suburb, the suburb name dropped into the heading, the first paragraph, the meta description and four times through the body, and a paragraph at the bottom listing the streets and the local landmarks.

It used to work. It stopped working, and it is now specifically named in Google's spam policies. But the underlying instinct was correct: you do want a page for the places you serve. The question is what has to be on it.

Why the template stopped working

Google's spam policies cover scaled content abuse, which is pages produced at volume that add little for the reader, and they explicitly do not care how the pages were made. A person writing forty near-identical pages by hand is doing the same thing as a script.

There is a second policy that catches these too. Doorway pages are described as multiple pages built for similar searches that funnel everyone to the same destination. A suburb page whose only purpose is to rank and then send the reader to your one real service page is precisely that.

The find and replace test

This is the test we run on every location page we write, and it settles the argument faster than any amount of discussion.

Take the page. Swap the suburb for a different one, anywhere in the country. Reread it. Every sentence that is still true is either scaffolding or filler. If most of the page survives, you have not written a location page, you have written a template with a variable in it.

The measure of a location page is how much of it breaks when you move it.

What actually differs between two suburbs

Quite a lot, once you stop looking for it in the wrong place. Not the landmarks and not the population. Nor is a page per suburb a substitute for ranking where your pin already reaches, which is covered in why you are not in the map pack. These:

• The housing stock. Pre-war weatherboard and a 2019 apartment tower create different work, different faults and different price points.
• Who you are competing against there. Different suburb, different three businesses holding the map pack, often a different kind of business entirely.
• The jobs you actually get from there. Pull twelve months of your own invoices by postcode. The mix is almost never the same as the suburb next door.
• Access and logistics. Parking, strata approval, gated estates, a river between you and them, a bridge that closes.
• Response time. If you can be there in fifteen minutes, that is a fact worth stating and one your competitor two towns over cannot match.
• Local rules. Council requirements, heritage overlays, body corporate processes, flood overlays.

Every item on that list comes from your own business or one afternoon of looking. None of it requires research you cannot do.

How many pages you should have

Fewer than you have been told.

The right number is the number of places you can say something specific and true about. For most local businesses that is between three and eight, not forty. A business with six substantial location pages will beat the same business with forty hollow ones, and it will take a quarter of the effort.

For everywhere else, one page listing the areas you cover is honest, useful and sufficient. Nobody is harmed by it and nothing is at risk from it, and it should agree with the service areas declared on your listing rather than claiming a wider reach than the profile does.

What a real location page contains

1. 01A heading that says the service and the place, in the words a customer would use.
2. 02An opening that describes the work you do there specifically, not the work you do generally.
3. 03Two or three jobs you have actually done in that area, with enough detail to be recognisable and no client details you do not have permission for.
4. 04The local constraint: the parking, the housing age, the council rule, the response time.
5. 05Reviews from customers in that area, if you have them, quoted rather than embedded in a carousel.
6. 06One clear way to get in touch, with the same phone number that appears everywhere else.

The rest of the on-page picture, including what your service pages should do and how they should link to each other, is on our on-page SEO page. If you serve a wide area from one base and are wondering whether location pages are even the right tool, start with how the map pack decides instead.