A location page ranks when it contains information that could only have been written about that place: the specific areas covered, the work you have done there, local details a resident would recognize, and the practicalities of serving that area. Pages generated from one template with the town name substituted are treated as near-duplicates, which is why most of them rank for nothing and why publishing more of them does not help.
Why the template approach fails
Take a typical location page and remove the place name. If what remains would work equally well for any of your other locations, Google has nothing to distinguish them. The pages compete with each other, the signals split, and one of them gets picked semi-arbitrarily while the rest sit idle.
The test is that simple, and most location pages fail it.
What genuinely differs between locations
| Element | What makes it specific | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage detail | The actual neighborhoods, districts and postcodes you serve there | Low |
| Work done locally | Named projects, photographs, the specifics of jobs in that area | Medium, and the highest value |
| Local conditions | What is different about working there. Housing stock, terrain, regulations, seasonality | Medium |
| Reviews from that area | Customers who live there, named by area where they allow it | Low once you are collecting them |
| Practicalities | Response times, travel, whether there is a surcharge, parking at the premises | Low |
| The team serving it | Who covers that area, with a photograph | Low |
The structure that works
- A heading that states the service and the place, in the words people use for both.
- An opening paragraph that answers the searcher's question immediately. Do you serve them, and can you help. Everything else comes after that.
- The coverage detail, listed specifically enough that a resident recognizes their own area.
- Proof from that area. Work done, photographs, reviews from local customers.
- The practicalities, including anything that differs from your other locations.
- A way to get in touch that suits the area, which for a branch means that branch's number rather than a central one.
How many to build
Build pages for places where you have something real to say and real work to point at. A business with three genuine service areas and three strong pages will beat the same business with forty thin ones, because the forty dilute each other and none of them stands up on its own.
Expand as the evidence accumulates rather than as ambition does.
Common mistakes
- A list of every town within fifty miles, with nothing to say about any of them
- The same paragraph of copy with one noun swapped, repeated across dozens of pages
- Pages for places you cannot actually serve within a reasonable time
- Fabricated local references that anyone from the area would immediately spot
- A different phone number per page that breaks consistency with your listings
- No internal links between the location pages and the service pages they relate to
Show a location page to someone who lives there and ask whether it reads as written by somebody who knows the area. If it does not, the page will not rank, and it would not have converted anyone if it had.