The question behind the question
Businesses covering a wide area usually ask this the wrong way round: how many location pages should we build? The better question is which places you can say something true and specific about, because that is the only thing that makes a location page work.
Everything else — town or county, ten pages or fifty — follows from that.
What each page type is actually for
| Use when | Fails when | |
|---|---|---|
| Town page | You genuinely work there and can describe real jobs, areas and travel times | It is the county page with the town name swapped in |
| County page | You cover a wide area with no single town dominant, or you are new to it | It is a list of towns with no substance of its own |
| Region page | Your service is delivered remotely or coverage is genuinely broad | Used to avoid deciding where you actually operate |
A county page is often the right first move: one substantial page covering Dorset beats twelve thin ones covering Dorset towns. You can always add town pages later, where the evidence justifies them.
The test a location page has to pass
Before building one, write three sentences that could only be about that place. Not “we serve Weymouth and the surrounding area” — something a competitor could not paste onto their own page by changing a word.
- Jobs you have actually done there, described specifically.
- Local conditions that affect your work — parking, access, building stock, seasonality.
- Travel and response times from your base, stated honestly.
- Named areas, estates or landmarks you genuinely cover.
- Where relevant, local pricing differences and why.
If you cannot write those three sentences, the page will not rank and should not exist. Pages that fail this test are doorway pages in all but name, and Google is explicit about discounting them.
How many is too many
There is no magic number, but there is a reliable signal: if adding the next page requires you to write more vaguely than the last, you have gone past the limit.
Sites that prune thin location pages usually improve, because the remaining pages stop competing with each other for the same terms and the site stops looking padded. We took our own site through exactly that exercise — a large set of thin town pages was cut back and redirected, which is a normal, healthy correction rather than an admission of failure.
If you do consolidate, redirect the removed pages to the most relevant survivor rather than the homepage, so any accumulated value follows the topic.
Getting the internal structure right
However many you build, the hierarchy should be obvious: service pages describe what you do, location pages describe where, and each links to the other in both directions. County pages link down to their towns; town pages link up to the county and across to the relevant service.
Keep the linking natural and in the prose. A block of fifty town links in the footer is a pattern search engines recognise and rarely reward.