Location pages are the most abused tool in local SEO. The pattern is familiar: a template with the town name swapped in, published for every place within fifty miles. Google classes these as doorway pages and treats them accordingly, and a site with a hundred of them often ranks worse than it did before they existed.
Landing page strategy is the decision that comes before any writing: which pages should exist at all.
When a page earns its place
| Build a page? | Why | |
|---|---|---|
| A town you genuinely serve, with real demand | Yes | Specific, useful and winnable |
| A town you serve occasionally, with no search volume | Usually no | Better covered on a county page |
| Every village within a radius | No | Near-identical by construction — doorway risk |
| A county where you cover most of it | Yes | A hub that links to the towns that matter |
| A service with enough distinct demand | Yes | One clear page per service |
| A service-and-town combination for every pair | Rarely | Only where demand and knowledge are genuinely distinct |
Fewer, better pages
A smaller set of genuinely distinct pages — each about a place you actually work, containing things only someone who works there would know — outperforms a large set of interchangeable ones. It also avoids the risk that a sitewide pattern of thin pages drags down the rest of the site.
Some pages are worth keeping out of the index until they can stand on their own. A page that exists only because a place name has search volume is a liability, not an asset.
Hubs and spokes
The structure that tends to work is a county or regional hub linking down to the towns that merit their own pages, with each town page linking back up. It gives search engines a clear map of where you operate and lets the hub carry the areas that do not justify a page of their own.
Deciding with data
Which towns get a page is a question of search demand, competition and genuine coverage — not of how many towns are within driving distance. We base it on keyword data and your real service area, and we will tell you when a town you want a page for does not have the demand to justify one.