What location pages are
A location page, or city page, is a page on your website about the service you provide in one town: "Roof Replacement in Battle Ground, WA" or "Movers in Roseville, MN". For a service-area business with one office, these pages are how the website shows Google that you work beyond the town you're based in.
They're one of the most common things we build in our organic SEO services, and one of the most common things we find done badly: twenty pages with the same text and a different town name in the heading.
Location pages SEO: where Google draws the line
Google's spam policies define doorway abuse as pages "created to rank for specific, similar search queries". The examples Google gives include pages aimed at particular regions or cities that funnel visitors to one page, and substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clear, browsable site structure. The same page also covers scaled content abuse: many pages generated mainly to manipulate rankings. That policy page was last updated August 28, 2026.
So the question isn't whether you can have city pages. You can. It's whether each page would be useful to someone in that town if search engines didn't exist.
Duplicate content location pages: our 50% rule
Every location page we write has to pass two checks before it goes live:
- No two location pages share more than half their main text. Headers, footers and the booking form don't count. The body copy does.
- Each page has at least 3 genuinely local details. Things a competitor couldn't paste in by changing the town name.
Here's an example of local details for an HVAC company's page about one town, not a client page: the age of the housing stock and the systems that usually go with it, the neighborhoods and main roads the crew covers, how long a typical drive is from the shop, whether the town needs a permit for a furnace swap, and photos of real jobs there.
On a Woodbridge, Virginia chimney company's site, the city pages had about 20% unique text. We rebuilt them to between 78% and 92% unique. That project isn't finished, and search clicks were down year on year for other reasons we explain in the case study, but the map pack held throughout.
Your options: which pages to build
- One service area page. A single page listing the towns you serve, with a map. Fine for a small area or a new business. It won't rank well for "service + town" in each place.
- A page per town. Best when you get real work in each town and can write something true and specific about it.
- A page per service per town. Only for your most valuable service in your most valuable towns. This is where doorway pages usually come from, so the 50% rule matters most here.
- Topical content instead. Guides and service pages that make the whole site stronger on the subject.
To choose, we use a threshold test. Compare your share of the map in the top 3 with the market leader's. Below roughly 25% to 50% of the leader's share, build topical content first. Above it, build pages for the neighborhoods where you already rank 4th to 6th. We explain how to read those maps in how to read a Google Maps rank grid.
Whichever you choose, link the pages from a clear service area section, so visitors and Google can reach them through the site and not only from search.
What location pages did on real projects
- For a St. Paul moving company, new service and suburb pages were part of six months of work in which "local movers roseville" went from an average position of 96.5 to 1.1. Several first-place suburb rankings still get few clicks, because the map pack takes them.
- For a Woodbridge, Virginia HVAC company, service page rebuilds, schema and location pages took its top-3 share of the map from 7% to 18%. The west side toward Dale City still ranks 9th to 12th, and location content aimed there is next.
Location pages helped in both cases. Neither was finished by them alone.
What a good location page includes
- A clear heading with the service and the town.
- Local details that only apply there: neighborhoods, housing, permits, common problems.
- Real job photos from that town, with a short caption.
- Reviews from customers there, if you have them.
- Links to the main service page and to nearby town pages.
- The same name, address and phone as your Business Profile. Don't invent an address in a town where you have no office.
Leave out the filler that makes city pages look alike: a paragraph of town history copied from an encyclopedia, a list of every ZIP code, or the same three testimonials on every page. If a sentence would still be true after swapping in another town's name, it doesn't count as one of your three local details.
Before publishing, compare each new page with your existing ones. Put the two main bodies side by side, or use a free text comparison tool, and rewrite until the overlap is under half. It takes longer than copying, which is the point: a page that took no effort to make usually gives a searcher no reason to stay.