If you have ever thought about SEO for your business, you have probably had this thought: should I make a page for every town I cover?
And then, following on from it: should I make one for every service? Every service in every town? Every type of customer? You can keep subdividing until you have thousands of the things.
It is a reasonable question and the honest answer has three parts. Yes, this works. No, most people do it badly. And the way most people do it badly is the same way every time.
Why the advice is confusing
Ask Google and you will be told not to create pages targeting keyword variants.
That advice is not dishonest, but it is worth understanding where it comes from. Google does not want its index flooded with near-identical pages, and it particularly does not want what it calls commodity content: pages that add nothing that was not already available somewhere else.
Meanwhile, done properly, this is still one of the most effective things a local business can do. Both things are true, and the difference between them is entirely about whether the pages deserve to exist.
The thing that separates the two
Here is the test, and everything else follows from it.
Is there genuinely something different to say about this town, or are you just swapping the name?
If a page is your standard text with “Blackpool” replaced by “Kirkham,” you have not made a new page. You have made a copy, and it will be treated as one. It also tells a reader precisely nothing, which is the part that matters more.
You will find advice suggesting you reword each version enough that the duplicate check does not catch it. I would leave that alone. Not on lofty principle, but because it is aiming at the wrong target. If you have to disguise a page to get it accepted, the page has nothing to offer, and you will have spent your effort on evading a check rather than being useful.
The alternative is more work and it is more durable: only make the page if there is genuinely something to say.
And there usually is, if you know your patch
This is where most location pages fall down, because they are written by somebody who has never been to the town.
Let me show you what I mean, using the coast I live on.
Lytham and Poulton are relatively affluent, with a busy restaurant and nightlife trade. The businesses there tend to have a different set of concerns from businesses ten minutes up the road.
Thornton-Cleveleys had a reputation for years as somewhere people retired to. That is genuinely shifting. The bars and pubs are on the rise, people my age are moving in, and the high street is doing better than the stereotype suggests. A page written on the old assumption would be describing a town that no longer quite exists.
Fleetwood, where I am from, is struggling in ways nobody sensible would pretend otherwise. It also has the best sunsets in England, a genuinely lovely promenade, its industrial areas, a serious concentration of skilled tradespeople, and it still sells fish across the country despite no boats landing here any more.
Now: could an agency in Manchester have written any of that? Could ChatGPT, from a prompt? No. And that is precisely why it is worth writing.
Every one of those paragraphs suggests different content, different customers and a different emphasis. A restaurant in Lytham needs something different from a trade business in Fleetwood, and if your location pages do not reflect that, they are not really location pages.
You know this about your own patch. You just have not written it down.
What to actually put on one
For a local service business, a page worth having usually contains:
Something true about the town that shows you actually work there. The types of property, what tends to go wrong with them, parking or access issues, seasonal patterns.
Which of your services matter most there, and why. They will not be the same everywhere.
Real work you have done locally. Photographs, a job you can describe, a street name if you are allowed to use it.
The practical stuff. How far you travel, whether there is a call-out charge for that area, how quickly you can usually get there.
And what it costs, or at least a range. Prices sometimes genuinely differ by area, and if they do, say so.
If you cannot fill that out for a particular town, that is your answer about whether the page should exist yet.
The shape I would actually recommend
Now, a structural point, because more pages is not automatically the answer.
For most small businesses, I would rather see strong service pages, with the areas covered clearly labelled on them, than a thin page per town.
A proper page about emergency boiler repairs, which makes clear you cover Poulton, Cleveleys, Fleetwood and Lytham, with a map, will usually out-perform four thin pages that each say very little.
Then, once that page is genuinely good and you have real depth for a specific town, split that one out. Earned, rather than generated.
And service plus location beats location alone. “Plumber Poulton” is competitive and generic. “Emergency boiler repair Poulton” is what somebody actually types when they are about to pay you, and there is far less competition for it. If you are going to build these pages, build them around the jobs you want rather than the trade you are in.
Which brings me to the interesting bit
Here is the part almost nobody thinks about.
These pages decide what work you get offered.
Whatever you build pages about is what people will ring you about. If every page is about emergency call-outs, you will get emergency call-outs, at all hours, from people in a panic who chose you because you were available.
If your pages are about full bathroom renovations in period properties, you will get fewer calls, and they will be about bathroom renovations in period properties.
That is a strategic decision dressed up as a technical one, and most businesses make it by accident.
So before building anything, ask: what work do I actually want more of? Then build for that, even if it is not what you currently do most of. This is how you shift a business over time, and it is considerably cheaper than any other method of doing so.
I have written separately about working backwards from where you want to be in three years, and this is where that plan meets the actual pages.
How fast to publish
Practical, and the part people rush.
Do not publish twenty at once. Start with three or four. Wait until they are indexed and you can see in Search Console whether they are getting impressions.
Then continue at a sensible pace. One a week is comfortable for a small site. If the early ones are working, carry on. If they are not, publishing more of the same will not help.
And if they get no traction at all, that is usually one of two things. Either the pages are too thin to earn attention, or your site does not have enough standing yet for Google to bother with new pages. The first is fixable by writing better ones. The second is fixable by having fewer, better pages that are properly linked together from the rest of your site.
Neither is fixed by adding more.
The short version
Make the page if there is something true to say. Do not make it if there is not.
Build around the work you want rather than the work you happen to get.
And write the bits only somebody who lives there would know, because that is the entire difference between a page worth having and a page that is just your homepage wearing a different hat.
Want to know which pages you are actually missing? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.