Do Location Pages Still Work?

Location pages earned their reputation honestly. For years the tactic was to generate one page per town, swap the name, publish forty, and wait.

That stopped working, and the fact it stopped is why people now ask whether the whole idea is dead. It is not. What died was the lazy version.

Why the templated version fails

Three separate problems, any one of which is enough.

There is nothing on the page. Four hundred words of generic service description with a town name in six places. Nobody reading it learns anything, and Google's helpful content guidance is explicitly about pages made for search engines rather than people.

They compete with each other. Thirty pages that are nearly identical give Google thirty candidates for the same query and no reason to prefer any of them. It often picks one almost at random, or none.

They drag the site down. This is the part people miss. A site where most pages are thin is assessed as a site with thin content, and that affects the pages you actually cared about.

So the risk is not that the pages do nothing. It is that they cost you something elsewhere.

What a real one contains

The test: could this page be copied onto the next town with a find and replace? If yes, it should not exist.

What makes it specific:

• Jobs you have actually done there. Named streets are unnecessary, but "we reroofed a 1950s weatherboard in this part of town" is not something a template produces.
• Housing stock and the problems that come with it. Older suburbs have different faults to new subdivisions. A trade knows this instinctively and almost never writes it down.
• Photos from there. Yours.
• Reviews from customers there, where you have them.
• How you cover it. Travel time, whether there is a call-out charge, which depot or base it runs from.
• The places around it. Which suburbs you would take on from there, which you would not.

Two hundred words of that is worth more than eight hundred words of nothing.

Where the material actually comes from

The usual objection is that there is nothing to say about a suburb. There is; it is just not written down anywhere yet.

Open your invoices for that area and read what the jobs actually were. A pattern appears almost immediately, because housing goes up in waves and fails in waves. The suburb built in the 1970s is having the same thing replaced across every street, and you are the person who knows what it is.

Twenty minutes with the job history produces more usable material than any amount of research, and none of it is transferable to the next page, which is exactly the point.

How many you should have

For most trade businesses, three to six.

Pick them on where you actually work and where the work you want is, not on population. A place you would turn down a job in does not need a page, however many people live there.

If you can only write one properly, write one. Adding the other five badly undoes the first.

Service pages come first

If you have limited time, this matters more than anything else on the page.

Most people search with the job first. The location is often supplied by their phone rather than typed, which means Google is already filtering by proximity whether or not a town name was in the search.

A page about the job, on a site with a well-filled Google Business Profile, will usually do more than a page about the place. Build the service pages first and add locations once those exist.

The strongest combination, once you have both, is a page about one job in one place: not "Plumbers in Rolleston" but the specific work you most want from that specific area. Fewer people search it and far fewer businesses have written it.

What to do if you already have forty

Do not delete them in a panic.

Work out which ones get any traffic at all, keep the best three or four and make them genuinely good, and redirect the rest to the nearest relevant page. Redirect rather than delete, so anything they had earned is passed on rather than dropped.

It usually feels like going backwards and usually is not. A site with four real pages about four real places is in a better position than one with forty that say nothing, and it is far easier to keep current.

Expect a few weeks of noise while that settles, for the same reason any restructure causes a wobble. Judge it at two months rather than two weeks.