The short answer
Location pages are not banned. Google's objection is to pages that exist only to be found, so the test is whether you could swap the town name and publish the same page elsewhere without a word becoming untrue. Build one for every place you can prove you work in.
Key takeaways
- Google's doorway page guidance targets pages built to be found rather than read, not town names in titles.
- If you could swap the town name and republish the page elsewhere untouched, it is thin and should not exist.
- A real page can disappoint someone; a thin page cannot, because it never says anything specific enough to be wrong.
- Stop building location pages when you run out of provable work, not when you run out of nearby towns.
- Fifteen of my own town pages are written and published but kept out of Google, because I have no completed work in those towns yet.
Every trade owner who wants work in the next town along runs into the same warning: build location pages and Google will punish you for it. The warning is half right, and most people miss the important half. This is where the line actually sits, and what I do about it on my own website.
What Google actually means by a doorway page
The objection is to pages built to be found rather than read, which is why a thin town page fails whether or not a penalty ever lands.
Google's guidance describes pages built to rank for particular searches, which all funnel the visitor towards the same destination, and which are not useful in themselves. The examples it gives include sets of pages targeting nearby towns and cities that all lead a reader to one place. The word that keeps appearing is intermediate. The page exists to be found, not to be read.
That makes this a practice problem rather than a rules problem. The question is not whether you are allowed location pages. You are. It is whether you have anything to put on them.
- Doorway page
- A page built to rank for a particular search which is not useful in itself, and which exists to move the reader on towards the same destination as every other page in the set. Google's own examples include batches of pages aimed at nearby towns and cities.
Picture a homeowner twenty minutes away searching for a roofer. They click your town page and find the same three paragraphs that are on your homepage, with a different place name dropped in eleven times. They still do not know whether you genuinely cover them, whether you have worked anywhere near them, or how quickly you could get there. The page took their click and gave nothing back.
Google does not need anything clever to spot that. It only has to notice that the page carries no information of its own. Whether or not a penalty ever lands, that page will not hold a ranking, because there is nothing on it for a ranking to be about.
The thirty-second test: could you publish this about anywhere else?
If swapping the town name would leave every sentence true, the page is thin; if it would not, you have something worth publishing.
Read the page you are planning to publish. Then ask yourself: could I copy this word for word, swap the town name, and publish it about somewhere else entirely without a single sentence becoming untrue?
If the answer is yes, it is a thin page and it should not exist. If the answer is no, because the page contains things that are only true about serving that particular place, you have something worth publishing. That is the whole line. Everything else in this article is detail.
The test works because it forces you to have real knowledge before you write a word. A page about a town you have never worked in cannot pass it. You have nothing specific to say, so you reach for generic copy, so the page is thin. The failure is upstream of the writing.
Turn it around and it gets easy. If you have been on roofs in a town for six years, you know things that a firm two counties away could not fake.
- Which estates have the same failing flat roof detail
- What the local stone is and how it weathers
- Whether the streets take a scaffold lorry
- What the conservation area officer will and will not sign off
None of that is SEO. It is just what you know.
Service area pages SEO works when the page is somewhere to put what you already know. It fails when the page itself is the point.
Thin doorway page versus genuine service area page, side by side
The difference is information that could only be written after the work was done, which is why a real page is capable of disappointing someone.
Once the pattern has been named you will spot a thin page in seconds. The difference is not tone or length. It is whether anything on the page could only have been written by somebody who had actually been there.
On the page: Opening lines
- Thin doorway page
- Townname homeowners deserve a reliable, trustworthy roofer
- Genuine service area page
- The housing stock there and the failure you keep getting called out to
On the page: The work
- Thin doorway page
- A service list identical to the one on eleven other town pages
- Genuine service area page
- Completed jobs: the street or estate, the month, what was wrong, what you did about it
On the page: Images
- Thin doorway page
- A map embed near the bottom, stock images of somebody else's roof
- Genuine service area page
- Photographs from those jobs
On the page: Practical terms
- Thin doorway page
- A closing line about being proud to serve Townname and the surrounding areas
- Genuine service area page
- Your call-out arrangement, travel time on a weekday morning, whether same-day is realistic
On the page: Coverage limits
- Thin doorway page
- Never stated, so the page cannot disappoint anybody
- Genuine service area page
- Stated plainly, including the towns your emergency cover does not reach
On the page: Swap the town name
- Thin doorway page
- Every sentence stays true
- Genuine service area page
- Most of the page becomes untrue
| On the page | Thin doorway page | Genuine service area page |
|---|---|---|
| Opening lines | Townname homeowners deserve a reliable, trustworthy roofer | The housing stock there and the failure you keep getting called out to |
| The work | A service list identical to the one on eleven other town pages | Completed jobs: the street or estate, the month, what was wrong, what you did about it |
| Images | A map embed near the bottom, stock images of somebody else's roof | Photographs from those jobs |
| Practical terms | A closing line about being proud to serve Townname and the surrounding areas | Your call-out arrangement, travel time on a weekday morning, whether same-day is realistic |
| Coverage limits | Never stated, so the page cannot disappoint anybody | Stated plainly, including the towns your emergency cover does not reach |
| Swap the town name | Every sentence stays true | Most of the page becomes untrue |
A thin page, line by line
An H1 reading Roofing Services in Townname. An opening paragraph explaining that Townname homeowners deserve a reliable, trustworthy roofer. A service list identical to the one on eleven other town pages. A closing line about being proud to serve Townname and the surrounding areas. The place name appears fourteen times and carries no information on any occasion.
A real page, line by line
Completed jobs in that area, described plainly: the street or estate, the month, what was wrong, what you did about it. Photographs from those jobs rather than stock images of somebody else's roof. The housing stock and the failure you keep getting called out to there. Then the practical terms for that place: your call-out arrangement, travel time on a weekday morning, whether same-day is realistic.
And where the service genuinely differs, say so on the page. If your emergency cover only extends twenty minutes from the yard, and that town sits outside it, write that down. That is the difference in one line: a real page can disappoint someone, and a thin page cannot, because it never says anything.
How many location pages are justified, and when to stop
Count the towns you serve, have worked in more than once, and can name jobs in, which for most established trades means starting with one or two.
The honest answer for most trades is considerably fewer than you have been sold. Tie the count to presence rather than ambition.
Three questions per town, and you need a yes to all three.
- Do you actually serve it, in the sense that you would take the job today at your normal rates?
- Have you actually worked there, more than once?
- Can you name those jobs, with enough detail to put on a public page without embarrassing yourself?
If a town fails any of the three, the page would be a claim you cannot support, and it will read exactly like one. A page you cannot fill is worse than no page at all: it competes for attention with the pages you can fill, and it muddies what the site appears to be about.
So stop when you run out of proof, not when you run out of towns. For most established trades that means starting with one or two, and adding a third only when the job book has caught up with the ambition.
If you want the surrounding towns before you have any work there, go and get the work first: quote there, do good jobs there, ask for reviews that mention where the job was. Then the page writes itself, and it ranks because it deserves to.
That sequencing is the part I spend most time on when I take on local SEO for trades, and it is set out in full on the Local SEO for tradesmen page. Location pages are one input among several, and they are rarely the first thing I would fix.
Roofer, plumber, electrician: three different answers
The test does not change by trade, but a roofer can fill several location pages honestly, an emergency plumber far fewer, and an electrician is usually better off with service pages.
The rule is the same for everyone. The shape it takes is not, because the work is not.
Roofers: a wide catchment and physical detail
A roofer travels for value. A full re-roof justifies an hour in the van, so the genuine catchment is wide, and the specifics are physical and easy to write honestly: housing stock, roof types, exposure, access for scaffolding, whether an area is full of 1930s semis sharing the same tired valley detail.
A roofer can often justify several location pages and genuinely fill them, because finished roofs are visible, photographable and attached to a street.
Emergency plumbers: distance is the service
A plumber running emergency call-outs is close to the opposite. A homeowner watching water come through a ceiling cares about one number: how many minutes until you are at the door. So a plumber's location pages live or die on response times and out-of-hours terms, and the honest ones are narrow.
Claiming coverage of somewhere you cannot reach inside an hour just generates calls you have to turn down, which costs you the call and the reputation.
Electricians: rank for the work, not the town
An electrician sits between the two and usually has a better option than geography altogether. Much of the demand is service specific rather than place specific: EV charger installation, consumer unit upgrades, EICRs for landlords, commercial work with entirely different constraints.
Two properly built service pages will normally out-earn six thin town pages, and no doorway page question hangs over a page about the work you actually do. If you are an electrician wondering how to rank in nearby towns, the answer is often that you should be ranking for the job instead.
What this site does, including the parts that cost me
This site now has location pages, and fifteen of them are deliberately kept out of Google until there is real local work to put on them.
I would struggle to argue any of the above and then do the opposite, so here is what the website you are reading actually does, including the part that costs me rankings.
There are pages for five places: Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, Barnsley and Chesterfield. Each one has a full page for each service, and each one exists because the search data says several hundred people a month are looking for exactly that, in exactly that place. Those pages print the numbers they were built on, including the numbers that are unflattering.
Then there are fifteen town pages, for places like Maltby, Penistone and Wath-upon-Dearne. Every one of them is written, published and linked to from the rest of the site. Not one of them is in Google's index, because I have no completed job in any of those towns yet, and a location page without that is exactly what this article is telling you not to build.
That is not a technicality. Each of those pages carries a noindex tag and is left out of the sitemap on purpose, and each one says on its face that I have not worked in that town yet. The moment there is a named client there — a business you could ring up and ask about me — the job goes on the page and the page starts asking to be indexed. Until then it sits there being honest and earning nothing, which is the correct outcome and an annoying one.
The five borough pages clear the same bar by a different route. A page about Rotherham that tells you the keyword difficulty there is 4 to 7 while Sheffield's is 17 to 20, and that the cost per click is a third of Sheffield's, is a page you could not republish about anywhere else without the numbers becoming wrong. That is the test, and it can be met with real research when it cannot yet be met with a case study.
Publishing doorway pages while charging people to advise against them would be indefensible. It is also one of the cheapest checks a sceptical owner can run before hiring anyone for local SEO. Look at the agency's own site, count the town pages, open two of them side by side. If they are the same page wearing different hats, you know exactly what they would build for you. Run that check on mine.
If your site already has eleven empty town pages
Sort the towns into the ones you can fill and the ones you cannot, then fix the profile and the reviews before writing another page.
Do not delete everything in a panic on a Tuesday afternoon. Sort them first.
Rank the towns honestly
Separate the places you genuinely work in from the places you would like to work in.
Fill the real ones properly
Real jobs, real photographs, real travel and call-out terms, done this month rather than one day.
Deal with the aspirational ones
They either come down, or get folded into one honest coverage section that says where you go and how far you will travel, without pretending each town is a destination in its own right.
Then look at what else is carrying the weight, because location pages are rarely the actual constraint. Your Google Business Profile does more for visibility in nearby towns than most town pages ever manage. Reviews that happen to mention where the job was do quiet, useful work in the same direction, and they count precisely because somebody other than you wrote them.
How to rank in nearby towns is mostly a question of earning the right to, and then saying so clearly enough that a homeowner believes you.
If you want to know where your own site sits on this, ask me for the free audit. I review it personally, you get a prioritised action plan within 3 working days, and there is no sales call at any point. Get My Free Local SEO Audit.
The bottom line
Location pages are not against the rules. Empty ones simply do not work, because there is nothing on them for a ranking to be about. Build one for every place you genuinely serve and can prove you have worked in, stop when the proof runs out, and be willing to hold that line even when the search volume next door looks tempting. I hold it on my own site: five borough pages built on published research, and fifteen town pages sitting behind a noindex tag until I have work in those towns to put on them.
Where to go next
Sources
- Google Search Central documentation Google's own guidance on doorway pages, including the example of sets of pages targeting nearby towns and cities.
Written by James Tandy
James builds high-converting websites and runs local SEO for UK home-service businesses, with ten years spent turning local search into booked jobs. More about James →