If you want to win customers in several towns, you often need dedicated pages there. The obvious route, duplicating the same page with the town name swapped out, is also the riskiest: Google calls these doorway pages and treats them as spam. There's another way.
Doorway pages:
what bothers Google.
A doorway page exists only to rank for a specific search term without offering visitors any value of its own. A typical example is a series of pages that differ only in the town name.
A good local page, by contrast, answers a real question: does this business work in my area, and does it understand the situation here? That only works with content that truly belongs to that place.
What makes a good
location page
- 01
Only towns where you actually work
A page for a town you don't serve is dishonest and risky. Your service area in the Google profile and your location pages should match.
- 02
Real local facts instead of filler
The local economy, well-known places, typical businesses, and peculiarities of the area make a page unique. They have to be accurate and checkable.
- 03
Concrete value for businesses there
Which businesses are there locally, and what concretely helps them? A tradesperson in the surrounding countryside has different concerns than a hospitality business in a tourism region.
- 04
Honest information about your location
If your base is elsewhere, say so and state the distance instead of faking a branch. Honesty is strategically smart here too.
- 05
Link it into the rest of your website
Location pages belong connected to service pages, blog, and contact, not hidden away as isolated entry pages.
Bottom line:
Fewer pages, but real ones.
Better a few location pages with genuine value than many copies. Focusing on the towns you truly serve and filling each page with verifiable local content builds trust with customers and with Google alike.
That's exactly the principle behind our service areas around Dessau. How we approach local visibility overall is covered in our Local SEO & Google Business Profile service.
FAQ
Frequently asked
questions.
As many as the towns you actually serve and can fill with real, distinct content. There's no fixed number. A few well-made pages are more effective and safer than many near-identical ones.
Shared building blocks like service descriptions are fine as long as each page additionally offers real, location-specific content. It becomes a problem when pages differ practically only by the town name.
About the author
Owner of simnify in Dessau-Roßlau. Builds high-performance websites and leads local SEO and GEO strategy for businesses across the Anhalt region and all of Germany.
