Most local service businesses don't need a separate page for every town they serve. A location page earns its place when you have real work, real customers, or a real office there to talk about. Pages that only swap the city name are what Google's spam policy calls doorway pages. Second Opinion checks both sides: whether your pages name your real services and service area, and whether any location pages are thin copies of each other.
If you've talked to a few SEO companies, someone has probably offered to build you a page for every town within fifty miles. Twenty towns, twenty pages, done by Friday.
Here's the thing.. those pages are usually the same page twenty times with the city name swapped. Google has a name for that, and it isn't a compliment.
What Google actually says
Google's spam policy describes "doorway" pages: pages made to rank for a set of similar searches, all leading people to the same place. A page that says "Best plumber in Cleveland" and another that says "Best plumber in Helen," with nothing else different, is the textbook example.
They don't usually get you penalized overnight. They just don't work, and they make the rest of the site look thinner than it is.
When a location page earns its place
- You have an office, a shop, or a yard there.
- You do a lot of work there, and you can show it: real projects, real photos, real customers.
- Something about the work is genuinely different there.. permits, terrain, water, codes, drive time.
If you can write a few paragraphs about a town that wouldn't make sense on any other town's page, it deserves a page. If you can't, it doesn't.. yet.
What we check
Second Opinion looks at this from two sides. First, whether your homepage and service pages name your real services and the area you serve, in plain words. Second, if you have location pages, whether they're thin or nearly identical to each other.
Both count toward the on-page half of your Website Score. If you don't have location pages, the second check doesn't apply to you at all, and it doesn't count against you.
What to do instead
An afternoon of writing, mostly on pages you already have.
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Say where you work on the pages you already have
Before you build anything new, make the homepage and your main service pages say where you work. Not a list of forty towns in the footer.. a sentence a person would actually say.
"We dig ponds and clear land across Hall, White, and Lumpkin counties" does more than a footer full of town names, because it ties the work to the place.
Your homepage names your main service and your service area in one plain sentence near the top.
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Pick the two or three places that deserve a page
Look at where your work actually comes from. Your invoices are a better guide than a map.
Choose the places where you have the most jobs, an office, or something genuinely different to say. For most businesses that's two or three, not twenty.
You have a short list of places, and you can name real jobs you've done in each one.
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Write each one like it could only be about that town
For each place on your list, write what's true there and nowhere else:
- Projects you've done there, with photos.
- Anything local that changes the work: terrain, permits, water, travel time.
- Who you've worked with there, if they're happy to be named.
If a sentence would still be true after you swap the town name, cut it or make it specific.
Read two of your location pages side by side. No paragraph could move from one to the other without becoming false.
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Merge or remove the copies
If you already have a stack of near-identical town pages, you don't have to delete them all at once. Keep the ones with real substance, fold the rest into one service area page, and point the old addresses at it.
Pointing an old address at a new page is called a redirect. It's a short job for whoever maintains your site, and it keeps anyone who bookmarked an old page from hitting a dead end.
Every location page left on your site has something on it that no other page has.