Spoke
Local landing pages
A page per location works when the locations differ. Generated from a template with the city swapped, it is the doorway page pattern, which has been penalized for two decades.
Doorway pages are named in Google's published spam policies, linked below. What distinguishes a legitimate location page from one is practitioner judgment, stated as such.
Every multi-location business arrives at the same idea: a page for each city. The idea is sound and the usual execution is a documented spam pattern, and the difference between them is not subtle.
Are location pages good or bad for SEO?
Both, depending entirely on whether they contain anything specific to the location. A page about your office in a city — the staff, the directions, the parking, the local detail — is a real page serving real visitors. A page generated from a template with the city name substituted is a doorway page, which Google's spam policies name directly.
The reliable test: if search engines did not exist, would this page be worth having? If the honest answer is no, it is a liability rather than an asset.
What makes it real
Specifics only somebody at that location could supply:
- The people there. Named, with photographs of the actual place.
- Getting there. Directions as a local gives them, parking, transit, the awkward entrance.
- What is different about operating there. Hours, local conditions, the questions clients in that area actually ask.
- Local proof. Work done there, with permission.
- The real address and phone for that location, matching your canonical record.
A page with four of those is a page. A page with none is a template.
What makes it a doorway
The pattern Google's policies describe is a set of pages created to funnel visitors into the same destination without offering distinct value — and the city-swap template is the textbook case.
The tells are easy to spot in your own site: paragraphs identical except for a place name; a list of fifty towns where you have no presence; pages linked only from a footer directory; content that would read identically if you shuffled the city names.
The last one is the sharpest test. Swap the city names between two of your pages. If nothing reads wrong, there was nothing in them about either city.
Areas you serve but are not in
The common hard case: a genuine service area with no office.
You can write honestly about it — how you serve it, travel time, work done there, what is specific about that area — and that is a legitimate page. What you cannot do is imply a location you do not have, invent an address, or produce one of these for every settlement within a radius.
The volume question answers itself. Pages for the handful of areas that matter, written properly, outperform fifty generated ones and do not carry the exposure.
The economics
The procurement section prices this correctly: a bulk location-page program is cheap to buy and creates a contingent liability against the whole domain. Generative tools have made producing them nearly free, which has made the pattern more common rather than safer — Google's policies name generative AI used to produce many pages without adding value as an example of scaled content abuse.
Fewer, real, locally specific pages. It is slower, it is defensible, and it is the only version that is still an asset in two years.
More in Local SEO
Google Business Profile
For a business that serves people in a place, the profile often brings in more contact than the website does. It's also the thing most likely to have been set up once and never looked at again.
SERP anatomy
Ad units, the map pack and organic results stacked on one screen, ranked by different systems on different inputs. Reading the page correctly is the whole prerequisite for working on it.
NAP & citations
Name, address and phone number, identical everywhere. It is clerical work with no creative content, which is exactly why it goes undone and why doing it is an advantage.
Multi-location
Each office competes in its own market against its own neighbors. Run them off one brand average and you'll never see the two that are quietly failing — which are the two costing you work.