What a real local page contains

The test

Delete the place name from the page and read what is left. If it could describe anywhere, it was always describing nowhere.

That is the whole diagnostic, and it takes ten seconds per page. It is also close to how an engine judges a set of sibling pages.

A page that survives the test has something specific in it. A page that does not cannot be fixed by adding more of the same.

Delete the place name and read what is left. If it could describe anywhere, it was always describing nowhere — and it takes ten seconds per page.

What genuinely differs by place

The neighborhoods and streets you actually work in, named. The travel time from your base. The parking or access situation.

Local building stock and its typical problems. Local rules, permits or inspection bodies. Seasonal conditions that affect the work.

Jobs you have done there, described. That last one is the most convincing and the least used.

• The neighborhoods and streets you actually work in
• Travel time from your base
• Parking and access conditions
• Local building stock and its typical problems
• Local permits, inspections or the body that issues them
• Seasonal conditions that affect the work
• Jobs you have done there, described

How many pages you can justify

As many places as you can say something real about, and no more. For most small businesses that is a handful rather than fifty.

A business serving five towns properly outperforms one with forty template pages, because five pages that rank beat forty that do not.

Places you serve but cannot write about belong on a coverage page listing them, which is honest and takes no effort to maintain.

Five pages that rank beat forty that do not, and the number is set by what you can say rather than by how far you will drive.

Structure that works

Open with the specific: where exactly you cover from here, and how quickly you get there. That answers the first question somebody has.

Then the service as it applies locally, with the detail that differs. Then proof: work done nearby, with the area named.

Then contact, with the same details as everywhere else on the site. Consistency matters as much here as anywhere.

Keep the structure the same across your local pages so a reader comparing two of them is comparing content rather than layout.

What to avoid

Padding with facts about the town lifted from an encyclopaedia. Population and founding dates persuade nobody and signal a template.

Lists of nearby towns stuffed into a paragraph, which is the oldest version of this pattern and the most obvious.

Claiming premises you do not have. It is against listing rules and it is checkable.

Population figures and founding dates persuade nobody and signal a template, which is the pattern described in doorway pages.

When you have nothing to say yet

Then do not write the page yet. Write it after your first job in that area, when you have something real to describe.

In the meantime a coverage page naming the places you travel to serves the search adequately and carries no risk.

Pages built ahead of the work are the ones that stay generic, because there was never anything to put in them.

Write the page after your first job in that area, when you have something real to describe. Pages built ahead of the work stay generic.

How ours are made

Location pages on a site built here carry sourced facts about the place alongside the specific detail you supply, and are measured against their siblings with the place name stripped out first.

A page that becomes generic once the name is removed does not publish. That refusal is the point rather than a limitation.

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.