How to write location pages that are not doorway pages

When a location page is legitimate

You have an office there. You have a crew based there. You drive there every week and have for years. Any of those makes the page honest. The page is about a place you really serve, and it can say what serving that place is actually like.

The test is simple. Could you fill the page with facts that are only true of that place? Your team, the neighborhoods you cover, the permit office, the local water, the age of the housing, the jobs you have done there. If you can, write it. If you cannot, you do not have a location page. You have a search you would like to catch.

What makes a doorway page

A doorway page exists to catch a search and pass the person somewhere else. The classic shape is one service page copied for forty towns with the town name swapped, each saying 'trusted plumber in' and a different city. Nothing else changes.

Google's spam policies name this directly, under doorway abuse and scaled content abuse. The reason is not the count of pages. It is that the pages give the searcher nothing the first one did not. A reader who lands on the copy for their town learns nothing about their town.

• Same headings, same paragraphs, only the place name changes.
• A city you do not serve, listed because people search it.
• A block of town names in the footer, each with its own thin page.
• A page that says a place is served but never says how.

How the builder's uniqueness check catches the swap

Website Builder Studio measures how alike two pages are before either publishes. Before it measures, it strips the city, state and industry names out of both. What is left is the actual content. If the actual content is the same, the pages score as copies, and the copy fails.

This is deliberate. A template with the town swapped is exactly what the check is built to refuse. It does not matter how many towns you list or how the names are arranged. Take the names away and the check sees one page.

It is part of the same check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards. A page that fails does not publish, and the in-app assistant says why, so you know it was the sameness and not something else.

How to write real local content

Start with what is different about the work there. Older homes mean older wiring, or cast-iron drains, or lath and plaster. A hard-water area means water heaters fail differently. A hilly town means different roofing access. A coastal one means salt. Say the thing you would tell a new hire before their first day there.

Then the practical facts. Which neighborhoods and how far. How long to get there from your base. Whether the town needs a permit for the work and who issues it. What you have done there, described plainly without invented numbers.

Then the people. If a crew or an office is based there, name that. If a customer there let you use their words, use them. The page should read like it was written by someone who has been there, because it was.

One page per real area

The temptation is a page for every town within driving distance. Resist it. One page per area you genuinely serve, with real content, is a set of pages you can keep true. Forty thin pages is a set you cannot.

If you serve a region, a single service-area page that names the region and its main towns is honest and clear. Add a town page only when you have that town's worth of things to say.

A business with real branches is different. Each branch is a real presence, and each can carry its own site or its own page set. See multi-location business websites for how that is set up.

How the interview builds them

The in-app assistant asks about your areas and what serving each one involves, so each page is written from a conversation about that place. Give it the real differences and it writes pages that carry them. Give it a list of towns and nothing else, and the pages it writes will be alike, and the check will say so.

That refusal is the feature. A builder that happily produced forty swapped pages would be handing you a problem with a delay on it. This one makes you say something true about each place first.

What stays your job

Deciding which places are real. Knowing the local facts. Keeping them current when you open or close an area. The builder can hold you to a standard of sameness; it cannot know whether you actually serve the next county.

The result, done right, is a small set of location pages that are genuinely useful to a person in that place. That is the only kind that lasts.