Getting found

Do I need a page for every town I cover?

By Bhavesh Narsai · Published 11 August 2026 · Updated 11 August 2026

It is the most common piece of SEO advice given to tradespeople, and it is not wrong. A page for each town you cover genuinely can bring in work. The trouble is that the version most people end up with is the version Google penalises, and nobody mentions that part.

Why the advice exists

People do not search for "plumber". They search for "plumber Horwich" or "emergency electrician Farnworth". If your website only ever says Bolton, you are relying on Google to work out that you cover the surrounding towns too, and it will not always take your word for it.

A page that speaks directly to one town gives Google something concrete to match against that search, and gives the person reading it the reassurance that you actually come out to where they live. That part of the advice is sound.

Where it goes wrong

The shortcut is obvious and almost everyone takes it. You write one page, then copy it fifteen times and swap the town name. Fifteen minutes of work, fifteen new pages, job done.

That set of pages has a name. Google calls them doorway pages: near-identical pages built to catch searches for different places, all funnelling to the same destination. They are named specifically in Google's spam policies, which means the outcome is not "it did not work", it is that the pages can be ignored entirely and, at worst, the site is treated as lower quality overall.

It is a genuinely bad trade. The upside was some extra traffic. The downside is the ranking you already had.

The test that settles it

Take the page, remove every mention of the town, and read it back. If it still makes complete sense and could be about anywhere, it is not a location page. It is your services page wearing a different hat.

A real one fails that test badly, because so much of it only makes sense in that one place.

What actually belongs on one

• Jobs you have genuinely done there, with photos. This is the single strongest thing you can put on the page, and it is the one competitors cannot copy.
• The specific areas and postcodes you reach, named properly. Not "and surrounding areas", but the estates, districts and villages people actually say when describing where they live.
• How quickly you can get there, and whether there is a callout difference. For anything urgent this is often the only thing the customer cares about.
• Anything local that changes the work. Older terraced stock, a lot of new build, conservation areas, on-street parking, steep access. Trades know these things instinctively and almost never write them down.
• Reviews from customers in that area, ideally naming it.

All of that is real information, which is why it works. It is also why you cannot produce fifteen of them in an afternoon.

How many do you actually need?

Start with two or three. Pick the towns you genuinely work in most, not the full list of everywhere you would travel to for the right job. Write those properly, see whether they bring enquiries, and add another when they do.

A handful of pages that a person would find useful will out-earn twenty thin ones every time, and they are far less work to keep accurate when your prices or coverage change.

If a town does not warrant a full page

Most will not, and that is fine. One clear "areas we cover" list on your site, with the towns named properly, does the job without any risk at all. Add the same service area to your Google Business Profile, which for a lot of local businesses does more of the local heavy lifting than the website does.

Make sure the machines can read all of it, too. Your name, address, phone and service area need to be marked up in a way Google and AI tools can pick up, which you can check with my free schema checker.

What it costs to do properly

I build location and service pages at £95 each, written around a specific town or a specific service rather than duplicated. If you find yourself wanting a lot of them at once, that is usually the point where a bigger build makes more sense than stacking add-ons, and I will say so rather than let it run.

The short version

A page for every town is good advice that turns bad the moment you take the shortcut. Write two or three real ones about the places you actually work, list the rest honestly, and let the Google listing carry the areas you only visit occasionally.

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