Location pages that win local searches, not Google penalties.

If you cover more than one town, you have probably wondered whether to add a page for each. A plumber in Norwich who also works in Wymondham, Dereham and Aylsham. A cleaner covering Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. A surveyor who travels across the county. Location pages can help you show up when people search for a service in their own town. Done badly, they do the opposite.

Website design trends for 2026 keep returning to the same point: sites that clearly say who they serve and where they operate do better in both organic and local search. Location pages are one of the most direct ways to do that. They are also one of the easiest things to get wrong.

What a location page is for

A location page tells a person in a specific place that you work there, what you offer them, and how to get started. It is not there to repeat your services page with the town name swapped in. Google's spam policies specifically call out doorway pages: lots of near-identical pages built to catch searches rather than to help anyone. Those can drag the whole site down, not just the thin pages.

If a page would still make sense with a different town name pasted in, it is not a location page. It is a template.

The test: does anything actually change by place?

Before writing a single page, ask what is genuinely different about serving each area. Good answers look like this:

• Coverage and travel: which villages around the town you include, and whether a call-out charge applies further out.
• Timings: which days you are in that area, or typical lead times.
• Local knowledge: the housing stock, the parking, the kind of jobs you see most there.
• Proof: projects, photos or reviews from customers in that town.
• Practical details: a local address if you have one, or where you are based in relation to it.

If you cannot find anything real to say about a place, you probably do not need a page for it. List it on a single areas we cover page instead. That is honest, useful and perfectly good for search.

An example from our own work

Surplush, a Norwich buyers club selling packaging and cleaning supplies to businesses, delivers by e-cargo bike in Norwich, Cambridge and London. When we relaunched their shop, part of the work was courier bookings and tracking for each of those cities, because delivery genuinely runs differently in each one, and delivery days also shift around bank holidays. That is exactly the kind of difference worth putting in front of customers. When the way you serve a place really changes, there is something real to say about it.

What to put on each page

Keep the structure consistent so pages are easy to build and easy to read, but make the content specific. A solid layout:

1. A clear heading that names the service and the place, such as "Boiler servicing in Dereham".
2. A short opening saying what you do there and who for, in plain language.
3. Local detail from the list above. This is the part that earns the page its place.
4. One or two real examples of work in that area, with photos if you have them.
5. Answers to common questions, written as direct answers. Clear headings and short, focused paragraphs also help AI-powered search tools pull out what you do.
6. One obvious next step: a phone number, a booking link or a short enquiry form.

Mistakes we see often

Pages for places you do not really serve

Adding King's Lynn or Cromer because they get searches, when you rarely go there, leads to calls you turn away and visitors who bounce. Neither helps you.

Copying and pasting with the name changed

This is the classic doorway pattern. Even if it ranks for a while, customers notice when every page reads the same.

Hiding the pages

Location pages should be linked from your navigation, footer or an areas page. If the only way to find one is through Google, that is a warning sign for search engines and a dead end for visitors.

Forgetting your Google Business Profile

Your website and your profile should tell the same story about where you work. If they disagree on service areas or address, you are sending mixed signals.

How many pages is the right number?

There is no magic figure. A small business covering Norwich and a handful of nearby market towns might only need three or four solid pages, plus an areas page for everywhere else. That will usually outperform thirty thin ones, and it is far easier to keep up to date when your prices or coverage change.

Fewer, better pages beat a page for every postcode.

Keeping them working

Location pages are not a one-off job. Add new projects and reviews from each area as they come in. Update coverage if you stop travelling somewhere. Check which pages bring in enquiries and put more effort into those. A page that gets refreshed with real local work stays useful, to customers and to search engines.