Do location pages still work, and what makes one rank.
They work. What stopped working is the page published eight times with the town name swapped out, and one sentence tells you which of the two you have.
Yes, location pages still work. What stopped working is the version where one page was duplicated nine times with the town name swapped out, and because that version is everywhere, the whole tactic has a bad name it does not deserve.
The test for whether a location page will earn anything is one sentence long. Paste another town's name over the one on the page. If nothing in the text becomes false, the page is not about that town and it will be ignored.
Everything below is the difference between the two, including how many to build, when to combine towns instead, and the linking that turns a pile of pages into something that compounds.
Why the swapped-noun version fails
It is worth understanding the mechanism, because owners usually assume there is a penalty involved and there is not.
When you publish eight near-identical pages, a search engine has to decide which one deserves to exist. It groups them, picks one, and quietly sets the rest aside. Nothing gets punished. They simply never appear, which from the outside looks identical to being punished and gets diagnosed wrongly for years.
The second failure is human and it costs you more. Somebody in Paris lands on a page that mentions Paris four times and says nothing a person in Paris would recognize. They can tell. The page reads as a mail merge, which is a worse first impression than having no page at all, because having no page is neutral and looking automated is not.
Two quick ways to audit your own set. Open two of them side by side and count the sentences that differ beyond the place name. Then show one to somebody who lives there and watch their face.
What is actually on a page that ranks
Specific, checkable, local detail that a competitor two hours away could not produce without doing the work. In order of how much weight each one carries.
- A job you did there. The neighbourhood or the street, what the work involved, what was awkward about it, and your own photos from that day. One real job is worth more than every adjective on the page.
- What the local building stock means for the work. The pre-war core with knob and tube still in it. The seventies subdivision with aluminum wiring. The new build with a drainage plan that assumes clay. This is the paragraph that proves the page was written by somebody who works there.
- The practical geography. Well and septic instead of municipal services. Rural routes where a delivery costs more. A hill that decides which equipment goes on the truck. Streets where you cannot park a trailer.
- The permit and inspection reality. Which office, roughly how long, whether you pull it or the homeowner does. Dull, searched, and almost never written properly for one municipality.
- Who you serve there now. Named customers if they agree to it, or the kind of customer if they do not. Our own painting client Windfeld Painting works across Brantford, Brant County, Paris, St. George, Burford, Ancaster, Waterford and Simcoe, and that list is doing real work on a page because every name in it is somewhere they genuinely drive to.
- Travel, stated plainly. Do you charge for the drive, is there a minimum, how far is too far. Customers at the edge of your range are asking this and nobody answers it.
- Local reference points. The plaza everybody still calls by its old name, the arena, the industrial park. Not for the search engine. For the person reading, who relaxes slightly when the page sounds like it came from nearby.
- Pricing, if it differs. A travel surcharge or a different minimum is useful information and almost nobody publishes it.
Write one page like that first, properly, before you write eight. It takes longer than you expect and it becomes the template for what the others have to clear.
How many to build, and in what order
Not one per town on a map. One per town you would drive to tomorrow for a normal job at a normal price.
Order them by demand first, because the terms are small and the gaps between them matter. Measured in October 2026, our own category shows "ancaster website design" at about 70 searches a month, "web design company in hamilton" at 110, and "hamilton seo company" at 480. Three towns, three very different sizes, and the right order to build in is obvious once you can see the numbers. Get the numbers for your own trade before you decide anything.
Then apply three filters.
- Do you have proof there. A completed job, a review, a photo. A town with no evidence behind it produces the thin page you are trying to avoid.
- Would you take the work at the normal rate. If the drive makes it marginal, the page will generate enquiries you resent.
- Can you write the unique paragraph today. If not, the page is not ready. Park it.
Four to six pages is a complete first phase for most trades. Add one a month afterwards and write it properly. A thin page published this week does not hold a place for a good page later, it just sits there diluting the set.
Where it gets out of hand is the matrix. Five services across eight towns is forty pages, each needing its own genuine local content, which nobody delivers. Pick your two or three highest-margin services and build towns underneath those. Leave the rest as service pages with no town layer at all.
When to combine towns into one page
Often, and it is the most underused answer in local search.
Combine when all three of these are true: the search demand for the smaller town is negligible, the work and the drive are effectively the same, and you cannot write a distinct paragraph for each.
Three shapes that work:
- A county or regional page. One page covering a rural municipality and the hamlets inside it, naming each one and saying something true about the area as a whole. Better than six pages that each say nothing.
- A paired page for two towns in one trade area. Where the crew, the drive and the housing stock are shared, one honest page about both beats two halves.
- A service page with a real service area section. For a business with one strong town and a few occasional ones, skip the extra pages entirely and write a proper paragraph naming the occasional ones in context.
Combining is not a compromise. It concentrates the content into a page strong enough to rank, and it stops you maintaining pages you never wanted. The only genuinely wrong answer is publishing eight pages with nothing in them.
The internal linking that makes a set work together
A set of location pages with no links between them is a set of orphans. This part takes an hour and is skipped constantly.
| Link | From | To |
|---|---|---|
| The hub | One service page | Every town page under it |
| Up | Each town page | Its service page |
| Across | Each town page | Two to four genuine neighbours, not all of them |
| Proof | Each town page | A project or case study from that area |
| Evidence | A project page | The town pages it is proof for |
| Advice | Each town page | A guide that answers the next question |
Three rules that matter more than the diagram.
Keep them out of the main navigation. Thirty items in a menu helps nobody. The hub page carries the list, and the hub goes in the navigation.
Vary the anchor text the way a person would write it. The same phrase repeated across every page reads as a pattern, and it also reads badly.
Check for orphans with a site: search on your own domain, or the Pages report in Search Console. A page nothing links to is a page that gets crawled late and valued low, and the diagnostic sequence for that is in why your website is not ranking.
Our own site is the argument
We publish a page for every town we work in and a page for every trade we build for, which you can see in the industries we build for and under each entry in our services. We are not going to tell you those pages are winning yet, because they went live recently and anybody claiming a verdict on a page that age is selling you something.
What we can tell you is the state of the market around them in October 2026. The leading local competitor in our category draws 173 organic visits a month from 59 keywords. An agency headquartered in Texas holds position one for "hamilton seo company", a term with 480 searches a month, which tells you how little local depth is actually competing for it. And two local competitors have bought links, visible to anyone with a backlink tool and the anchor text to prove it, which is a liability rather than a moat.
That is a market being held by pages nobody has put any local substance into. It is the same situation in most trades in this region, and it is why the tactic still works for the small number of businesses willing to write the pages properly.
The honest limits
A location page is not a map pack ranking. Proximity to the searcher weighs heavily on the map results, and no page on your own site overrides geography. The town page wins the organic results underneath the map, feeds the enquiry when somebody checks you out afterwards, and gives your Google Business Profile somewhere relevant to point. The profile work itself is in the local SEO checklist for trades.
It is also slow. These pages compound over months, not weeks, and the first sign of life is impressions rather than position.
And it fails outright for a town where you have never worked. There is no writing trick that substitutes for a job, a photo and a customer. Go and do the work there, then write the page.
Our own town pages are built this way because we would not sell a shape we were not prepared to put our own name on. If you want a page set scoped for the towns you actually serve, tell us where you work and we will tell you how many pages that justifies, including the times the answer is fewer than you expected.
One for every town you would drive to tomorrow at your normal price, which for most trades means four to six to begin with. Order them by search demand, then add one a month. A town you cannot write something specific about is not ready.
A job you did there, with your own photos. What the local building stock means for the work. The permit office, the drive, what you charge for travel, who you already serve. Paste another town name over it: if nothing becomes false, it is not local.
Often, yes. Where demand for the smaller town is negligible, the drive and the work are the same, and you cannot write a distinct paragraph for each, one honest page about both beats two thin ones. A county or regional page works the same way.
Not directly. Map results weigh proximity to the searcher heavily and are driven mostly by your Google Business Profile. Location pages win the organic results underneath the map, support the enquiry when somebody checks you out, and give the profile somewhere relevant to point.
Months, and they compound rather than arrive. Impressions move before positions do, so a page collecting impressions for the right town is working even when it is not visible yet. A page with no impressions after two months is not being considered at all.