Are Town and City Pages Still a Good Idea for Local SEO?

Do location pages still work for local SEO?

Location pages still rank, still send traffic and still support map pack visibility for businesses that serve more than one area. What has changed is Google's tolerance for volume without substance.

In the past, businesses could build a page for every town within a fifty-mile radius, change a handful of words, and see rankings follow. That approach is now a liability. Google's content quality systems are explicitly designed to spot pages that exist only to target a keyword, and can suppress an entire site's visibility if enough of them are found.

• A page for a town where you have completed real jobs still performs well.
• A page for a town you have never worked in, built purely to rank, is a risk.
• Pages that differ only by find-and-replacing the place name are treated as duplicate or near-duplicate content.

When is a town or city page worth building?

Build a page when there is a real business reason for it, not simply because a keyword tool shows search volume for that town.

• You have completed work there. Real jobs give you photos, details and a story to tell.
• You have a physical presence. An office, a van depot, a partner tradesperson or a bookable local team.
• Local demand is proven. Search Console or enquiry data shows people from that town already looking for you.
• You can write something specific. Local landmarks, travel times, parking notes, or area-specific regulations relevant to your service.

If none of these apply for a town, a blog post covering the wider region, or simply relying on your main service area page, is the safer and often more effective choice.

What separates a good location page from a thin one?

The difference rarely comes down to word count. It comes down to whether a visitor, and a search engine, can tell the page was built specifically for that place.

How many location pages should a business build?

There is no fixed number, but a smaller set of strong pages consistently beats a large set of weak ones. If a business can genuinely serve fifteen towns but can only write distinct, useful content for six, publish six.

A practical approach many of our clients in Portsmouth, Fareham, Havant and Southsea use is to build a strong page for their core towns, then group secondary or rarely-searched towns under a single "areas we cover" page that lists them honestly, without pretending each has its own dedicated content.

For a business unsure whether pages or a single hub page is the right structure for its current size, see the different types of local SEO services.

How do you avoid location pages competing with each other?

• Give each page a distinct primary keyword: the town plus the specific service.
• Avoid identical intro paragraphs across pages; rewrite the opening for each town.
• Link pages to each other sparingly, and only where it helps a reader compare areas.
• Use unique testimonials, project photos and FAQs per page where possible.

This overlaps closely with the technical side of managing multiple pages targeting similar phrases, which is covered in full detail elsewhere.

How do town and city pages perform in AI search and AI Overviews?

AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity tend to pull from pages that state something concrete and specific about a place, rather than pages that mention a town in passing. A page that names local landmarks, describes actual completed work and lists genuine local reviews gives an assistant something quotable when a user asks "who does this in Fareham".

A thin, templated page rarely gets surfaced this way, because there is nothing distinct for the assistant to extract. The same local specificity that satisfies a human reader is what earns citation in an AI answer.

Location page glossary

• Location page — a page targeting a specific town, city or service area.
• Thin content — a page with little unique or useful information.
• Duplicate content — near-identical text repeated across multiple pages.
• Helpful content system — Google's system for identifying content made primarily for search engines.
• Service area business — a business that serves customers at their location rather than a single storefront.
• LocalBusiness schema — structured data describing a business's location and services.
• Map pack — the three local results shown with a map on relevant searches.

Frequently asked questions

Build fewer pages, and make each one count

Town and city pages have not stopped working; low-effort versions of them have. If you can back a page with real local proof, it remains one of the most reliable ways to earn map pack and organic visibility in that area.

If you are weighing up which towns deserve their own page, our local SEO services in Fareham include an honest audit of what to keep, rewrite or merge. Get in touch to talk it through.