Thirty Pages With the City Name Swapped Is Not Local SEO

The site with forty pages and one paragraph

One of the first things I do with a new account is read every page on the site. On a lot of sites that arrive from another agency, that takes less time than it should, because thirty or forty of the pages are the same page. “Roof repair in Papillion.” “Roof repair in Bellevue.” “Roof repair in La Vista.” Same headline, same three paragraphs, same stock photo, with the town swapped in wherever a blank was left for it.

The owner was usually told this was local SEO. Sometimes they were shown a spreadsheet of rankings for it. And for a while, years ago, it did work. It does not now, and more to the point, Google has a written policy against it.

What Google calls it

Google’s spam policies describe doorway abuse as “when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries,” and one of its listed examples is “having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users” to the same place. Another is “creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy.” That is a fair description of a forty-page city template.

The same document covers scaled content abuse: “many pages generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users,” and it is explicit that it does not matter how the pages were made. Templates, spinners, AI, a person with a find-and-replace; the policy is about the result. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks the question I put to every page: does it “provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis,” and does it show “first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge.” A swapped-name page cannot answer yes to either.

How to tell if you have them

Open two of your city pages side by side. Read them. If you could swap the town names back and nothing would be wrong, they are doorway pages. A quicker check: search your own site for a phrase from the middle of one page and see how many pages it appears on.

Then look at what the pages are doing. In Google Search Console, under the pages report, see whether they have clicks or only impressions. On most sites I audit, the template pages have a handful of impressions each and almost no clicks, and the one or two that do get clicks are the towns the business is genuinely based in. The rest are dead weight that makes the site look thin. Our SEO audit checklist walks through this step by step.

What a city page contains when it is real

A city page earns its place when it says things that are only true of that city and that business. That is harder to write, which is why templates exist, but it is not mysterious. Here is what I put on one.

Which services the crews do there and which they do not, because a roofer who does not do commercial work in that town should say so. Real jobs in that town, even described briefly: the street, the type of house, what the problem was. Drive time or the closest yard, because customers care how fast you can get there. Local detail that matters to the trade: the age of the housing stock, the hail history, the permit office, the HOA rules in the big subdivisions. Reviews from customers in that town, with the town named. A map, the service radius, and a phone number with the right area code. And a reason the page exists that a reader would accept without being told it is for Google.

When we rebuilt the pages for a moving company in Omaha, the metro-town pages were written one at a time with that kind of detail, and they are the pages that started bringing clicks in month five. Thirteen pages that said something beat the forty that said nothing. Our local SEO page explains how those pages fit with the Business Profile and the review work, because a city page on its own does less than people expect.

What to do with the ones you already have

Do not delete them all in one go without a plan, and do not leave them either. The approach I use is to keep the towns that matter, usually the ones the trucks go to every week, and rewrite those pages properly. The rest get redirected to the nearest real page or to the main service page so nothing lands on a dead link. This is also the moment to check that the pages Google can reach are the ones you want it to reach, which is in the same audit checklist above.

If someone is proposing to build you a city page for every town in three counties, ask them to show you one they have written for another client and read it with the town name covered. If you cannot tell where it is for, you have your answer.

And if you would like a second pair of eyes on the pages you have now, get in touch and I will go through them with you. Finding the two pages that will bring calls, and fixing them, is one of my favourite parts of the job.