Should a Contractor Have a Page for Every City?

Google's spam policies define doorway abuse as sites or pages "created to rank for specific, similar search queries". Two of its examples describe the city-page shortcut almost exactly:

• "Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page"
• "Creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy"

Google says it finds violations "through automated systems and, as needed, human review", and that sites that violate its policies "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all". The policy doesn't ban location pages. It rules out pages whose only job is to catch a search and push the visitor somewhere else. A town page that answers real questions about working in that town isn't a doorway.

A town page is worth building when three things are true: you've done real work there, you can show it, and there's something genuinely different to say about serving that town compared with the next one (drive time, a building type common there, a cluster of reviews from that area). If none of those are true yet, don't build the page. A thin page doesn't help you, and it dilutes the pages that have something to say.

A practical threshold: if you can't fill the page with at least one real project, one real review and a specific local detail, it isn't ready. Wait until the work exists.

This is different from a lot of generic advice, which says to build a page for every city you want to rank in, treating the page as bait first and a resource second. Build the page because customers in that town need the information on it.

The problem isn't having many location pages. It's having many pages that are the same page with a find-and-replace on the town name. Each page needs:

• Its own project photos, not the same gallery under a new heading.
• Its own copy about serving that town: travel time from your base, local permit quirks, the kinds of properties common there.
• Local proof, ideally a review that names the town or neighbourhood.
• A scope specific enough that, with the heading removed, nobody could mistake it for the page one town over.

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Pages that can show all four are worth building. Pages that can show none should wait.

A town page and a Business Profile do different jobs. As of 15 October 2026, Google's Business Profile help says:

1. Hide your address if customers don't visit you. Google's sign-up guidance says that if your business doesn't have a storefront where you receive customers, you must hide your business address.
2. List the areas you serve. You can set the service area by cities, postal codes or other areas, and add up to 20 service areas.
3. Keep the area realistic. Google suggests the overall area generally shouldn't extend farther than about 2 hours' driving time from where you're based, while noting larger areas suit some businesses.
4. Keep one profile. Google's guidelines for representing your business say there should be only one profile per business, and service-area businesses can't list a virtual office unless it's staffed during business hours.

So the profile covers the whole area from one listing, and your website carries the detail. Making a profile per town, or a page per town with nothing new on it, works against both.

Build one locations hub page that lists every town with its own page, links out to each, and is linked back from each town page. Then link into the relevant town pages from your service pages: a roofing page linking to the two or three towns where you've done the most roofing work, for example. That way the site reads as one connected structure, not a set of orphaned pages nobody would find by browsing. Towns without their own page can still be named on the hub or on a regional page.

There's no fixed number. The test: could someone unfamiliar with your business tell your town pages apart with the headings removed? If yes, you probably have the right number. If every page reads the same, you have too many, whether that's five or fifty.

For most small trades businesses, that means a handful of genuinely distinct pages, added as the proof builds up, not all at once on launch day. Before publishing a new one, have someone outside the business read it and guess which town it's for without the heading. If they can't, add the detail that would give it away, or hold off.

The same rule. A city gets its own page on our site only when there is distinct substance to put on it, such as real client work, how meetings actually happen there and local context, and the page has to read differently from every other location page. Where that isn't true yet, the city is covered as a section of a broader regional page instead. You can see the result on our locations pages.