What a doorway page is and why it gets ignored
A doorway page is a page built to catch a search and pass the visitor somewhere else, with little of its own to offer. The familiar local version is a set of pages titled with a service and a town, each carrying the same paragraphs with a different name dropped in.
Search engines have described this pattern in their spam guidance for a long time. The practical outcome is usually quiet: the pages are crawled, judged to be near copies of each other and left out of results, or one is chosen to stand for the whole set. In worse cases the low quality of the set colours how the rest of the site is treated. Check the current guidance of the search engines you depend on for how they define it today.
The pages also fail with people. A visitor who lands on a page about their city and finds nothing that shows any knowledge of it leaves quickly.
Would the page be wrong if the place name were swapped?
There is a quick test for any location page. Replace the place name throughout with a different one and read the page again. If everything still reads as accurate, the page was never about the place. It was about your service, with a label attached.
A page that passes the test becomes wrong when the name changes. It mentions the areas you cover, which do not exist in the other city. It refers to how customers there travel, what the buildings are like, which regulations or seasons affect the work, which branch they would visit and when it opens. Swap the name and those statements turn false.
Run the test strictly on existing pages before writing new ones. It is common to find that only the heading and the first sentence change meaning, and everything beneath them would suit any town in the country.
What a location page needs to be worth publishing
The substance has to come from what the business really knows about the place. That knowledge exists in most companies. It sits with the people who take the calls and do the jobs, and it rarely reaches the website.
Local vocabulary matters here. A page for Gurgaon that speaks of sectors, named business districts and the roads people commute along sounds like it was written by someone who knows the city. A page for Manchester would speak of districts and postcodes, one for Dubai of communities and free zones, one for Houston of neighbourhoods and suburbs. Use the terms residents use, in the places they would naturally appear.
- The areas served, named as locals name them, and any you do not cover.
- How the service differs there: property types, common problems, travel, timing.
- Who the customer will deal with and how to reach them.
- Evidence from that place, such as reviews or approved examples, where you have it.
- Questions customers in that area really ask, with specific answers.
Be plain about how you serve the place
A location page should never imply premises that do not exist. If there is a branch, give its address, hours and directions. If the business travels to customers, say where it travels from and how far. If the work is done remotely, say that.
Our own city pages take the remote case. The page for Gurgaon describes the city's business areas and the kinds of company found there, and states that we work with businesses there remotely, with no claim of an office. It is offered here as an example of the approach, and the swap test applies to it as much as to anyone else's page.
Being clear costs less than it seems. Customers who need someone on site were never going to be won by a vague page, and customers who do not mind are reassured by the candour.
The same rule applies to structured data and business profiles. Mark up an address, or create a profile for a place, only where the business really operates from it.
How many location pages should a business publish?
Publish as many as you can write with real substance, and no more. For a business with four branches that is four pages, each with its own details. For a service-area business it might be a handful covering the districts where it does most of its work.
The temptation is to cover every town and suburb within driving distance. Resist it. Thirty thin pages compete with each other, dilute the site and take real effort to keep accurate. Five strong ones can be maintained, linked to properly and improved as you learn more.
Where demand in a small area does not justify a page, mention the area on the page for the nearest larger one. A clear list of the localities covered is often enough to be found for them.
What gets location pages ignored
The causes are consistent across sites and countries. Most come from producing pages at a scale the business's knowledge cannot support.
Automation makes this easier to get wrong than it used to be. A tool can produce a hundred fluent city pages in an afternoon, and fluent is not the same as informed. If no one at the business supplied facts about the place, the page has none, however well it reads.
- The same body copy on every page with only the place name changed.
- Lists of towns, postcodes or sectors pasted in with no sentences around them.
- Pages for places the business does not serve in practice.
- No route to the pages except a block of links in the footer.
- Contact details that are identical on every page when the branches differ.
Link the pages into the site and keep them current
A location page should be reachable the way a visitor would look for it: from a locations index, from the relevant service pages and from the contact page. Each one should link back to the services offered there and, where a branch has a business profile, to and from that profile. Our guide for businesses with many branches covers the structure in more detail.
Review the pages on a schedule. Staff change, hours change, coverage areas grow and shrink. A page that was accurate when written and is now wrong fails the same test from the other direction. If you would like a second opinion on an existing set of pages, this is part of what our local SEO services examine first.
