Somewhere in most B2B projects, someone asks whether the site should have a page for each city it serves. Burlington, Oakville, Mississauga, Markham, Toronto, and on down the list.
The question usually arrives with a worry attached. Someone on your marketing team has read that Google penalizes this sort of thing, and nobody wants to earn a penalty while trying to be found online.
Both halves of that are worth separating. First off, city pages are not against the rules. However, thin ones are a problem, and what we find is that most city pages are indeed thin on legitimate content.
We get asked this enough that we’ve ended up with a short test for it (which we’ll come to shortly). Funnily enough, we’re also working through the question on our own site at the moment, so the examples below are ours rather than borrowed.
Why the question keeps coming up
Many buyers search with places in them. Not everyone, and not at every stage, but enough that a company serving a region can watch competitors appear for “web design Burlington” while it doesn’t.
Your service pages are written for the service, not the place. They can rank for the service and still lose the version of the search with a city attached, which is frequently the version used by someone ready to talk to somebody nearby.
That gap is real and the disagreement is about what to do with it.
What Google actually says
it is worth reading the policy rather than the summaries of it. Summaries tend to be written by people selling local SEO.
Google’s spam policies describe doorway abuse as pages built to rank for specific, similar searches that lead users to intermediate pages less useful than the real destination. One of the examples given is multiple pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to a single page.
Notice what that does and doesn’t say. The problem named is funnelling. Nothing in it caps how many location pages a site may have, and nothing says a page per city is forbidden.
A set of pages that each answer a real question for a real audience is not what the policy describes. Ten pages where only the city name is swapped is exactly what it describes.
Patterns That Read as Doorway Pages
The cover-the-city-name test
We call it the cover-the-city-name test, which is less a methodology than a ten-second habit. Cover the city name on the page and then read what’s left.
If the remaining text would sit just as happily on any other city’s page, then you have a template with a variable in it. Search engines are considerably better at spotting that than the people who built it. If what’s left still says something specific and true, you have a legitimate city page.
We recommend applying this before you build each city page. It is a great deal cheaper as a planning question than as an audit finding, and we would rather talk a client out of four pages than having them write them twice.
The four questions we ask first
Before any city gets a page, we work through four questions. A city doesn’t have to pass all four, but it should pass two or more.
Could we actually get there?
If a prospect asked us to come by next Tuesday, would that be a yes without thinking about it? Proximity is not a ranking factor, but it is the difference between a page that describes a service and one that describes a service you can genuinely provide.
Do we have work we can point to?
That includes clients in the city, and ideally a project worth writing up. This is the question that most often returns a no, and the one people are most tempted to fudge.
Is there enough search volume to bother?
Not every town has a meaningful number of people searching for what you do with a place name attached. Some are worth a page, some are worth a line on a service-area page, and some are worth nothing at all.
Is there anything true to say about working there?
Something specific to that city that wouldn’t apply to your business generally. This is the hardest of the four, and it deserves to be answered honestly.
Worth Building
- You have clients there
- You would happily visit
- Real search volume for the city
- Something true to say about working there
Wait Until
- No clients and no projects yet
- The page would need the city name to exist
- Proof would have to be invented
- The basics aren’t in place yet
The part nobody warns you about
Being genuinely different for each city is harder than it sounds.
You can describe neighbourhoods and what a place is known for, and we would gently suggest not doing it. A reader comparing accountants does not need a paragraph about the waterfront. Accounting in Toronto is not very different from accounting in Markham, because the service is the service.
Local colour that has nothing to do with the work is filler with a postal code attached. It makes the page longer without making it better, and most readers can spot that kind of fluff within a few sentences.
Case studies are the best answer, but they are also the constraint. Having several clients in a city doesn’t mean any of that work was substantial enough to write up as a case study worth publishing. Small projects, quiet projects, and projects under NDA all count as clients and none of them give you a story to publish.
When a city has no relevant example, there isn’t much you can do about it. What we can’t recommend is inventing one. People in a city often network, and a fabricated local proof point is the one mistake on this list that can very quickly kill your credibility.
How we worked through our own list
For our own website, here is how our own list came out. Which is a useful illustration precisely because it isn’t perfectly tidy.
- Burlington and Oakville went first, simply based on proximity. We’re on the border of both, and the case for being found here needs no explaining.
- Markham came next, because we were based there for our first eleven years. That history is real and it’s ours to write about.
- Mississauga followed, being close to the current office. More usefully, it is a place where we have several client projects to reference.
- Toronto is likely next, and it’s the awkward one. We have projects to show, but we’re further away and the competition for anything Toronto-flavoured is considerable.
- Hamilton hasn’t been built, for the simple reason that we have no client examples there yet. It’s a bit of a “chicken and the egg” type of a problem. We need the page to land clients, but we need some client work to build the page.
That last line is the one we would underline. Hamilton is a perfectly good market, we would happily work there, and we have no page for it. Not because of some rule about how many pages a site may have, but because the honest version of that page would be thin, and a thin page is worse than no page.
Why we didn’t just open a Toronto address
The obvious shortcut to a competitive city is a virtual office, so it’s worth saying why we didn’t take it.
Google’s verification has become considerably stricter. A video walkthrough is now common, and it’s expected to show your office with signage and company-specific materials in it. Most virtual office providers won’t allow custom signage, and a simply rented room no longer clears the bar on its own.
Even getting through is not the end of it. Re-verification often comes back around months later, by which point you’ve built up a profile with posts and reviews attached to an address you can’t prove again. That’s a worse position than never having started.
What belongs on a page that earns its place
Assuming the city clears the test, the page needs more than a heading with a place in it.
- A reason you’re relevant there, stated plainly. Clients, history, proximity, or a service that suits the local industry mix.
- Proof from that city, where it exists. A case study, a named client with permission, or at minimum an honest description of the kind of work.
- The service, explained properly. People arriving from a city search still want to know what you do.
- Something specific about working with you at a distance, if distance is a factor. How meetings work, how often you’d visit.
- A clear next step that belongs to the page rather than dumping everyone into one generic form.
On linking, we took a deliberate decision worth repeating. The city pages exist for people arriving from city searches, not for people already browsing the site, so they don’t appear in the main menu. We built a Service Areas hub page to point to the city-based pages, plus we linked to them from the home page. Cluttering the menu with eight town names serves nobody.
What Belongs on a City Page
- 1A reason you’re relevant there Clients, history, proximity, or a local industry mix that suits what you do.
- 2Proof from that city A case study, a named client with permission, or an honest description of the work.
- 3The service, explained properly People arriving from a city search still want to know what you actually do.
- 4How working at a distance works Only if distance is a factor. How meetings run, how often you would visit.
- 5A next step that belongs to the page Not everyone funnelled into one generic form.
How you’ll know whether it worked
Set the expectation before you start. These pages are slow, and the first months will look like nothing is happening.
Judge them city by city rather than in aggregate. A site-wide traffic number will hide both the page that’s working and the four that aren’t. What you want from your analytics is impressions and enquiries for each page separately, and the honest comparison is against that page’s own history.
If a page has had a fair run and produced nothing, that’s information. Improve it or remove it. Leaving a page up because deleting it feels like an admission is how sites accumulate the sprawl that caused the worry in the first place.
One city at a time
City pages are neither the trick that opens up a region nor the penalty risk they’re often described as. They’re ordinary pages with a place in the title, and they work on exactly the same terms as every other page on your site, which is whether somebody who lands there finds something worth their time.
If you can write a true, specific page about working in a city, write it. If you can’t yet, go and earn the material rather than publishing a placeholder and hoping for the best. That is the slower route, and it is the only one we have seen still look sensible two years later.
It’s also worth saying that this sits downstream of the fundamentals. If your local search basics aren’t in order, city pages won’t rescue them, and the groundwork covered in our SEO guide matters more than any page you add.
If you’re weighing this for your own region and want an outside read on which cities are worth a page, book a discovery call and we’ll go through your list with you – no pitch, and no pressure.
