The Difference Between a Location Page and a Doorway Page
A location page has minutes, not weeks, to convince someone. A page that only swaps the city name into a template gives a visitor nothing to decide on in that window, and gives a search engine nothing to rank, for the same reason.
Two rules separate the two kinds of page. Both are about what is true locally, and neither is a trick.
How small the window actually is
BrightLocal’s consumer search behaviour research found that 75% of consumers take less than 30 minutes to decide which business they want to use, and 72% look at three or fewer businesses before deciding.
Source: BrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior, published 24 June 2026; 1,227 US consumers who had searched online for a local business in the previous three months. Read on 23 September 2026.
That is the whole opportunity. Half an hour, three businesses, and one page each to make the case. A page that could have been written about any town in the country does not survive that comparison, because the two pages beside it are making a specific claim and yours is making a generic one.
What makes a page a clone rather than a location page
Take the master list of everything the company does, drop it onto a page, change the city name at the top. That is the pattern search engines are built to catch, and it is the pattern that fails a real visitor for the same underlying reason: there is nothing on the page that is true of this place in particular.
Google names it directly in its spam policies, under doorway abuse. One of its own examples is “having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page”, alongside “creating substantially similar pages”. The policy is not aimed at the idea of having a page per city. It is aimed at pages that exist to catch a search and then hand the visitor along to the same destination everyone else lands on.
Someone searching from a specific town is not looking for proof that a company exists in general. They are looking for proof that it works here, does this particular work here, and knows something about here that a copy-paste page could not know.
Rule 1: list what is actually offered at that location
A location page should name the services genuinely available from that location, not the entire menu of everything the company does everywhere. If a business offers twelve services overall but only staffs or delivers eight of them from a given office or service area, the page for that location lists eight.
This one change is often the difference between a page that reads as real and one that reads as a placeholder, and it costs nothing. It requires knowing what is true locally instead of copying what is true company-wide. It also does something quieter and more valuable: it stops the page promising work that the nearest crew cannot actually do, which is a phone call that ends in disappointment rather than a job.
Rule 2: add at least two facts only someone in that city would know
This is the part most location pages skip entirely, and the part that signals “we know this town” rather than “we serve this town”. Two per page, minimum.
City hall’s address, hours and contact information. The permit office. A utility contact. Something a resident would genuinely look up, placed somewhere they would not expect a business website to have it.
A well-known annual event or market. A landmark most residents would recognise by name. A gathering place everyone knows. The kind of detail that could not have been written by someone who had never set foot in the city, because it was not.
The two details do not need to relate to the service. Their job is to prove local knowledge exists, not to sell the service a second time.
One trap worth naming: the city hall address and phone number are content. They are not your business’s address and phone, and they must never end up in the page’s structured data as though they were. A helpful local detail that quietly tells a search engine your office is inside city hall is worse than no detail at all.
Why the order matters
Real local pages differ because the underlying offer or information genuinely differs, not because a placeholder changed. A page listing the right eight services, naming the actual city hall hours and a real local landmark, is doing exactly that. Two visitors from two different towns land on two pages that could not be swapped without breaking something. That is the test, and it is a test you can run yourself: open two of your own location pages side by side and swap the city names. If nothing else on either page has to change, you do not have two pages. You have one page and a find-and-replace.
Where to find the two local facts
This is not research that needs a trip to city hall. A city’s official website almost always lists hours and contact information directly. A search for the city plus “annual events” or “landmarks” surfaces something usable in minutes. The bar is not obscurity, it is specificity: a detail a resident would nod at is worth more than a detail that sounds impressive and could apply to any town.
Two practical notes. Check the hours on the city’s own site rather than a directory, because a wrong opening time on your page is the one error a local reader will spot immediately. And revisit those details when the page is next touched; a discontinued festival on a page is the same failure as a stale phone number.
What this does not do
Getting these two rules right does not make a page rank on its own. It makes the page worth ranking, which is a different claim and the honest one. A page still needs to be reachable, linked from somewhere on the site rather than orphaned, and genuinely relevant to the search it is written for. What the two rules remove is the reason a good page gets dismissed as one of fifty near-identical ones, and the reason a visitor in that thirty-minute window bounces back to the other two businesses on the list.
Common questions
What is the difference between a location page and a doorway page?
A location page contains information that is true of that location: the services actually delivered there, and details specific to that city. A doorway page exists to catch a search and pass the visitor to the same destination as every other version of it. Google's spam policies name pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse, and also name substantially similar pages. The test is whether the page would still make sense if it were the only one.
Are location pages against Google's guidelines?
No. Having a page for each place you genuinely serve is ordinary. What the policy targets is near-duplicate pages that differ only by a swapped place name and funnel everyone to the same destination. The difference is what is on the page, not how many pages there are.
How many location pages should a business have?
As many as it can fill honestly. Each page needs services genuinely available from that location and at least two details specific to that city. If a location cannot be described that way, its page will read as filler to a visitor and to a search engine, and it is better not to have it.
What local details should go on a location page?
Two kinds, at minimum one of each: something practical a resident would look up, such as city hall hours, the permit office or a utility contact, and something that proves presence, such as a known landmark, an annual event or a recognised gathering place. They need not relate to the service. Keep any address or phone number of a civic building as page content only, never in the page's structured data about your business.
Do location pages still work in AI search?
The same thing decides it. Answer engines summarise pages, and a page that says nothing specific about a place gives them nothing to say about you in that place. Pages that name real services and real local detail give both a search engine and an answer engine something concrete to repeat, which is the whole mechanism.
Written by Tyson McKay, founder of AEOCheck. Both statistics above were read from BrightLocal's own research page on 23 September 2026 and are printed with their sample size and date; we publish how we check things, including our own claims. Building out a set of location pages is a site build, scoped on its own rather than part of a monthly plan, so if that is what you need, tell us what you are working with. Last verified 23 September 2026.