You’re a business with multiple locations – but should each address have an individual page on your website? We’ve delved into this subject matter – looking at both the pros and cons – and here’s what we found…
Location Pages Improve Experience for Users
The obvious benefit to having location pages on your website is that they allow customers within different service areas to find your business. They can quickly highlight where your business provides its services and help to build visibility for your services in each area – while also drawing attention to the fact you have multiple locations.
Google Update Causing De-Indexing
In Autumn last year (2022), many service area businesses saw search engine ranking fluctuations following Google’s content & spam updates. The community came together to identify what may have caused this, and the one common denominator with websites that had issues was that they all had location pages.
Rather than seeing rankings impacted, these websites instead saw pages being automatically deindexed, which in turn caused their ranking to drop for queries relating to the corresponding pages.
The reason for this issue could be due to Google viewing these pages as unhelpful – we all know that Google’s focus is on providing content to users rather than ranking for rankings sake. Comparatively, websites with location pages that had unique content were not deindexed or affected.
Doorway Pages
Location pages can sometimes be referred to as doorway or gateway pages. These pages usually contain duplicate content, as they are written for a specific keyword in mind rather than adding value to a user, for example ‘[city] + [service]’. Doorway pages consist of low quality and low value content, and some websites will create them solely to rank highly for specific keywords – which we also know as Keyword Stuffing. And what do we know about keyword stuffing? It’s a big no-no from Google.
Unique Content on Location Pages
With that being said, if your location pages contain unique content that is relevant to your website visitors, then these pages can be useful.
To make your location pages unique, you should include different content on each page for:
- Text
- Images
- Headings
- Reviews
- Attributes (e.g. accessibility, parking)
- Staff bios
- Transport details
This will help you in the effort to continue to rank in Google’s search results pages.
Can You Use Location Pages?
As long as you are not using keyword stuffing in order to rank on search engines then we do recommend using location pages. Google wants content to exist to provide a positive user experience, rather than influencing rankings alone.
Alternatively, you could create a general service area page that informs users where you serve, including a map to help users to visualise the service area.
Portfolio Page
Another alternative is to showcase your work and the locations that you serve using portfolio pages. Shout about clients or customers that you’ve worked with in particular areas, explaining the project and using visuals and photos.
Web Design & Content Creation
If you need a new website that makes good use of location pages, contact us now. We can design and develop your website and create the content for it too.
