Service area pages are the most abused tactic in local SEO. The idea is sound: if you are a roofer in Exeter who also covers Exmouth, Topsham and Crediton, a page about your work in Exmouth helps someone there see that you genuinely cover them. The abuse is producing 150 pages that differ only in the town name.
Google has a name for that - doorway abuse - and it is in its spam policies. So the question is not whether to have service area pages but how to make them worth having.
What Google's spam policy actually says
Google defines doorway abuse as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries that lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination. Among its examples:
- Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.
- Generating pages to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of the site.
- Creating substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy.
Doorway page vs useful service area page
| Doorway page | Useful service area page |
|---|---|
| Same text with the town name swapped | Written for that town, with details that only apply there |
| Pages for every village within 50 miles | Pages only for places you regularly work |
| No photos, or the same stock photo | Photos of jobs actually done in that area |
| Only purpose is to push you to the contact page | Answers real questions: do you cover my street, what does call-out cost, how quickly can you come |
| Towns you could not reach in reasonable time | Towns within your genuine travel radius |
| Hidden from navigation, only reachable via search | Linked from a clear "Areas we cover" page |
What to put on a service area page
If you cannot write at least a few genuinely different paragraphs about working in a place, it probably does not need its own page. When you can, include things like:
- Examples of recent jobs in that town, with photos (and the customer's permission, with no house numbers).
- Typical property types and the problems that come with them - Victorian terraces, 1960s estates, thatched cottages, flats with shared drainage.
- Honest travel details: typical response time, whether there is a call-out or travel charge, days you are usually in the area.
- Local rules where they genuinely matter, such as conservation areas affecting windows or roofing, described accurately.
- Reviews from customers in that area, if they have mentioned it themselves.
- Who to call and how, with the same phone number as everywhere else.
How many service area pages should you have?
Fewer than you think. For most businesses, a handful of pages for the main towns you really work in, plus a single "Areas we cover" page listing the rest, is the right shape. The areas page can list villages and postcode districts in a plain list - that answers the "do you cover me?" question without spinning up a page for each.
Service areas on your Google Business Profile work separately: you can add up to 20, and they should reflect where you actually go. Your website pages and profile service areas should tell the same story.
Structuring them on your website
- One "Areas we cover" hub page, linked from the main navigation or footer.
- Individual town pages linked from that hub, and linking back to the relevant service pages.
- Clean URLs such as /areas/exmouth rather than keyword-stuffed ones.
- Page titles that describe the page naturally: "Roofing in Exmouth | Smith Roofing".
- No automatic generation of pages from a list of towns.
If you already have dozens of thin location pages
Many small business sites built by volume agencies carry exactly this pattern. The fix is to consolidate: keep and improve the pages for places you genuinely work most, and redirect or remove the rest, pointing them at the "Areas we cover" page. It feels like throwing away work. In practice you are removing pages that were more likely to count against you than for you.