Local landing pages have been a favourite tactic of the SEO world for years, and if you run a small business, there’s a fair chance someone has pitched you a version of them. The idea is simple: take one page, duplicate it fifty times, swap the town name each time, and wait for the enquiries to roll in. Wolverhampton, Dudley, Walsall, Halesowen, and Stourbridge are all identical apart from a single word.
It’s a tempting pitch, because it looks like a lot of coverage for very little effort. It’s also a tactic Google is cracking down on, and that’s the part that catches most business owners out. Pages that once quietly picked up traffic can now be filtered out of results, and when a whole site is stuffed with them, they can undermine how much search engines trust everything else you’ve published.
We’re not saying this to frighten you for the sake of it. Well, maybe a little. But the fix is well within reach, and if you follow what we set out below, you’ll be in a stronger position than most of the competitors still copying and pasting.
Let’s start with what’s actually going on. In Google’s spam policies, doorway abuse is described as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, which then lead people to an intermediate page that isn’t as useful as the final destination. One of the examples given is pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to a single page.
To be clear, Google isn’t banning location pages. A page that properly serves people in a particular area is perfectly fine, and often very valuable. What it’s cracking down on is a particular type of page: the mass-produced kind, built for search engines first and customers second. If your Dudley page and your Walsall page are the same 400 words with the town swapped, you’ve built exactly that.
The first problem is duplication. When dozens of pages on your site say almost exactly the same thing, search engines have no good reason to show any of them. They can’t tell which page deserves to rank, so they may pick the wrong one or none at all. Your own pages end up competing against each other, and none of them is strong enough to win.
The second problem is bigger. Google says pages that break its spam policies may rank lower in results or not appear at all. When a site is packed with thin, near-identical pages, that pattern can affect how your whole website is treated, not just the pages themselves. Your carefully written service pages, your case studies, your homepage: all of them can end up sharing the blame for what a batch of templates did. The shortcut that was meant to bring in more traffic can quietly weaken the pages that were already working.
Then there’s the person actually reading the page. If you’re a plumber in Cradley Heath and someone in Halesowen lands on a page that says “we’re proud to serve the Halesowen community” without a single detail to back it up, they’ll notice. It reads like a template because it is one. There’s no local project, no familiar street, no real customer, nothing to suggest you’ve ever been there.
People in the Black Country can spot a shortcut from a mile off. Once trust drops, so do enquiries, and it doesn’t matter how high a page ranks if nobody rings.
If you’re wondering whether your own site has this problem, try a quick check. Open two of your location pages side by side. If you could swap the place names and nobody would know the difference, you have your answer.
Here’s the reassuring part: fixing this doesn’t mean starting again from scratch, and it certainly doesn’t mean vanishing from local search. It means swapping quantity for quality.
Start by being realistic about where you genuinely work. A page for every town within fifty miles might look impressive in a spreadsheet, but a handful of well-built pages for the areas that matter to your business will do far more. Five strong pages beat fifty clones every time.
Each page needs to earn its place by offering something the others can’t. That usually comes down to three things.
First, a real local case study. Show a project you’ve actually done in that area: the problem, what you did and the result. Photos, numbers and a named client (with their permission) are far more convincing than a paragraph of generic description.
Second, genuine social proof. Use real reviews and testimonials from customers in that area, ideally with a name and a sentence about the job. If you don’t have any yet, ask for them. Don’t invent them, and don’t paste the same review across ten pages.
Third, unique regional context. What makes that place different? The local industries, the types of property, the challenges customers there face, the neighbourhoods and landmarks you know. Here in Brierley Hill we’d never write about the Black Country as if it were one interchangeable place, because it isn’t. Every town has its own character, and your pages should show you know it.
Practical details help too: a local phone number if you have one, a map, opening times and the faces of the people who’ll actually turn up.
It’s also worth being honest about where the crutch tends to creep in fastest: anywhere a decision feels tedious rather than difficult. Approving a strategy nobody’s read properly, sending a client email nobody’s proof-read, greenlighting a design nobody’s really looked at: those are the moments where “AI did it” quietly becomes “nobody did it.” Catching that pattern early is far easier than unpicking it once it’s become how a team operates.
If you’re weighing up how much AI belongs in your own marketing, from brand identity through to the website that carries it, we’re always happy to talk it through: no sales pitch, just an honest conversation about what genuinely needs a human touch and what doesn’t. We’ve spent over two decades helping regional businesses build brands people trust, in the Black Country and beyond, through expertise and judgement no algorithm can replace.
If you already have a stack of templated pages, don’t panic and don’t delete everything overnight. Work through them one at a time. Keep and rebuild the pages for areas that matter. Merge the weaker ones into a stronger page and redirect the old address, so visitors and search engines land in the right place. Remove anything you can’t justify. It’s worth doing this carefully, because pulling pages out badly can cause problems of its own.
That’s where we can help. If you’re not sure where you stand, an SEO audit will show you which pages are helping, which are dragging you down and what to fix first. And if you’d like a team alongside you while you rebuild, our SEO support covers the lot, from planning the right pages to writing and building them so they stand up to scrutiny. Get in touch and we’ll look at your site together. Follow the plan and you’ll be fine, and you’ll be well ahead of the businesses still cutting corners.
