How to Fix: City/location pages

City/location pages is an important SEO check in the Local SEO category. This is a medium-priority issue. While not urgent, fixing it will improve your overall SEO health.

City and location pages are the single most abused tactic in local SEO, and the reason they are on this list is not that you are missing them — it is that most sites do them in exactly the way Google has spent a decade learning to ignore. Spin up forty pages that read “Best plumber in [City],” swap the city name, change nothing else, and you have not built local relevance. You have built a doorway-page pattern that, at best, gets filtered and, at worst, drags the whole domain down.

The check is really asking a harder question than “do you have location pages?” It is asking whether each one earns its place.

The line between a location page and a doorway page

Google’s guidance on this is old and unambiguous: pages created purely to funnel search traffic for many similar locations, with little unique value, are doorway pages and violate the guidelines. A legitimate location page exists because you genuinely operate in, or serve, that place — and it proves it. A doorway page exists because you wanted to rank for the place name. The visible content is often similar; the difference is whether there is anything real behind it.

Why it matters for SEO

• Thin, templated location pages compete with each other. Fifty near-duplicate pages split your relevance instead of concentrating it, and internal cannibalisation is a self-inflicted wound.
• Local intent rewards genuine signals. A real address, local reviews, area-specific detail, and a matching Google Business Profile do far more than the city name repeated in an H1.
• The downside is site-wide. A large block of thin doorway pages is the kind of pattern that can weigh on the domain’s overall quality assessment, not just those URLs.

What I would do about it

Difficulty Level: MEDIUM – This fix requires some technical knowledge or familiarity with WordPress settings and plugins.

Estimated Time: varies

Build fewer pages, and make each one true. My rule: only create a location page for a place where you can write at least a screen of content that could not be copy-pasted onto another city’s page.

1. Only publish pages you can genuinely fill. A real address or service-area statement, staff or projects tied to that area, local case studies, photos from actual jobs there, and area-specific pricing or logistics. If you cannot fill it without a template, do not publish it.
2. Make each unique below the fold. Different testimonials, different local landmarks and neighbourhoods served, different FAQs. The uniqueness has to survive a find-and-replace test — swap the city name out and the page should read wrong.
3. Consolidate the thin ones. Where you already have dozens of near-identical pages, merge them into a smaller set of strong pages and 301-redirect the rest. Fewer, better pages beat many hollow ones.
4. Connect the off-page signals. Tie genuine service-area pages to a Google Business Profile, consistent NAP (name, address, phone) across directories, and LocalBusiness schema where you have a real presence.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Programmatically generating a page for every city in the region with only the name changed.
• Claiming a physical address in a city where you have no real presence.
• Stuffing the city name into the title, H1, alt text, and every paragraph in place of real local detail.
• Keeping fifty thin pages live “because they might rank” while they quietly cannibalise each other.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

• Yoast SEO – Comprehensive SEO plugin with built-in checks
• Rank Math – Feature-rich SEO plugin with detailed analysis
• Google Search Console – Free tool to monitor your site’s search presence
• SEO Roadmap – Complete SEO audit and action plan tool

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.