If you serve Conway, Surfside Beach and Pawleys Island, a customer in each of those towns searches with the town name. A page about your work in that town gives Google something to match. That’s why town pages exist, and why they get abused.
What Google prohibits
Sites caught doing either can lose rankings across the whole site, not just on the town pages.
- Doorway pages: many pages built to rank for similar searches that all funnel people to the same place without offering anything different. A page per town with the same text and a different town name is the classic example.
- Scaled content abuse: large numbers of pages generated, by people or software, mainly to rank rather than to help anyone. Google added this to its spam policies in March 2024.
What makes a town page useful
If you can’t write three true, different things about a town, you probably don’t need a page for it yet. A short list of the towns you serve on your main service page is honest and still helps.
- Something true about working there: the kind of homes or businesses, the season, the roads, the rules. A roofer’s Surfside page can talk about salt air and hurricane straps; their Conway page can talk about older homes near downtown.
- Work you’ve really done there, with photos if you have them.
- Answers to questions people in that town actually ask, including whether you come out there and what it costs.
- How to reach you, and the same phone number as everywhere else.
Written by Nikita Huttenlocher, founder and lead engineer at Huttenlocher Technologies, a web design and software company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.