Building City Service Area Pages Without Creating Doorway Pages
What makes a service area page useful instead of a doorway page? A service area page is useful when it gives someone in that city information they can't get anywhere else on your site, like local jobs, reviews, photos, response times, or pricing. If you could swap the city name and nothing else would change, it looks like the doorway pages Google's spam policies describe. Most home services, legal, and medical businesses want a page for every suburb they serve. That instinct makes sense. People search by town, and a roofer based in one suburb still wants calls from the next one over. The trouble starts with how those pages get built. A template gets copied 30 times, the city name gets swapped, and the site suddenly has dozens of service area pages that say the same thing. This guide covers what Google actually says, a quick test for spotting doorway pages, a rule for deciding which cities earn their own page, and a checklist for cleaning up the pages you already have. Key takea...