Nine Town Pages. The Only Thing That Changed Was the Town.

You serve nine towns and you rank in one of them, which is the one your office sits in. Somebody points out that you could have a page for each of the other eight by Friday, and they are right, because a machine will write eight pages about eight towns in the time it takes to make coffee.

So the pages get made. Then, a few weeks later, you open two of them side by side to check something, and you read them properly for the first time.

Page four and page five have the same four paragraphs in the same order. The same sentence about the character of the housing stock. The same promise about local expertise. The same three questions and the same three answers underneath them. The only thing that changed between the two is the name of the town, and it changed six times.

Nobody did anything wrong here. Every one of those pages is grammatical, on brand and technically correct. And a person who lives in either of those towns would put the page down after two sentences, which is the same conclusion a search engine is going to reach by a different route.

Why a page and not a profile

It is worth being clear about what this is for, because the obvious alternative is free and most agents should do that one first.

The short list of businesses at the top of a local search, the one with the map above it, ranks businesses rather than pages, and one of the three inputs Google publishes for it is how far the searcher is standing from your front door. That is a physical fact about your office and no amount of work moves it. Which means there is a hard edge to it: past a certain distance you are competing against somebody who is simply closer, and they win.

A page has no such input. An ordinary indexable page about the work you do in a particular place competes on what is written on it, which is why one page per area is the oldest tactic in local marketing and why every agency in the world offers it. It is also the reason this article exists, because the tactic has a well-known failure mode with a name, and the name is in Google's published policy rather than in somebody's blog post.

There is a second reason worth naming and it is newer. A growing share of these questions never reach a list of links at all: somebody asks an assistant which agents work in a particular town and gets a paragraph back. What gets quoted in that paragraph is text that answers a question directly on a page that is genuinely about the thing. The same writing that makes an area page worth reading is the writing that makes it quotable, which is convenient, and it is the only part of this whole subject where the two audiences want exactly the same thing.

What Google's spam policy actually names

Most of what is written about location pages cites a Google policy that has since been rewritten. The current spam policies name this tactic in two separate entries, and the second one did not exist when most of the advice you will find was published.

The first is doorway abuse. The policy defines it as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, which lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination. Among its own examples is having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. Read the mechanism rather than the label: the thing being described is a page that catches a query and passes the person along to somewhere else. The offence is the handover.

The second is scaled content abuse, defined as many pages generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. Its examples include creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader but contains search keywords, and stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding value. Here the offence is not the number of pages. It is what is on them at that number.

Both entries are worth reading in full, because between them they put four questions to anybody who is about to build a set of these.

The example that is about the thing we sell

There is a sentence in the scaled content entry that anybody selling this service should be made to read out loud. The first illustration Google gives is using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users.

That is not a description of a hypothetical bad actor. It is a description of the cheap version of this exact product, and there is a version of ours that would fit it perfectly: hand over a list of towns, generate a page for each, publish. If somebody offers you that, the policy has already named it, and the fact that the pages were written by a good model rather than a bad one changes nothing, because the phrase in the policy is not about how the words were produced. It is about whether anything was added.

Google has said the same thing in plainer language elsewhere. Its guidance on helpful content is explicit that using automation is not the problem in itself, and the questions it tells creators to ask themselves are about the output rather than the tool. That is the honest position, and it is also ours: a draft written in ninety seconds is fine. A page published in ninety seconds is not, and the difference between them is a person who knows the place reading it before it goes live.

What separates a real area page from a doorway

Google publishes a self-assessment for exactly this question and almost nobody in this category has read it. Its guidance on creating helpful content is a list of questions to ask about your own work, and three of them land directly on area pages.

The first is whether the content clearly demonstrates first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge, and the example Google gives inside the brackets is expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place. Visiting a place. It is the whole test, sitting in a parenthesis, and it cannot be written around, because what is being asked for is not a style of prose. It is a fact about whether you have been there.

The second is a pair of warning signs: whether you are producing lots of content on many different topics in the hope that some of it might perform well, and whether you are using extensive automation to produce content on many topics. Answer yes to either and the document's own conclusion is that you are making search-engine-first content. Note what the suggested remedy is not. It is not better writing.

The third is the one that quietly explains why every thin location page in this industry looks the same. The list asks whether you are writing to a particular word count because you have heard Google has a preferred one, and then answers itself in a bracket: no, we do not. Somewhere a long time ago a number got into circulation and the whole category has been padding to reach it since.

Repetition is measurable, and somebody measured it

There is a temptation to treat all of this as a matter of taste, as if the difference between a real page and a doorway were something only a human editor could feel. It is not. Sameness is one of the cheapest properties in the world for a machine to measure, and there is a paper that shows how cheap.

In 2006 four researchers, three of them at Microsoft Research and one at UCLA, took a crawl of 105 million pages, drew a uniform random sample of 17,168 English pages out of it, and classified every one of them by hand as spam or not spam. That sample is the foundation of everything else in the paper: 2,364 of the pages, 13.8%, were judged to be spam.

Then they went looking for properties that predicted it, and one of the properties is the interesting one here. They compressed every page and measured the compression ratio, on the reasoning that a page which says the same thing repeatedly compresses better than a page that does not. Among pages that compressed to a quarter of their size or better, 70% were judged spam.

The honest limits are large and worth stating before anybody quotes this at a client. This is the web of two decades ago. Spam is what four researchers judged it to be. The measurement is about repetition inside one page, and a set of near-identical town pages is repetition across pages, which is a different measurement that nobody has published a figure for. And a perfectly good page with a large navigation, a footer and a repeated call to action compresses well too, which is exactly why the authors test ten different content heuristics and treat this as one of them rather than as a rule.

What survives all of that is the cheapness. You do not need a language model to notice that eight pages are the same page. You need a compression library and a few seconds.

What actually goes on a page that is about somewhere

The useful question is not what to avoid. It is what a page has on it that a template cannot produce, and the answer is short enough to be uncomfortable, because everything on the list has to come from you.

It has the work you actually did there. A closing on a named street, a rental you managed, a listing that sat and then did not, a buyer who wanted one thing and bought another. Specific, checkable, and about a real transaction rather than about your general enthusiasm for the area. This is the material that does not exist for a town you have never worked in, which is why the honest version of this project starts with a list of areas that is shorter than the one you wanted.

It has the questions people actually ask about that place, answered in the first sentence rather than in the fourth paragraph. What the taxes are like compared to the next town. Whether the trains are any good. Which streets flood. What the difference is between the village and the town of the same name, which in this valley is a real question with a real answer and one that catches people out.

It has something a person who lives there would recognise. Not scenery. The thing everybody who lives there knows and nobody writes down: where the traffic actually backs up, which side of the road the good light is on in the afternoon, what happens to the main street in the third week of September.

And it has one way to get in touch that belongs to you. A form on your own page rather than a link into somebody else's directory, so that the person who read all of that arrives in your records rather than in a list you rent back later.

The part that is regulated, and it is not the search engine

Everything above is a commercial question. This section is not, and it is the one nobody selling area pages will raise with you.

An area page is an advertisement, and it is an advertisement about a community rather than about a house. The regulations under the Fair Housing Act are specific about both halves of that, and they are older than any of this technology.

The rule on advertising is 24 CFR 100.75. Its second paragraph is broader than most people expect: the prohibitions apply to all written or oral notices or statements by a person engaged in the sale or rental of a dwelling, and written notices and statements are defined to include any applications, flyers, brochures, deeds, signs, banners, posters, billboards or any documents used with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling. There is no list of technologies in that sentence and there does not need to be one. A page on your website is a document used with respect to the sale of dwellings.

Then comes the paragraph that is precisely about this service. Among the practices the rule names as prohibited is selecting media or locations for advertising the sale or rental of dwellings which deny particular segments of the housing market information about housing opportunities because of race, colour, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin. Read that beside a decision about which eight towns get a page and which four do not. Nobody is suggesting that choosing where to advertise is unlawful. What the rule says is that the choice is a regulated act, which is a different and more uncomfortable statement, and it means the reason for the list has to be a business reason you could say out loud.

The second rule is about what the page says. 24 CFR 100.70 covers what are generally referred to as unlawful steering practices, and two of its examples are written as if somebody had an area page open. It names discouraging any person from inspecting, purchasing or renting a dwelling because of the race, colour, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin of persons in a community, neighbourhood or development. And it names discouraging the purchase or rental of a dwelling because of race, colour, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin, by exaggerating drawbacks or failing to inform any person of desirable features of a dwelling or of a community, neighbourhood or development.

Sit with the second one, because it is not the one people expect. Failing to inform. Both examples hang on that same clause about why, so uneven pages are not unlawful on their own and nobody should tell you they are. What they are is the record somebody would read the why off. A set of pages where four towns get eight hundred enthusiastic words and two towns get two hundred flat ones describes some communities as more desirable than others, and it did that through effort rather than through a sentence anybody wrote, which is why the shape of the set is worth looking at before somebody else does.

What an area page may and may not say

The practical line is easier to hold than the regulation makes it sound, and it comes down to what the sentence is about.

Write about the housing and the transaction. Prices, taxes, inventory, how long things sit, what the commute costs in time, what a survey usually turns up on older properties in that part of the county, what you have actually sold there. Every one of those is a fact about property, it is checkable, and it is what somebody reading an agent's area page came for.

Do not write about the people. This is the whole line and it is simpler than the alternatives people reach for. Descriptions of who lives somewhere, who a place is suited to, what kind of family would be comfortable, which community a neighbourhood belongs to: none of that is about the housing, all of it is about the residents, and it is the exact territory the steering rule covers.

Two habits deserve naming because they are so common they read as neutral. School ratings pasted onto every page are a proxy that correlates strongly with things the Act protects, and if you publish them you have made a statement about desirability using somebody else's numbers. Crime data is the same shape and worse, because the summaries are usually unsourced. If a reader wants either, they can get both from the primary source in less time than it takes you to write a paragraph, and the honest move is to say where to look rather than to characterise a community.

And treat the areas evenly. Not identically, because identical is the failure this whole article is about, but evenly: comparable effort, comparable honesty about the drawbacks, comparable enthusiasm where it is earned. The rule about failing to inform is a rule about the shape of the whole set rather than about any one page in it, and the shape of the set is a thing only you can see.

What it costs, and how long it takes

The software is not the line that matters here. What the bill tracks is how much of the material has to be extracted from you, because you are the only place it exists.

An agent with a tidy record of what they have closed, where, and for whom is a fast project: the facts are already written down and the work is turning them into pages that answer questions. An agent whose knowledge of six towns lives entirely in their head is a slower one, and most of that time is a conversation rather than a keyboard. That conversation is worth having whether or not any pages come out of it, which is the second-best argument for doing this at all.

There is a smaller ongoing cost that everybody forgets to budget for, which is going back. The proof on these pages ages: the closing was three years ago, the listing sold, the tax figure moved, the shop you mentioned closed. Most of them need a short sitting once a year, the ones that earn their keep need more than that, and a set of area pages nobody revisits becomes a public record of when you stopped paying attention.

The one thing we will not quote is a traffic estimate, and it is worth saying why rather than leaving a gap. Nobody publishes the number of people searching for your service in your particular town with a stated method; the figures that circulate come from tools that estimate them and do not show their working. Every article in this category leans on those numbers. This one refuses them, which makes it less impressive and more useful.

What it does not do, and should not pretend to

It does not rank a place you do not work. There is nothing true to put on that page, both a reader and a search engine notice, and the pages you cannot fill are the ones that make the whole set look like a template.

It does not put you into an AI answer on request. Nobody controls what an assistant quotes and anybody who says otherwise is describing an experiment rather than a product. Writing a page that answers questions directly makes it quotable. That is the only lever there is, and it is not a guarantee.

It does not replace the rest of local search. A page for each area is one surface. The Business Profile, the reviews and the mentions on other people's websites are another, they are decided by different machinery, and the profile is usually the cheaper thing to fix first.

It does not survive being left alone. Every fact on these pages has a date attached whether or not you print one, and the difference between a page that earns attention for years and a page that quietly embarrasses you is somebody going back to it.

And it does not make the list of towns longer than it is. This is the one people find hardest, because the whole appeal of the tactic is scale. The number of areas you can write honestly about is a fact about your career so far, and no tool changes it.

How to test whether a page is about anywhere, in twenty minutes

Four checks. All of them are free, none of them need a tool, and any page in this industry can be run through them tonight.

Delete the town name from the page, everywhere it appears, and read what is left. If you cannot tell which town it was about, you have your answer, and so does everybody else. This is the single most useful thing in this article and it takes ninety seconds per page.

Open two of your pages side by side and read the first paragraph of each out loud, one after the other. Sameness is much easier to hear than to see, which is why proofreading them one at a time never catches it.

Count the checkable facts on the page: a street, a price, a date, a number, a name of something that exists. Then count the sentences that could have been written by somebody who has never been there. A page where the second number is larger than the first is a page you have not written yet.

Then hand it to somebody who lives there and watch their face. Not for approval, for recognition. The moment worth waiting for is the small one where they say that is true, or better, where they correct you, because a correction means the page was specific enough to be wrong, and specific enough to be wrong is the whole bar.

Common questions, answered honestly

What are GEO or area landing pages, in plain terms?

They are ordinary pages on your own website, one for each place you work, written so that somebody searching for your service in that place finds a page that is genuinely about it rather than a page listing every town you cover. GEO now carries a second meaning as well, generative engine optimisation, which is the practice of writing pages that an AI assistant can quote when it answers a question. In practice the two want the same thing: direct answers to real questions, on a page that has something on it only somebody who works there would know.

How is this different from local SEO?

They compete on different surfaces and are decided by different things. Local SEO is about your Business Profile and the short list of businesses at the top of a nearby search, where Google publishes three inputs and one of them is how far away the searcher is. Area pages are ordinary web pages competing on what is written on them, which is why they can reach places your profile cannot. Most businesses should finish the profile first, because it is cheaper, faster and does not carry the risk described in the rest of this article.

Are location pages considered doorway pages by Google?

They are if they behave like doorways. The policy defines doorway abuse as pages created to rank for specific, similar queries which lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination, and it names pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. A page that answers the question it was found for, on its own, is not doing that. A page whose only purpose is to catch the query and push the reader somewhere else is, whatever it looks like.

Is it against the rules to use AI to write them?

Not in itself, and Google says so directly in its guidance on helpful content, which frames automation as a question about the output rather than about the tool. What is named in the spam policy is using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value for users. The distinction is whether anything was added between the draft and the publication, and in practice that means a person who knows the place read it and changed it. A page nobody read is the case the policy is describing.

How many pages should I have?

As many as you have something true to say about, which is almost always fewer than the list you started with. There is no threshold at which a set of pages becomes spam and no number that makes it safe. The calculator above is deliberately built on the only two things anybody can honestly supply, which are how many areas are on your list and how many of them you have actually worked in.

Can I write a page for a town I want to work in but have not yet?

You can, and it will be the weakest page in the set, and it is worth being deliberate about it rather than pretending otherwise. If you do, write it as what it is: a page about that market from somebody who works one town over, with the facts you can genuinely stand behind and no invented familiarity. That is a defensible page. A page claiming years of local expertise you do not have is not, and it is the kind of claim a person who lives there will spot in a sentence.

What about fair housing? Is any of this risky?

The advertising rules apply to a web page exactly as they apply to a flyer, and the regulation is explicit that written statements include any documents used with respect to the sale of a dwelling. Two things follow. Write about the housing and the transaction, not about who lives somewhere or who a place would suit. And treat your areas evenly, because the rules name both selecting where to advertise in a way that denies parts of the market information, and discouraging somebody by failing to inform them of the desirable features of a neighbourhood. Both of those turn on whether the reason was one of the characteristics the Act protects, so an uneven set of pages is not unlawful by itself. It is the thing the reason would be read off, and it is invisible from inside any single page.

Will this get me quoted in ChatGPT or an AI answer?

Sometimes, and nobody can promise it. What gets quoted is a passage that answers a question directly, in plain language, on a page an assistant can read. That means a real question as a heading and the answer in the sentence underneath it, rather than three paragraphs of positioning followed by the fact. It is worth doing because the same format is the one that works for a human being in a hurry, which means nothing here asks you to write worse in order to be quoted more.

What to do about it

Take the list of areas you want pages for and put a mark next to every one where you can name a street you have worked on. Not a town you have driven through. A street.

That shorter list is the project. It is probably half of what you wrote down, and it beats the long version outright, because every page on it can carry something checkable and every page you left off would have been the one that made a reader stop trusting the rest.

Then take the two pages you already have that you are least sure about, delete every mention of the town from both, and read what remains. If the two documents are now the same document, you have learned the whole of this article in four minutes, and you have also found the first two pages worth rewriting.