Which parts of a local page have to be local

Most local landing pages are one page with the town name swapped. They do not rank, and when they do, they do not convert, because the visitor can tell within two seconds that the page is not about where they live. The fix is not more pages. It is knowing which parts of a local page have to be local and which parts are allowed to be identical.

What has to be local

Four things carry the weight: work you have actually done there, named with enough specificity that a resident recognises it; the constraints of that place, which for a trade means permits, inspectors, soil, climate, building stock or whatever genuinely differs; who the competition is and how you are different from them locally rather than in general; and the practical facts of serving that area, meaning travel time, call-out charges and which days you are there.

Your process, your guarantee, your pricing structure, your credentials and your frequently asked questions can be identical on every page, because they are identical in reality and pretending otherwise is a lie the page does not need. Google is not penalising a shared process section. It is ignoring pages whose only distinguishing feature is a place name, which is a different complaint.

The honest page count

The number of local pages a business can support is the number of places where it has something true and specific to say. For most trades that is between five and fifteen, not two hundred. A company with eight genuinely local pages outranks a company with eighty swapped ones, and it does so while being a better business to buy from, because the pages are the same facts the sales conversation uses.

If you are running more pages than you have facts for, the honest move is to merge them into regional pages and put the effort into the ones that remain. The measurement side of that, meaning how to tell whether your own pages are too similar, is in service area pages that rank instead of reading as doorway pages.