Are Location Pages Dead?

Great Leap Studios is based in El Dorado Hills, California. El Dorado Hills is a three-minute drive from Folsom, a 7 minute drive from Rancho Cordova and Granite Bay. It’s 15 minutes from Fair Oaks and Roseville, and about twenty minutes from Sacramento — one of the largest cities in California. We may be in El Dorado Hills, but El Dorado Hills and Sacramento are so close, they may as well be one giant city.

We also provide services that are almost entirely online, which means geography matters relatively little for whether we can actually help a business. Yet, even if someone were to prefer local, a 5 minute drive is not going to turn them off.

And yet, when we first launched in 2015, Google treated us like we were only in El Dorado Hills.

We ranked well for El Dorado Hills. We ranked poorly for every surrounding city, even the ones practically adjacent to us, because our physical address was in one place and our rankings reflected that. A business five minutes away that had a Sacramento address was showing up above us for Sacramento searches. That’s the nature of how Google has historically weighted local presence.

Location pages were the solution we developed to address that problem — and they’ve been a core part of how we approach local search optimization ever since. Yet, many SEO companies have claimed that location pages are dead and no longer work. Why?

What a Location Page Is

A location page is a dedicated landing page on a business’s website focused on a specific geographic area that the business serves. Rather than having a single service page that says “we serve the greater Sacramento area,” a location page is written specifically for Sacramento — or for Roseville, or El Dorado Hills, or wherever — with content tailored to that audience, that geography, and the specific queries someone in that area might use to find the service.

The goal is to give Google a clear, relevant, well-written signal that a business is genuinely relevant to searches coming from or targeting that location, even if the physical address doesn’t reflect it.

Done correctly, it works. Done the way most SEO companies do it, it doesn’t — which is why the “location pages are dead” narrative got so much traction in the first place.

Where That Narrative Came From

Around 2016, Google made clear it was targeting thin, keyword-stuffed pages that had been built purely for search manipulation rather than for users. A lot of location pages fell into exactly that category. SEO firms had been generating them in bulk — copying a template, swapping the city name, maybe adding a sentence or two about the location cribbed from Wikipedia, and publishing dozens or hundreds of nearly identical pages across client sites.

Those pages started dropping. In some cases, they disappeared from rankings entirely. SEO professionals who had been selling location pages as a service started backing away from them, and the conventional wisdom shifted toward declaring them ineffective.

The problem with that narrative is that it was describing a specific approach to location pages, not the concept itself. The pages that fell were thin, duplicated, and built for algorithms. The pages that continued to rank were genuinely written, genuinely useful, and genuinely different from each other.

All of the location pages we had built for our clients continued to perform. None of them took the hit that the industry was describing, because none of them were built the way the industry was describing.

The version of a location page that stopped working was essentially this: take a service page, copy it, add the city name in a few key places, publish, repeat. It was low-cost, fast to produce, and produced pages that said nothing meaningful to the person actually reading them.

The version that continues to work is a genuinely written, standalone page that treats the location as the actual subject. That means the content is original from the first word to the last. It means the page addresses something specific about that market, that community, or the types of clients and problems that are common there. It means the services are presented in a way that feels relevant to someone in that city rather than generic enough to apply anywhere.

When I wrote location pages for a Cincinnati locksmith we worked with, we didn’t copy a template fifteen times and change the city name. We wrote fifteen distinct pages, each targeting a different community in the greater Cincinnati area, each written from scratch, each incorporating real information about the service context in that area. Every page ranks. Every page has ranked continuously since it was built.

That’s the distinction that matters, and it’s why the “location pages are dead” conclusion missed the point.

Location pages aren’t the right tool for every situation. A few factors determine whether they’re worth building:

• Competitive Density — In markets where competitors have been investing heavily in SEO for years, a location page alone isn’t going to be sufficient to rank against established players. Location pages work best when competition is moderate — particularly for small businesses in markets where the competitors aren’t running sophisticated SEO programs. In those environments, a well-written location page can be the most relevant result Google has for that query, which is often enough.
• Geographic Service Area — Location pages make the most sense for businesses that genuinely serve multiple areas but have a single physical address. A service business, a professional practice, an online service provider — these are the natural candidates. Brick-and-mortar businesses that serve only the immediate area around their location have less to gain from them.
• Content Depth — A location page written to 300 or 400 words with the same content as every other page on the site isn’t worth building. The pages that rank are the ones long enough and specific enough to genuinely address the user’s query. That takes more investment, which is why we typically recommend them when budget allows for doing them right rather than doing them quickly.

The user always comes first. Every word on a location page should be written for the person reading it, not for the search engine crawling it. Search benefit is the outcome of producing something genuinely useful — not a shortcut around producing it.

How Location Pages Fit into a Broader Strategy

Location pages are one component of local search optimization, not a standalone solution. They work best alongside a well-maintained Google Business Profile, consistent NAP (name, address, phone) citations across directories, locally relevant blog content, and a website that performs well technically. A location page on a slow, poorly structured site with weak domain authority is going to underperform compared to the same page on a site that has been invested in over time.

For businesses that serve multiple cities and are struggling to rank outside their immediate area, location pages remain one of the most direct and effective tools available. The ones that stopped working weren’t examples of the concept failing — they were examples of shortcuts catching up with the people who took them.

If you’re interested in whether location pages make sense for your business, or want to talk through a broader local search strategy, reach out through the contact page or call (347) 460-5492.