By Chris Leo, Movou
Your location pages are probably not thin. That is the wrong thing to worry about. Somebody built you a stack of city pages, one per town you serve, and two years later you have no idea whether any of them do a thing. The usual advice is to go add more words to them. Before you spend a weekend doing that, there is a faster question to answer: does Google actually use these pages, or does it use one of them and quietly ignore the rest? You can find out in about twenty minutes, and the answer changes what you should do next.
- A location page earns its place only if there is at least one search where Google picks that page and not one of its siblings.
- Impressions spread evenly across a set of near identical pages is not coverage. It usually means Google only ever needed one of them.
- Good position with zero clicks is a different problem from bad position, and it has a different fix.
- Decide how many pages the set should have. Do not triage them one at a time.
Why do location pages stop earning anything?
Most owners assume the pages are too thin, because that is what every SEO article says. Sometimes that is true. Far more often the problem is that the pages are too similar to each other, and Google has quietly decided they are the same page.
Google does not owe you one ranking slot per URL. When it finds several pages that answer the same thing, it consolidates them and picks one to show, which is behavior Google documents openly in its guidance on canonical URLs. It is not a penalty. It is housekeeping. But it means a set of fourteen town pages can behave like one page with fourteen addresses, and the thirteen that lost are not going to start winning because you added two paragraphs to them.
In our work auditing service business sites, the location pages that fail almost never fail for the reason the owner expects. The owner expects thin content. What turns up far more often is a set of pages that all surface for the same small handful of searches, which tells you the set is too big for the demand underneath it.
How do I tell which location pages are working?
Open Google Search Console and go to the Performance report. Turn on Impressions, Clicks, CTR and Average position so all four are showing. Then do this in order, because the order matters.
1) Click the Pages tab and sort by impressions, not by clicks. Clicks will be near zero across the board and will tell you nothing. Impressions tell you which pages Google is willing to show.
2) Click into a single location page. Search Console filters everything to that one URL. Now click the Queries tab. You are looking at the actual searches that page appears for.
3) Write down the top three queries for that page. Then do the same for the next location page, and the next.
Once you have done six or seven pages you will see the answer without needing a spreadsheet. Either each page has its own queries with its own town name in them, or the same two or three generic searches keep showing up on every page in the set.
What counts as a location page that earns its place?
Here is the test, and it is a single question. Is there at least one search where this page is the one Google picks, and where the searcher named a place?
That is it. Not “does it get impressions.” Not “is it ranking.” Does it own a query.
A page that owns a query is doing a job no other page on your site is doing. A page that only ever appears for searches its siblings also appear for is not a page, it is a duplicate wearing a different town name. You built fourteen doors into the same room.
This matters because it flips the decision. You stop asking “is this page good enough to keep” and start asking “how many pages does this set actually need.” Those produce very different answers. The first question almost always ends in “keep everything and add words.” The second one ends in a number, and the number is usually smaller than what you have.
What does a good position with zero clicks mean?
This is the case that confuses people most, so it is worth separating out. You find a location page sitting in the top three with a real pile of impressions and not one click. That feels impossible. It is not, and it is not the same problem as ranking badly.
Two things are usually going on.
First, average position in Search Console is an average across every single impression, which Google spells out in its definition of impressions, position and clicks. A page that ranks second for a search nobody runs and fortieth for the one everybody runs can average out to something that looks healthy. The average is hiding two different stories.
Second, the search may be one where nobody needs to click. If somebody searches your company name plus a town, they may get your phone number right there in the results and call it. No click, real customer. That is a win recorded as a failure.
The honest asterisk here: it does not matter if you are number one for a search that nobody runs. Check the impression count before you celebrate a position. A page at position two with eleven impressions in ninety days is not a page that is working. It is a page nobody is looking for.
If what you find is the opposite, pages ranking too deep to matter rather than too shallow to click, that is a genuinely different fix and we wrote it up separately in the page 3 guide.
Are my location pages competing with each other?
Run this check. Take the single most valuable search in your business, the one that is your service plus a town, and look at which of your pages Search Console says earns the impressions for it.
If the answer is a page you did not build for that search, Google has picked a different door than the one you painted. That happens constantly with location page sets, because the pages are near identical and Google has to break the tie somehow. It often breaks it on internal links, which means the page your menu links to most wins, whether or not it is the right one.
The fix is not more content. The fix is to make the set smaller and the survivors more different from each other. One page per town where you have an actual presence, a real crew, a real address, real photos, real jobs you have done there. Zero pages for towns where you have a business license and nothing else.
How many location pages should a service business have?
Fewer than you have been sold. The honest range for most service businesses is somewhere between three and twelve, and it is set by how many places you can genuinely say something different about, not by how many places you would accept work in.
The test is simple. Can you write two paragraphs about working in that town that could not be copied onto any other town page by swapping the name? If yes, build the page. If no, that town belongs as a line in your service area on one page, not as a page of its own.
Under every house there has to be a foundation or the whole thing collapses, and for local search the foundation is your Google Business Profile and your citations, not your page count. A pile of near identical city pages is decoration on top of a foundation that may not be there. If you want the foundation side of this, start with why the trade matters more than the city.
What do I do with the pages that fail the test?
Do not delete anything this week. Do this instead, in this order.
1) Pick the strongest page in each group that shares queries. Strongest means the one with the most impressions, not the one you like best.
2) Point the losers at the winner with a 301 redirect, so whatever small authority they have moves instead of evaporating.
3) Fix your internal links so your menu and your footer point at the survivors. This is the step everybody skips and it is the one Google reads hardest.
4) Wait. Search Console data lags by a couple of days, and consolidation takes longer than that to settle. Give it four to six weeks before you judge it, and do not make a second change in the middle or you will never know which one did it.
I am not a fan of changing things just to change them. There has to be a measurable payoff or it is not worth doing. So take the before picture first: impressions and clicks for the whole set, today, screenshotted. Otherwise in two months you will have opinions instead of an answer.
Key takeaways
- Sort by impressions, not clicks, and read the Queries tab page by page.
- One test: does this page own a search that names a place? If not, it is a duplicate with a different town name on it.
- Good position plus zero clicks usually means low demand or a no-click search, not a broken page.
- Consolidate to the pages you can say something real about, redirect the rest, then fix internal links.
- Take the before picture today, and give it four to six weeks.
Go open Search Console and check one page. Just one. Click into a location page, open the Queries tab, and see whether the searches listed there name the town that page was built for. That one look tells you whether you have a content problem or a page count problem, and those two go in opposite directions. If you want a second set of eyes on what you find, get in touch with us at Movou and we will look at it with you.
What does your page count look like right now?