Location pages are city or town landing pages built to capture searches where someone adds a place name to what they're looking for. I built ten of them in a week for a Shopify marketplace, and the results were mixed enough to be worth writing up honestly.
This isn't a success story with a graph going up. It's what actually happened: how I chose the wording, why I built one before building nine, the error that shipped on all ten pages at once, and why Google indexed some of them and ignored the others.
What location pages are, and when they're spam
A location page targets "[what you sell] in [place]". They work when your product genuinely varies by place — when something is delivered, performed or attended somewhere physical, and the availability in one city is different from the next.
They stop working the moment the only thing that changes between pages is the place name. That's the version people call programmatic SEO when it succeeds and doorway pages when it doesn't. The test is simple: if you removed the place name, would the page still say anything true and specific? If not, you haven't built a page, you've built a template with a hole in it.
In my case the products are real events happening at real venues, with different availability in every city. That's the version worth building.
Choosing the wording before building anything
The first decision wasn't design or structure. It was vocabulary.
Every business has internal language, and it leaks into everything you publish. The word your team uses for a product often isn't the word your customers type into Google, and the gap can be large. So before writing a line of copy I checked search volumes for the competing terms — the two or three words that all mean roughly the same thing — and used whichever one people actually search for.
That's ten minutes of work in SEMrush that changes every heading on every page. Do it first, because retrofitting vocabulary across a set of live pages is considerably less fun.
Build one. Sit with it. Then build nine.
I built a single pilot page and left it alone for a few days before touching the rest.
That gap was the most valuable part of the process. Looking at one live page with fresh eyes surfaced problems in structure, wording and internal linking that would otherwise have been copied nine times over. Once it was right, it became the template: same sections, same shape, different content underneath.
The remaining nine took about three days.
Why these are collections, not pages
On Shopify there's a meaningful choice here. A page holds copy. A collection holds copy and the products themselves.
Building location pages as collections means the written content sits at the top and the live listings sit underneath it, pulled in automatically. That's what stops the page being thin. There's real inventory on it, it updates itself as availability changes, and a visitor who scrolls past the copy finds something to act on.
If you're doing this on Shopify, build location pages as collections. A page with no products on it is a much harder sell to both Google and the visitor.
The error that shipped ten times
One of the pages stated that a particular type of course ran in that city. It didn't. There were none at all.
Nobody wrote that claim deliberately. It came out of the template doing what templates do — carrying an assumption from the page it was copied from. That's the specific risk of scaled page building: you aren't writing ten pages, you're writing one page ten times. One wrong assumption ships ten times.
The fix was a rule rather than a correction: a thing only gets mentioned on a city page if it is genuinely available in that city, now. Not nearby. Not usually. Now.
If you build pages at scale, write down the rules that govern what can appear on them, and check every page against the rules rather than proofreading them one at a time. It's the same discipline as catching keyword cannibalization: the problems that matter at scale are systematic, not individual.
Google indexed some and ignored others
This is the part that never appears in the tutorials.
Same template. Same structure. As far as I can tell, the same quality. And Google indexed some of the pages while leaving others alone. It doesn't track with city size, or with how much content is on the page, or with anything else obvious I've been able to find.
Indexing isn't a guarantee, it's a decision Google makes about whether a page is worth its crawl budget and storage. Publishing a page is a request, not an instruction.
Two things I've done about it:
- An A–Z index page. Every location listed in one place, linked from the site footer, so no page is orphaned and every one of them has a genuine internal path to it. Then submitted in Search Console.
- Position tracking. Not to prove the project worked, but to see which pages move and whether there's a pattern in the ones that never got picked up.
What I'd tell you to do differently
- Check the vocabulary first. Before design, before copy, before anything.
- Build one and live with it. A few days of looking at a live pilot beats any amount of planning.
- Put something real underneath. Products, listings, availability. Copy alone isn't a page.
- Write the rules down. What can and can't be claimed on these pages, checked systematically.
- Link them properly. An index page and a footer link cost nothing and give the crawler somewhere to go.
- Expect it to be slow. This is a months-long answer, not a weeks-long one.
FAQ
How many location pages should I build?
Start with the places where you genuinely have the most to offer, and build one before you build ten. The number matters far less than whether each page has real, differing content on it.
Are location pages the same as doorway pages?
No, but they become doorway pages the moment the only difference between them is the place name. The distinction is whether the page says something true and specific about that location.
Why won't Google index my location pages?
Common causes are thin or near-duplicate content, no internal links pointing to the page, and no genuine reason for the page to exist separately. Fixing the internal linking is the cheapest thing to try first.
How long before location pages rank?
Longer than you'd like. Indexing alone can take weeks, and position movement after that is a matter of months, which is why tracking them from day one is worth the effort.
What happens next
I'll publish the numbers in a couple of months: which pages ranked, which never got indexed, and whether the index page made any difference to either.
If you want the underlying principles rather than this specific case, Website SEO for Beginners covers them in plain English, and the rest is in the SEO & Creator guides. Everything I run day to day is listed in my daily stack.
0 comments