The short version
- Google's spam policy calls pages made to rank for similar searches, including city pages that funnel visitors to one place, doorway abuse.
- A town page earns its place with what only that town has. Your jobs there, photos, a review from a customer there, and the neighborhoods you cover.
- Give a page to each town you work in, match the list to your Google service areas, and skip the towns you cannot write about.
Most contractors serve more than one town, and homeowners often put the town right in the search. "Deck builder Issaquah." "Furnace repair Beaverton." A page for each town you work in is how a contractor site answers those searches.
It is also the page type that gets contractor sites in trouble. Somebody builds forty town pages in an afternoon, each one the same three paragraphs with a new town name, and calls it SEO. Google has a name for that, and it is in the spam policies.
Every site I build has a page for each town the contractor serves, so I have a working test for what belongs on one. Here it is.
What Google says about city pages
Google's spam policies (opens in a new tab) describe doorway abuse as pages made to rank for a group of similar searches, where the visitor lands on a page that is less useful than the one it leads to. One of the examples Google lists is "pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page." Another is a set of substantially similar pages that sit closer to a page of search results than to a clear, browsable site structure.
The same policy page covers two neighbors of that problem.
- Keyword stuffing. One of Google's examples is a block of text listing the cities and regions a page is trying to rank for. That is the footer with sixty town names in it.
- Scaled content abuse. Generating many pages mainly to move rankings, with little value to the reader, however they were made. Google names generative AI tools as one of the ways people do it.
Read the policy closely and notice what it does not say. It does not say a contractor cannot have a page for Kent and a page for Auburn. It describes pages whose only job is to catch a search and push the visitor somewhere else, and pages so alike that they add nothing. A Kent page that shows the work you did in Kent, and helps a Kent homeowner decide to call you, is neither of those.
The swap test
Before I publish a town page, I run one test. Take the Kent page, replace every "Kent" with "Auburn", and read it again. If every sentence is still true, the page is not about Kent. It is a template with a town name in it, and it belongs in the doorway column.
A page that passes the swap test has sentences that break when the town changes.
- A kitchen you remodeled on East Hill, with the photos
- A review from a customer in Kent, next to that job
- The neighborhoods you go to, by name, like East Hill, West Hill, and Lake Meridian
- Something true about the work there, like the age of the houses or the hills your crew works on
- Whether jobs there go through a city permit office or the county
None of that has to be long. The Google page on creating helpful content (opens in a new tab) is plain on this point. Google has no preferred word count, and asks whether content shows first hand experience, such as having visited a place. A town page with two real jobs and three sentences written by someone who has worked there beats five hundred words of filler.
A real example from a Burien contractor
Terra Install is a general contractor in Burien, and its site lists each town the crew works with the neighborhoods it covers there. Renton names the Highlands, Kennydale, Talbot Hill, Benson Hill, and Skyway. Tukwila names Foster, Riverton, and Allentown. The Des Moines entry names North Hill, Marine Hills, Woodmont, and Zenith, and mentions older housing stock and exterior carpentry exposed to salt water.
That last line is the swap test passing. You cannot move it to a Kent page and keep it true. A homeowner in Des Moines reading it knows this crew has worked on houses like theirs.
What goes on a town page
I use the same layout for every town page on a site, and I change what is inside it. The layout is not the problem. Identical content is.
| Part of the page | What it says |
|---|---|
| Heading and first line | The trade and the town, and one sentence that is only true there |
| Recent jobs | Two or three jobs in that town, each with a photo and a line about the work |
| A review | A Google review from a customer in that town, next to their job |
| Neighborhoods | The parts of town you cover, and the nearby areas you also go to |
| The work there | What is different about houses, lots, or permits in that town |
| Links | The service pages and the project pages for jobs in that town |
| Contact | The phone, the quote form, and the license number |
On the sites I build, the reviews come from your Google profile and sit next to the work they describe, so the town page can show the Kent review beside the Kent job without anyone copying and pasting.
Which towns get a page
Start with the towns you already work in. If you have a Google Business Profile, you already made that list once. Google's help page on service areas (opens in a new tab) lets a business that travels to its customers set up to 20 service areas by city, postal code, or other area, and asks that the whole area stay within about two hours of driving from where the business is based. It does not accept a radius drawn around your shop.
That list and your town pages should match. A homeowner who sees Maple Valley on your profile should find a Maple Valley page on your site.
Then apply three filters.
- You work there often. At least one finished job you can show, ideally more.
- You can say something true about it. If you cannot write three sentences about the town that fail the swap test, the page is not ready.
- It is a place people search. Unincorporated areas count. White Center and Fairwood are not cities, and the people who live there still call them by name.
Skip the towns that fail. A town you have never worked in can get its page after the first job there, with the photos from that job. On my builds, a pack of ten more pages is $600, and a town added after its first job goes live with real photos on it.
How town pages fit the rest of the site
Google's doorway policy sets near copies against a clear, browsable structure. Read the other way, that is the instruction for building town pages right.
The structure I use is simple. The home page links to a service area page. The service area page lists every town, each one a link. Each town page links to the service pages and to the project pages for jobs in that town. Each project page links back to its town. A homeowner can move from "Kent" to "kitchen remodels" to "the kitchen on East Hill" and back without hitting a dead end or a page that exists only to send them somewhere else.
Titles matter too. A long title that repeats across twenty pages with only the town changed tells a homeowner scanning the results nothing new. Keep town page titles short. The trade, the town, and your business name at the end. Let the first line of the page do the describing.
Mistakes I see on contractor town pages
- The same text on every page. It fails the swap test by design, and it is the pattern Google's doorway examples describe.
- The footer list. Sixty town names in small print at the bottom of every page is close to Google's own keyword stuffing example.
- Stock photos. A photo of a house nobody on your crew has seen tells the homeowner the page was written without them in mind.
- Towns across the state. A page for a town four hours away brings calls you will decline, and it sits far past the two hours of driving that Google asks a profile's service area to stay within.
- No way to act. A town page without a phone number, a quote form, and the license number wastes the visit it earned.
What I need from you to write them
Every site I build has a page for every town you serve, each one written for its own town. A Site is $1,500 with 20 town pages, and a Site with Tools is $4,000 with 40. To write them well, I need three things per town. Photos from jobs there labeled with the town, the neighborhoods you go to, and one or two sentences in your own words about what the work is like there. The sentences can be rough. They are the part no template can supply.
If you are still setting up the basics, start with the order in my local SEO guide for contractors. Town pages come right after the Google profile.
