Scrabble tiles spelling 'SEO' on a wooden surface. Ideal for digital marketing themes.

4 November 2026Updated 4 November 2026

Local SEO When You Work in More Than One Town

“Why do we only show up in Google near the office? We cover the whole county.” It’s one of the commonest gripes from any business that works across a patch rather than a single postcode. A physio practice with clinics in three market towns has it. So does a mobile mechanic, an accountancy firm with clients forty miles away and a wedding caterer who’ll go wherever the marquee goes. The tempting answer is a page for every town on the map. It’s also the answer most likely to backfire.

In brief

Google’s local results mainly come down to relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is the one you can’t argue with.
A Business Profile belongs to a real place where you actually work. If you go to your customers, you hide the address and list the areas you cover.
Copy-and-swap town pages that all funnel people to one contact form are the kind of thing Google’s spam policies call doorway abuse.
Search Console will tell you which towns people already search for you with.

Why distance keeps winning

Google sorts its local results on three main things. Relevance is how well your Business Profile matches what someone typed. Prominence is how well known you are, and reviews and links from other websites feed into that. Distance is how far you are from the person searching.

You can work on the first two. The third is geography. That’s why a business based in one town tends to show strongly there and fade the further out you go. Nobody’s sat in a dark room picking out your business. It’s the map doing what it was built to do, and you can’t pay your way round it either, because Google says there’s no way to request or buy a better local ranking.

What you can do is make it plain, on your profile and on your website, that you really do work in those other places. Our guide to how SEO works for a business website fills in the bigger picture.

One real place per Business Profile

A Business Profile is meant for your actual, real-world location. A rented mailing address you don’t work from, the classic virtual office, isn’t eligible. A second profile for the same spot isn’t allowed either. Google tells businesses not to create more than one per location, in one account or several.

Got more than one site that customers visit? Then each can have its own profile. A dental group with three surgeries, each staffed and open to patients, fits that neatly. Any address you show on Google should have permanent signage with your business name on it, though. A desk in a friend’s office with a sticker on the door won’t do.

It works the other way round if you travel to customers. Roofers, dog groomers with a van, an IT support firm visiting offices. Google wants the address hidden and one profile for your base, with a service area set. You can list up to 20 areas by town, postcode or another type of area. You can’t draw a radius. And the whole patch shouldn’t stretch more than about two hours’ drive from where you’re based, though Google allows that larger areas may suit some businesses. Some businesses are both. A garden centre that delivers counts as a hybrid, with a public address and a service area on the same profile.

We’ve covered the setup basics in our post on getting a Business Profile set up properly. Opening more profiles than you have real premises won’t widen your reach. It just breaks Google’s guidelines, and that’s a risk to the profiles you’ve already got.

Where town pages go wrong

So the website has to do the heavy lifting. That’s where plenty of businesses reach for the template. Emergency plumber in Town A. Emergency plumber in Town B. Same few paragraphs, same stock photo, the town name swapped in six places and a button to the same contact form.

Google has a name for that. Its spam policies call it doorway abuse, meaning pages built to rank for specific, similar searches that lead people to in-between pages less useful than where they actually wanted to go. One of the examples it gives is “multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.” Another is “substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy.”

Churning them out with an AI tool doesn’t get round it. Google’s separate policy on scaled content abuse covers lots of pages made mainly to manipulate rankings rather than help people, and it applies however they were produced. A hundred near-identical town pages generated overnight, adding nothing for the reader, is the sort of thing it’s aimed at.

None of this means location pages are banned. The problem is pages that exist only to catch a search and hand the visitor on somewhere else.

What makes a location page worth having

Would the page still be useful if Google didn’t exist? Would someone in that town learn something from it they couldn’t get from your main service page? If yes, it’s probably earning its keep.

With premises it’s easy. Each clinic or office page gets its own address, opening hours, parking, the people who work there, photos of the actual building and a map. A solicitors’ firm with two offices might point out that one has step-free access and the other has a free car park round the back. A bike shop with two branches should say which one does servicing and when.

Service-area businesses have it harder, and honesty matters more. A tree surgeon covering two counties probably doesn’t need forty town pages. A handful of area pages can make sense where the work there is different, or where there’s real proof to show. Photos of local jobs. Reviews from customers in that area. If you can’t think of anything specific to say about a place, that tells you something. Put it in a ‘where we work’ list on the service page and leave it there.

Google’s self-assessment questions on people-first content make a decent sense-check here. So does a simpler one. Would you be happy handing the page to a customer from that town?

Getting the website and the profiles to agree

Each profile asks for a website, and Google wants one that represents that individual location. For a business with several premises, the obvious reading is to link each profile to its own location page. Google also asks you not to use links that redirect or refer people on to landing pages, so point at the real page. Keep the name, address, phone number and hours identical on both.

Structured data can back this up. Google’s local business documentation says to define each location as its own LocalBusiness, with the ‘url’ property pointing at that specific location. Our article on adding schema markup to a business website explains what the code actually does.

Location pages also need somewhere sensible to live. A clear ‘Locations’ or ‘Contact’ section that links to each one gives you the kind of browseable hierarchy Google contrasts with doorways. It’s much easier to get right before the build starts, which is why planning your site structure early pays off.

Finding out which towns people search for

Open the Performance report in Search Console, add a filter, choose ‘Queries containing’ and type a town name. The match isn’t case-sensitive but is otherwise exact, so try the common spellings and abbreviations people use. You’ll see whether searches mentioning that town already bring up your site, how often and whether anyone clicks. Very rare searches are hidden for privacy, so treat a blank as ‘not much’ rather than ‘nobody’.

A town with plenty of impressions and next to no clicks is worth a closer look. You’re already appearing there, so the page Google’s showing may simply not answer the question well. A town that never turns up at all might not justify a page yet. Our beginner’s walkthrough of Search Console covers the rest of that report.

Then check it against your real enquiries. A ‘Where are you based?’ box on your contact form takes seconds to add and shows you which areas actually send work. A wedding venue might discover its couples come from far further afield than anyone assumed, which changes where it’s worth putting the effort.

Getting the balance right

For a business working across several towns, the aim is fewer, better pages and profiles that match how you really operate. One profile per real location. Location pages only where there’s something true and useful to say.

That’s where our local SEO work starts, and it sits inside our wider SEO services for business websites. If you’re not sure whether your town pages are helping or hurting, talk to us and we’ll take a look.

Keep reading

Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA. Scott has spent 17 years in web design and digital marketing, nine of them inside agencies and eight running his own practice. He plans, designs and builds the sites himself, from single landing pages to full ecommerce builds, and he's the person you speak to when you call.

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