At some point every trade business owner gets the same advice, usually from someone selling SEO: build a page for every suburb you service. Electrician Werribee. Electrician Point Cook. Electrician Hoppers Crossing. Forty, sixty, ninety of them. Google sees a page for each suburb, you rank in each suburb, the phone rings.
It's a real strategy, and the underlying idea is sound. The way it usually gets executed is the problem, because the usual execution is precisely the thing Google's own spam policies describe and act against — and the cost of getting it wrong isn't that the pages don't work. It's that they can drag the rest of your site down with them.
So let's do this properly: what Google actually says, what it actually ranks locally, and what a location page has to contain to be worth building.
What Google's spam policies actually say
You don't need to guess at this. Google publishes it.
Under the heading of doorway abuse, Google defines the problem as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, which lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination. The examples it gives include having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.
Read that example again, because it is a word-for-word description of the standard tradie suburb-page package: ninety near-identical pages, each targeting a city or suburb, every one of them funnelling the visitor to the same contact form.
There's a second policy that catches the modern version of this. Scaled content abuse is defined as generating many pages for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings rather than helping users, and Google names using generative AI tools or similar tools to generate many pages without adding value as an example. Spinning up sixty suburb pages from a template with the place name swapped is the old way of doing it; asking a chatbot to write sixty variations is the new way. Both land in the same policy.
Google's guidance on creating helpful content asks a self-assessment question that settles the matter: are you producing lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results? If the honest answer for your suburb pages is yes, you've built the wrong thing.
What actually decides local rankings
Here's the other half of why the sixty-page approach underdelivers even when it isn't penalised: it's aimed at the wrong lever.
Google's own explanation of local results is that they're mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your business profile matches what someone searched for. Distance is how far your business is from the person searching. Prominence is how well-known the business is, with reviews and ratings feeding into it. Google also says plainly that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
Distance is the one that undoes the whole spray-and-pray approach. A page cannot move your van. If your workshop is in Sunshine and someone in Frankston searches for an electrician, no amount of on-page optimisation on a "Electrician Frankston" page changes the fact that there are forty electricians closer to them. You can win searches at a genuine distance, but you win them on prominence and relevance being much stronger than the closer options — which is a much bigger job than publishing a page, and it only pays if that suburb is worth winning.
Which is why the first move isn't writing anything. It's choosing.
Gold nugget. Pick your suburbs off your invoices, not off a map. Export the last twelve months of completed jobs from your accounting or job management software, add a suburb column, and sort by total revenue. You'll almost always find that a small handful of suburbs produce most of the money, a long tail produces almost nothing, and a few produce plenty of revenue at terrible margin because of travel time. Build pages only for the top group. The exercise gives you two things at once: a defensible shortlist of maybe six to ten suburbs actually worth ranking in, and — because you're looking at the job list — a stack of real jobs in each of those suburbs to write the page about. Most owners have never sorted their revenue by suburb, and the report takes about fifteen minutes to produce.
Set up the service area properly first
Before you build a single page, fix the free thing. Your Google Business Profile lets you list service areas, and for a trade business that's often doing more work than your website is.
Google allows up to 20 service areas, and says the boundaries of your overall area shouldn't extend more than about two hours of driving time from where your business is based. If you don't serve customers at your business address — which is most trades — Google's guidance is to remove the address from the profile and operate as a service-area business.
That's a fifteen-minute job with real consequences, and it interacts directly with the distance factor above. Set it honestly: covering everything within two hours because you technically could is a good way to be irrelevant everywhere. This sits alongside the broader profile work we cover in how to get your trade business found on Google without spending a fortune, and it's the foundation the pages sit on top of, not a substitute for them.
What makes a location page a real page
A location page earns its place when it contains things that could only have been written by a business that actually works in that suburb. That's the whole test. Everything below is just a way of generating that material.
Named jobs from that suburb. Not "we service Altona North" but what you did there. The switchboard upgrade on the 1970s brick veneer, the three-phase upgrade for the workshop on the industrial estate, the body corporate you do the monthly compliance testing for. Detail, with the client's permission where it identifies them.
Photos taken there. Your own, from your own jobs. A stock photo of a smiling electrician is the single loudest signal that a page is filler.
The specifics of the housing or building stock. This is where a real tradesperson pulls away from a template instantly, because you already know it. Which suburbs are full of 1960s homes with ceramic fuses that need a switchboard upgrade before anything else can happen. Which ones are new estates where the work is EV chargers and data cabling. Which ones are high-rise and body corporate. Which have heritage overlays that change what you can do to a façade. That knowledge is genuinely useful to the reader deciding whether you understand their situation, and it is impossible to fake at scale.
Who covers it and how fast. Name the technician or crew that works that area and what your realistic response time is. Response time is a conversion lever in its own right, as we've covered in how fast you reply decides whether you win the job, and stating it on the page sets the expectation before the phone rings.
Reviews from customers in that suburb. Pulling the reviews you already have that mention the area is one of the highest-value ten minutes you'll spend on the page, and it's another reason to keep the review habit running — see how to get more Google reviews for your trade business.
One clear action. Same as any page that has a job to do. If this page is also going to receive paid traffic, it needs to behave like a landing page rather than a brochure, which is a separate discipline covered in why sending Google Ads to your homepage burns money.
Six pages built like that will beat sixty built from a template, and they'll keep working, because the thing making them rank is the thing making them useful.
Gold nugget. Here is the one-sentence test, and it takes ten seconds per page. Find and replace the suburb name on the page with a different suburb. If the page still reads perfectly — every sentence still true, nothing now wrong — you have built a doorway page, and it is a liability rather than an asset. A real location page breaks when you swap the name, because it contains claims that are only true of that place. Run this on any suburb pages you already have. Whatever fails, either rewrite it properly or delete it, and don't be precious about deleting: a page that ranks for nothing and looks like scaled content is doing worse than nothing.
The version that scales, if you need it to
If you genuinely operate across a large area — a plumbing business covering all of Melbourne, say — six pages won't cover the ground, and you don't want to write ninety by hand either. The answer isn't to abandon the standard, it's to change what the page is.
Instead of ninety pages each pretending to be a full service offering, build a smaller number of pages around real distinctions: the service, the type of building, or a genuine region where the work is actually different. "Body corporate electrical compliance in Melbourne's inner north" is a real page with real content behind it. "Electrician Brunswick East" usually isn't, unless you have genuine Brunswick East material to put in it. Then let your Google Business Profile service areas and your review volume do the suburb-level work, which is what they're for.
And be disciplined about where you spend money on top of it. When we rebuilt paid search for Medical Foot Care, the account had been spending across the country while one clinic sat with capacity; the fix was tightly geo-fencing the campaign to the catchment that actually needed filling. Geographic discipline in advertising and geographic honesty in your content are the same instinct. Trying to be everywhere is how you end up nowhere in particular, on either channel.
The reason this is worth getting right now
Location pages built properly do double duty. They rank in ordinary search, and they're also the material that gets cited when someone asks an AI assistant who to hire in their suburb — a shift we've written about in when your customers ask AI instead of Google. Specific, verifiable, locally grounded content is what gets picked up in both. Generic templated pages are exactly what both systems are built to discard.
So the effort you'd have spent on sixty thin pages is better spent on six substantial ones, plus a properly configured profile and a working review habit. It's less writing, it's more useful, and it's the only version of the strategy that's still working in a year.
If you're not sure whether the pages you've already got are helping or quietly hurting — or you want to know which suburbs are actually worth chasing before you spend anything — that's part of what we pull apart in the Business Health Check: a fixed-price review of your numbers and your online presence, with a written plan of what to fix first. Or start with the free five-minute scorecard.