Guide · Content
Area pages that
are not doorways.
"Build a page for every town you serve" is standard local SEO advice and it is half right. Done thinly it is the textbook definition of a doorway page, which Google has an explicit policy against. The difference is not the idea, it is the execution.
Published 2026-09-08 · Formory Group
What a doorway page is.
A page that exists only to catch a search and funnel the visitor somewhere else, with content identical to twenty siblings apart from the place name. Google names this pattern in its spam policies. The giveaway is the test: if swapping the city name produces the other page exactly, both are doorways.
What makes an area page legitimate.
Something true about your work in that place that is not true everywhere. Jobs you have completed there. How long it takes you to get there and what that does to the price. Local conditions that change the work — housing stock, permits, parking, the age of the buildings. Names of neighbourhoods you actually cover.
If you cannot write three specific sentences about working in that city, do not make the page. A single honest "areas we serve" page listing them all will serve you better than twelve empty ones.
How we apply this to ourselves.
Every city and trade page on this site is built from our own survey of 49,994 GTA business listings, and each one is only published when there are enough businesses in that combination for the numbers to mean something. The tables on a page for one trade in one city are not the tables on any other page — that is the test we hold ourselves to, and it is why some combinations have no page at all.
A practical rule.
Fewer, better pages. Five area pages with real content beat forty generated ones, and they carry no risk. If you are tempted to generate the forty, ask what a customer in the fortieth town would get from that page that they could not get from the main service page. If the answer is nothing, you have your answer.
Questions
The usual questions.
How many area pages is too many?
There is no number. There is only whether each page has something specific to say. Ten with substance is fine; three without it is already a problem.
Can I use AI to write them?
You can draft with it, but if the draft is generic you have automated the doorway rather than avoided it. The specifics have to come from you.
What if I genuinely serve fifty towns?
Write proper pages for the ones where you do the most work and list the rest on a single coverage page. That is honest and it ranks better than fifty thin pages ever will.
Now check your own
You have read the numbers.
Where does your site stand?
Type your address and we will open your site the way a visitor would, then tell you plainly what is wrong with it — including when the answer is nothing. Ten seconds, no email, nothing stored.
Start with a
straight answer.
Describe the business and where it works. We come back with what we would change, what it would cost and how long it takes — or with a reason not to bother.