A practice with three locations needs three location pages. The tempting way to build them is one template with the city name substituted. It is fast, it scales, and it does not work.
Why the template fails
Google has treated near-duplicate location pages as doorway pages for well over a decade, and the March 2024 spam policy update sharpened the language around content generated primarily to manipulate rankings.
The reader test is simpler and gets to the same place: if nothing on the page could only have been written about that location, why should it rank for that location?
If you could swap the city name and the page would still be accurate, it is not a location page. It is a template with a variable in it.
What a real location page contains
The practitioners who actually work there. By name, with their credentials. This is the single strongest differentiator and most templates omit it entirely.
The services offered at that site, which are frequently not identical across locations. If one site has a laser the others do not, that is the page's reason to exist.
Directions as a local would give them. Which cross street, where to park, which entrance, whether the lift is round the back. This reads as genuinely local because it is, and it is useful to a patient in a way that a city name in an H1 is not.
Hours, specific to that site.
Reviews from that location. Not a global feed.
Something only true there. The building's history, the neighborhood, the fact that the Tuesday clinic is the busy one. A sentence or two is enough.
The structure
One page per location, at a sensible URL — /locations/tampa — with
LocalBusiness schema carrying that location's own address, phone and hours.
A separate Google Business Profile per location, each with its own reviews. Do not point three profiles at one page.
Internal links from the location page to the services offered there, and from each service page back to the locations that offer it.
Scaling to many locations
Past five or six sites, the honest answer is that writing genuinely distinct pages is real work and there is no way around it. What we do:
- A shared skeleton for structure, never for prose
- One genuinely local paragraph per page, written by someone who has been there — frequently the practice manager, in ten minutes, on a call
- Location-specific photos. Not stock. This alone separates you from most competitors
- Staggered publication rather than fifty pages in one day
That last point matters more than people expect. A site that goes from six pages to sixty overnight is exhibiting the pattern the spam policy describes, regardless of how good the sixty are.
We apply the same rule to our own county pages — three of them, each genuinely different, rather than thirty templated ones.
If you have location pages that were built from a template, the fix is usually a paragraph each rather than a rebuild.