“Can’t we just make a page for every town?” It’s one of the most common questions in local SEO, and it’s an understandable one. You serve Crawley, Horsham, Haywards Heath and East Grinstead, so why not have a page for each one?
Sometimes that’s exactly the right thing to do. Done badly, though, those pages are what Google calls doorway pages, and they can drag down the whole site.
What Google Means by Doorway Pages
Google describes doorways as pages or sites created to rank for specific, similar searches, which send people to pages that are less useful than the final destination. Its examples include having many pages targeted at specific regions or cities that all funnel visitors to one page.
In plain English, if your Crawley page and your Horsham page say the same thing with the town name swapped, you’ve built doorway pages.
A Cautionary Tale
We worked with a solar company that had a page for every town it wanted to rank for. Those towns covered much of the south of England.
Those pages were wiped out, and all the work that went into them was lost.
What Makes a Town Page Useful
A good location page gives someone in that town information they couldn’t get from your main service page. Here’s what we look for:
- The page is about a place where you work, or where you have a presence.
- It shows projects you’ve completed in that town, with photos and details.
- It mentions local specifics, such as the planning authority, common property types or problems you see in that area.
- It includes reviews or testimonials from customers in that town, if you have them.
- It reads as though a person who knows the area wrote it.
If you can’t fill a page with that kind of detail, you probably don’t need the page.
Fewer, Stronger Pages Usually Win
For most small businesses, one strong county page beats twenty thin town pages.
We worked with an architects’ practice that didn’t appear in local searches outside its immediate town, so it wasn’t showing up for Sussex searches at all. Instead of creating a page for every town, we built one dedicated Sussex page, updated the local schema and optimised case studies of jobs in the area. We’ll go into that work in more detail later in this series.
Once you’ve got a solid county page, add individual town pages only where you have enough local work and knowledge to make each one stand on its own.
Your Address Still Counts
Whitespark’s 2026 survey ranked having a physical address in the city of search as the fourth most important factor for the map pack. A town page won’t get you into the map pack for a town you’re not based in. It can help your website rank in the normal results, but only if it’s useful.
If you’re not sure whether your location pages help or hurt, we’re happy to take a look as part of our local SEO work for Sussex businesses.
Your website is only half of local visibility. The other half lives on Google itself, so next we cover what moves the Sussex map pack in 2026.