If you serve customers in several Cork towns, location pages can help you show up in each of them. Done badly, they can drag your whole site down. The difference is whether each page is genuinely useful to someone in that place.
The doorway page problem
The lazy version of location pages is one template with the town name swapped: Best plumber in Douglas, Best plumber in Ballincollig, and so on, with identical text underneath. Google calls these doorway pages. They exist to rank rather than to help, and Google’s guidelines explicitly target them. At best they are ignored. At worst they lower trust in the whole site.
When location pages make sense
- You have premises in more than one location.
- You regularly serve customers in specific towns and have real experience there.
- Customers in those places have different needs, questions or circumstances.
If none of those apply, one strong service page and a well-set-up Google profile with service areas will do more for you.
What a good location page includes
- Something specific to the place: the areas and estates you cover, local landmarks customers use for directions, common jobs or issues in that area.
- Proof from that place: projects, case studies, photos and reviews from customers there.
- Practical details: response times, travel charges, parking or where to find you.
- Local questions answered: the questions people in that area actually ask you.
- Links to your services: so people can find detail, and Google understands how the site fits together.
An example from Cork
A heating engineer covering Carrigaline and Crosshaven could write about older coastal homes and salt air affecting boilers, typical response times from their base, recent installations in Shanbally, and reviews from Carrigaline customers. None of that would make sense on their Mallow page, which is exactly the point.
Structure and linking
Keep a clear structure: a locations hub page linking to each town, each town linking to relevant services, and each service linking back to the towns you cover. Use clean URLs such as /locations/douglas/, and include each page in your sitemap.
How many should you create?
As many as you can make genuinely useful, and no more. Five excellent location pages beat fifty thin ones. Start with the areas that already bring you the most business, write them properly, and add more as you gather real projects and reviews from new places.
How to measure them
In Search Console, filter by page to see which searches each location page appears for and how many clicks it earns. If a page gets impressions but few clicks, improve its title and description. If it gets nothing at all after a few months, it probably needs more substance.
Want to see how we approach it? Browse our own Cork location pages, or get in touch and we will plan yours.