The copy-paste trap

It seems logical: you serve Duncan, Nanaimo, and Ladysmith, so you create three pages — one for each town — with the same text, same photos, same everything, just the town name swapped in. Three pages, three shots at ranking. Simple.

Google doesn’t see it that way. When Google crawls your site and finds three pages that are 95% identical, it has to decide which one is the “real” version and which are duplicates. It will typically pick one — usually the one for your main location — and either ignore or significantly discount the others. You don’t get three bites at the apple. You get one, and you’ve wasted the work of building two pages.

Worse, a site with a lot of near-duplicate thin pages can look like it’s trying to game search results, which erodes Google’s trust in your site overall.

What “duplicate content” actually means

Google doesn’t penalise duplicate content in the dramatic sense most people imagine. It doesn’t flag your site or apply a manual action. What it does is de-duplicate: when two pages are too similar, it picks one to rank and largely ignores the other. The problem is that the one it picks may not be the one you want — and the pages you’ve built for secondary towns stop being useful.

The threshold isn’t exact, but a rough guide: if more than 70–80% of a page’s content is identical to another page on your site, it’s at risk of being treated as a duplicate. The solution isn’t to rewrite everything from scratch — it’s to make each page genuinely add something the others don’t.

Three approaches that work

Approach 1 — Best for most service businesses
One strong page per town with unique content

Build a dedicated page for each town you serve. Each page covers the same services but includes a genuine block of location-specific content: local context, nearby neighbourhoods you cover, anything specific to working in that area. Even 200 words of truly location-specific content — not just the town name, but actual local detail — is enough to distinguish the pages. This is the approach described in full in the service area pages guide.

Approach 2 — Best for 6+ locations
Hub and spoke: one service area overview + individual town pages

Create a “Service Areas” hub page that lists all the towns you cover and links to each individual town page. The hub ranks for broad searches like “electrician Vancouver Island” while each spoke page targets specific town searches like “electrician Ladysmith.” Internal links from the hub to each spoke page tell Google they’re all related and help each page get discovered and indexed. This structure scales well as you add more coverage areas.

Approach 3 — Best when towns are very small
One page covering a cluster of nearby small communities

Not every town needs its own page. If you serve Yellow Point, Saltair, and Cedar — small communities near Ladysmith with relatively low search volume — a single page covering “the Ladysmith area including Yellow Point, Saltair, and Cedar” makes more sense than three thin pages. Cluster small communities together under the nearest named town, then build individual pages only for towns large enough to have meaningful search volume on their own.

How to make each page genuinely different

The key principle is that the unique content needs to be real — not just artificial variation that reads like you swapped words around. Google’s algorithms are good at detecting spun content. Here are practical ways to make each location page distinct:

  • Local geography and context: Reference real neighbourhoods, landmarks, or local characteristics. A roofer serving Chemainus can mention the heritage buildings downtown and the older roofing styles common in the area.
  • Local regulations or considerations: Different municipalities have different permit requirements, building codes, or common local issues. A page for Nanaimo might mention City of Nanaimo permit processes; a page for Cowichan Valley might mention the Regional District.
  • Reviews from that area: If you have Google reviews from customers in that town, quote one on that page. A review from a Ladysmith resident on your Ladysmith page is a strong local signal.
  • Local links or references: Link to the local municipality’s website, a local business association, or a relevant local resource. This adds credibility and local context.
  • Photos from work in that area: A photo of a project you completed in that specific town, with an alt tag and caption that mentions the location, adds genuine local content and is difficult to replicate across pages.

The 100-word test: If you removed every instance of the town name from your location page, would anything left be specific to that location? If the answer is no — if it could be any town — the page isn’t differentiated enough. Add at least one section that is genuinely about that place.

Internal linking between location pages

Location pages should link to each other in a natural way. Your Duncan page might include a line like “also serving Ladysmith and Chemainus” with links to those pages. Your Nanaimo page might link to your Parksville and Lantzville pages. This helps Google discover all your location pages quickly and understand their geographic relationship.

It also helps visitors. Someone who lands on your Ladysmith page and is actually based in Chemainus can easily find your Chemainus page. Every location page should make it easy to navigate to other nearby locations you serve.

Your Google Business Profile and location pages

Your Google Business Profile is the primary signal for your registered business address. Location pages on your website complement the GBP but don’t replace it. For towns outside your immediate area, you’re competing on website signals (your location pages, citations, relevant content) rather than on GBP proximity. This is why well-built location pages matter more for secondary towns than for your home base.

Make sure the service areas you list in your GBP settings are consistent with the towns you have pages for. Inconsistency between your GBP settings and your website can confuse Google about where you actually operate.

What not to do

A few approaches that look like they should work but don’t:

  • Creating pages for towns you’ve never worked in — if your reviews, citations, and GBP don’t support a claim that you serve Campbell River, a page won’t make you rank there.
  • Using a “location page generator” or template tool — these produce exactly the kind of near-duplicate thin content that Google ignores.
  • Hiding location pages from your navigation — pages Google can’t easily find by following links are harder to index. Link to your location pages from your footer or a Service Areas page in the main nav.
  • Not putting the town name in the title tag — the title tag is the single most important on-page signal for local search. If the town name isn’t there, the page is working against itself.

Need help with your local SEO?

Get in touch with Michael

Based in Duncan, BC. I help Vancouver Island small businesses get found on Google — without the agency markup.