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Common Mistakes

Why Most Location Pages Don't Rank

Common mistakes that prevent location pages from appearing in search results.

The Thin Content Problem

200-word pages that say 'We offer services in Springfield' aren't going to outrank competitors with comprehensive, useful content.

Signals low quality to Google

Duplicate Content Across Locations

Same template with swapped city names. Google sees these as doorway pages designed to manipulate rankings.

Risk of penalties or filtering

Poor Internal Linking

Orphan pages with no links from homepage, service pages, or hub structure. No authority flows to them.

Pages never get indexed properly

Wrong Search Intent

Targeting keywords nobody searches, or informational queries when you need transactional traffic.

Wasted effort, wrong audience

Technical Issues

Slow page speed, mobile unfriendly, crawl issues, canonicalization errors, sitemap problems.

Content is fine but can't rank

Internal Competition

Multiple pages targeting the same keywords compete with each other instead of both ranking.

Cannibalization hurts all pages

The Good News

All of these problems are fixable with the right approach. The key is treating location pages as genuine content assets, not just keyword targets. A systematic approach addresses each of these issues before pages go live.

Avoid these mistakes with a systematic approach to local SEO.