The proposal says forty location pages, one per city in your service area, and the price is per page.
Here is the part nobody says out loud. You cannot write a page about a city you have never worked in, because there is nothing true to put on it. So what gets built is one page with a variable in it, forty times, and the variable is the city name.
That is not a shortcut to the same result. It is a different thing with a different outcome, and Google describes it specifically.
What Google actually says, which is sharper than the consultant version
Worth reading the real wording rather than the version that gets paraphrased in sales calls.
Google’s spam policies define doorway abuse as “when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries”, and say such pages “lead users to intermediate pages that aren’t as useful as the final destination”. Among the examples it lists is creating multiple pages aimed at particular regions or cities that all send users to the same destination.
Notice what the test actually is in that sentence. It is not whether the page duplicates text. It is whether the page is somewhere you pass through on the way to the page that does the work.
Which gives a better question than the usual one. Does this page end on itself, or is it a corridor?
If your Austin page answers what somebody in Austin needed to know and they can act from it, it ends on itself. If its only function is to exist until the reader clicks through to the one real service page, it is a corridor with a city name on the door, and Google has written down what it thinks of those.
On consequences, the same page is direct: violating sites may rank lower or not appear at all, detection is automated with human review where needed, and persistent attempts to work around the policies can cost you eligibility for other search features.
The branch playbook does not transfer
Here is the distinction the industry sells straight through, and it explains why so much location page advice is useless to the people buying it.
If you have five branches, a location page is easy to fill, because the building supplies the content. Named staff with photographs, where to park, which entrance, the frontage as it looks from the street, the hours that differ at that site, reviews from customers of that branch. I went through that version properly in SEO for multiple locations, and every item on the list is available because you are physically there.
Now read that same list as a plumber with one van and forty towns on your map. No staff there. No building. No parking. No separate Business Profile, and you should not be inventing an address to get one.
Every single item requires premises you do not have. Which is why the template exists: the agency is selling the branch playbook to a service area business, and the only field left to vary is the place name.
What can honestly go on a service-area page
The honest list is short, and that is the whole point, because a short list cannot support forty pages.
Jobs you have actually done there, with specifics. Not “we serve Round Rock”. The job: what the problem was, what it cost roughly, what was awkward about the house. Three of those and the page is real.
Travel time, stated, and whether it changes the price. This is the single most useful thing you can tell somebody and almost no page says it. If you charge a call-out surcharge past thirty minutes, say so. People are trying to work out whether you will actually come.
Conditions that genuinely differ there. Water hardness, soil movement, the age of the housing stock, a permit requirement that town has and the next one does not, an HOA rule, a council inspection step. These are real and they are the thing a local tradesman knows and a template cannot fake.
Local proof, named. A review that mentions the area. A customer who will be quoted. A photograph of work with something recognizable behind it.
Who you would send and how soon. Your crew that covers the north side, and that you can usually be there same day on weekdays. That is an answer to the question the reader has.
Count how many towns you could fill that list for honestly. For most businesses it is three to five, not forty. Those three to five pages will outperform the forty, and the comparison is not close.
Which is why the page follows the work
Now the inversion, and it is the thing that should change how you read the proposal.
The pitch is that forty pages will get you work in forty towns. But the page only becomes credible once you have done work in the town, because the work is where the content comes from.
So the sequence in the proposal is backwards. The page cannot generate the first job in a town. The first job generates the page.
Which means the honest route to a new town is to win one job there by some other means, and then write the page out of it. Within a year of doing that properly you have eight real pages instead of forty corridors, and each one is defensible, specific, and a thing a human would read.
I would put that to whoever sold you the forty. Ask which of the forty towns you have completed work in. The answer is the number of pages worth building.
For the towns you want and have not worked in yet
Those towns still need addressing, and pages are the wrong tool. Three things that are the right ones.
Configure the service area on your Business Profile properly. Define the areas you genuinely cover, and if you go to customers rather than the reverse, hide the address rather than displaying a home or a mailbox. That detail matters more than people expect and is a common cause of suspension.
Buy the geography. Local Services Ads and paid search will put you in front of somebody in a town where you have no history, today, which is exactly the job that a thin page was pretending to do. How LSAs work and whether they pay is a separate piece.
Make one service page excellent instead. One page per thing you do, named the way buyers name it, with the service area stated plainly on it. I set out what belongs on a service page recently, and for most single-location service businesses that page plus a well-run profile beats any number of city variants.
Where I come out
There is one honest exception and I would not pretend otherwise. If a town has a genuinely distinct regulatory or physical condition you know properly, you can write a page about it before you have worked there, because you have something true to say. That is rare, and if you are using it to justify more than a couple of pages you are talking yourself into the template again.
Otherwise: build the pages you can fill, buy the reach for the places you cannot, and let the work write the rest.
And if somebody is selling you pages by the unit, notice what that pricing structure rewards. It is not depth.
If you’d like a second opinion on how many of your location pages are earning their place, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on SEO cover how these fit the rest of a local presence. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.