Why the template approach fails
Take one service page, swap the city, publish forty. Each page is now 95% identical to thirty-nine others, targets a term with no local demand behind it, and collectively they look like exactly what search guidelines describe as doorway pages.
The failure mode is not usually a penalty. It is that nothing ranks, the pages sit unvisited, and the effort produced a maintenance liability.
What makes a location page legitimate
- Something is genuinely different there — a regulation, a competitor set, a language requirement, a licensing body, a market condition you can state specifically.
- You can evidence a connection to the place: a location, staff, clients you may name, or work you may describe.
- There is measurable search demand for the combination, not just an assumption that the phrase exists.
- The page would still be useful to a reader if you removed the city name from it.
That last test is the most useful one. If deleting the place name leaves a page that could be about anywhere, the page has nothing to say about anywhere.
When to build none
If you serve clients remotely across a country with no local presence and no market-specific difference to describe, city pages are the wrong instrument. A single well-built service page with clear geographic coverage will outperform forty thin ones and cost far less to maintain.
The service × industry alternative
Where location does not differentiate, sector usually does. What is genuinely different about the work for a law firm versus an e-commerce store is real, describable and defensible in a way that 'SEO in Reading' generally is not.