Why it matters on an HVAC site
It is the format the trades run on, and the format most often abused. The question is never whether to have location pages; it is how many the business can genuinely fill.
A useful test: could somebody who lives there read this page and learn something they did not know about getting this work done in their town. If not, the page is a container for a place name.
How to check it yourself
- Count the elements genuinely specific to the place: permit rules, dominant housing stock and system age, named jobs done there, local pricing factors, a named technician who covers it.
- Measure shared text against the rest of the set.
- Check indexation per page rather than for the set, since the set average hides that most are not indexed.
Worked through in numbers
A contractor covers 34 towns and has 34 location pages, all generated from one template.
Applying the specificity test, 9 pages had at least three genuinely local elements available: older housing stock with known ductwork issues, a local permit quirk, and completed jobs to reference. The other 25 had nothing but a name.
The 9 were written properly, the 25 became rows in a served-areas table on the main service page. Of the 9, 8 reached the first page for their town query within five months. The previous 34 had produced two.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Content. What separates one that earns its URL from one that does not.