Delete city pages that only swap the town name
A local SEO checklist says near-duplicate location pages are worth deleting, not fixing.
If your website has a page for every town you serve and the only difference between them is the town name, one local SEO says get rid of them.
The advice comes from The SEO Guy (@theseoguy_), who posted a long checklist for ranking a local business in Google. Under the website section, two lines sit next to each other. One city plus one service equals one page. And location pages should be actually localized, so if 40 of your pages are the same content with the city swapped, delete them.
if 40 of your pages are the same content with the city swapped, delete them.
What a real location page looks like
The rest of the checklist gives a sense of what he means by localized and useful. He recommends putting the keyword in the URL, the title tag and the H1 (the main heading on the page), front loading the keyword in the meta title, and keeping the phone number visible without scrolling. He also suggests internal links (links from one page of your site to another) between related services and cities, and finishing one cluster of pages before starting the next.
He puts commercial pages, the ones that sell your service, ahead of blog posts. Always.
Bulk AI articles get the same warning
In a follow-up post, he turned to blogging for a local business. Do it deliberately. Think about the questions you actually want answered. If you use AI to write, look it over and give it a strong prompt. His verdict on the alternative is blunt. Mass produced AI articles almost never rank, and even if they do, they almost never convert.
mass produced ai articles almost never rank, and even if they do, they almost never convert
That is the same underlying point as the location pages. The problem is not that a page mentions a city or that a tool helped write it. The problem is a page that says nothing specific to the person reading it. This echoes earlier warnings that bulk-made pages can cost you trust across your whole site.
For the specifics he suggests adding, he lists first party detail. Real pricing ranges from your market, real jobs, and how you actually diagnose the problem. Also real author bios, licenses, certifications and a company story, with no "admin" bylines.
What to do
Open your site and list every location page you have. Read two of them side by side. If you could swap the city names and nobody would notice, you have the problem he is describing. Either rewrite them with jobs, prices and details from that specific town, or delete them and keep the ones you can make real.
This is one SEO's checklist, not a Google announcement.