How many location pages does a London business need?
The honest answer is fewer than most agencies will sell you, and the test for whether a page deserves to exist is simpler than you would expect.
London has 32 boroughs and several hundred recognisable districts, which makes a certain kind of proposal very easy to write: one page per area, several hundred pages, delivered next month.
It almost never works, and it frequently does damage. Here is how to decide what you actually need.
The test that matters
Before creating a page for an area, try to write three sentences about doing business there that would be false if you swapped in a different place name.
Not "we provide excellent service to businesses in Bromley." That is true of everywhere and therefore says nothing. Something closer to: Bromley is the largest London borough by area, customers in Orpington do not consider a Beckenham business local, and a single borough-wide page will underperform three area pages.
If you cannot write those three sentences, you do not have a page. You have a keyword with a template wrapped around it.
Why thin location pages fail
Search engines have been dealing with templated location pages for well over a decade, and the pattern is trivially detectable: identical structure, identical word count, one noun swapped. Pages like this tend to end up ignored, and in volume they can affect how the rest of the site is assessed.
There is a second cost that gets less attention. Every thin page you publish is a page competing with your own stronger pages for the same terms. Fifty near-identical pages do not give you fifty chances to rank — they give search engines a reason to pick none of them.
A sensible starting number
For most London service businesses, somewhere between three and twelve location pages is right.
- Three to five if you serve a compact area — a few adjacent neighbourhoods where customers will genuinely travel to you.
- Six to twelve if you cover a large borough or several boroughs, and can write substantively about each.
- More than twelve only if you have a genuine reason and the content to support it.
The constraint is not ambition. It is how many areas you can write about with something specific to say.
What belongs on a page that earns its place
- Local commercial context. What kinds of businesses operate there, and what that means for the work.
- Genuine local considerations. Travel distances, catchment quirks, seasonal patterns, competitive density.
- Questions specific to that area, not a generic FAQ block repeated everywhere.
- Honest positioning. If you are not based there, do not imply that you are.
What to do with the areas you cannot write about
Leave them out. Then, if a particular area starts producing enquiries, write the page properly at that point.
Search visibility built on twelve good pages is more durable than visibility built on two hundred weak ones, and it costs considerably less to maintain.
If you want a view on which areas are worth building for your business, get in touch — it is usually a short conversation.