Most of the local advertisers we studied have a page for each town they serve. A plumber lists 15 communities, a pest control company lists 55, and each town gets its own page with its own address in the browser bar. The pages are mostly there for Google's regular search results. The question this chapter answers is whether they do anything for your ads.
They can, and the reason is how Google decides which ads show and what each click costs. The bid is only part of it. Google also looks at whether the ad and the page behind it fit what the person typed. A page that names the right town and the right service helps. A page that names the wrong town hurts, and in the 12 St. Louis local businesses we studied for this guide, a third of the sites had one.
Chapter 3 worked out that the share of clicks becoming calls or forms is the number a local business moves most easily. The page a click lands on does most of the moving.
Google Ranks Your Ad on More Than the Bid. The Page Behind the Ad Counts Too.
When someone in St. Charles types "plumber st charles mo," Google holds a quick auction among the plumbers bidding on it. The bid is one input. Google's help page on Ad Rank lists five more, and two of them matter most to a local business: how the ad and its landing page hold up for that particular search, and the search's context, which includes where the person is standing when they type it. A business can't lower a competitor's bid. It can make its own page fit.
Google reports on that fit through Quality Score, a 1-to-10 number for each keyword in the account. It rolls up three ratings: the odds that searchers click your ad, the closeness of ad to search, and the quality of the page as a destination for that click. Google treats the number as a report card, not a setting the auction reads. The auction makes its own reading of the same things, live, for every search.
For a local search, the page holds up when it repeats the two things the person typed: the service, and often the town. That is what location pages are for, when they're built for the click.
Eight Local Advertisers Built Pages for Kirkwood, Clayton and Other Suburbs. Their Ad Text Almost Never Named Those Towns.
City pages are everywhere in local marketing. Of the 12 St. Louis area businesses in our sample, 8 publish pages for the towns or neighborhoods they serve, from 3 pages at the smallest to 55 at the largest. The roofer also publishes 92 more pages that pair a town with a single service.
The ads are a different story. We collected the 92 text ads that Google's Ads Transparency Center, its public library of ads, shows for the 10 businesses in our sample that aren't chains. Five of the 8 businesses with city pages never wrote a suburb into their ad text. Several wrote St. Louis. The other town names that appeared were mostly addresses in location assets, which show where the business is, not which towns it serves.
Three businesses did more. An HVAC company wrote its home town, Chesterfield, into its ad copy. A cleaning company added sitelinks named for two of its towns, Clayton and Kirkwood, which match two of its town pages. It was the only business whose ad text pointed toward a specific town page. The roofer used location insertion, a Google feature that drops the searcher's town into the headline, with St. Louis as the fallback. That puts the right town in the ad, but the ad text gives no sign of a town page behind it.
The Transparency Center shows the text an advertiser wrote, not the keywords behind it, what each searcher saw, or where every click lands. Some of these accounts may send town searches to town pages in ways the library can't show. What it does show is that the pages were built and the ads rarely pointed to them.
A City Page Written for Another Town Tells the Searcher They Clicked the Wrong Company.
City pages usually share one template, with the town name swapped in. Of the 8 businesses in our sample with city pages, 5 used one layout for every town. That's a reasonable way to start. The trouble comes when the swap is incomplete.
Four of the 12 sites had a city page that named the wrong town or the wrong business:
- An electrician's Chesterfield page called the company "Ballwin's favorite."
- A roofer's Randolph County, Illinois list included three North Carolina towns, and every city page, Illinois ones too, carried a section headed "Greater St. Louis Area Of Missouri."
- A pest control company's Wildwood page called the company "Wildwood Pest Control" and made claims, like an entomologist on staff, that no other page on the site makes.
- A dentist's area page described "our dental practice in Clayton," when the practice's only office is in St. Louis.
A fifth site had a duplicate page live in its sitemap, with "-copy" in the address and a different town's text inside.
Picture the person who searched for a pest control company in Wildwood, clicked an ad and landed on a page for a company with a different name. They don't think "template error." They think they clicked the wrong company, and they go back to the results. The business paid for that click and got nothing for it. The dentist's mistake runs the other way: a Clayton searcher arrives expecting an office nearby that doesn't exist.
A Town With Its Own Searches Earns Its Own Ad Group and Its Own Page.
An ad group is the set of keywords that share one set of ads. The tighter the group, the closer the ad and the page can match each search in it. For a local business, that starts with one service per ad group: drain cleaning in one, water heaters in another. A town comes next, and only when people actually search for it.
Keyword Planner shows how uneven that is. In the St. Louis market, the most-searched way of asking for a plumber in each town gets about 590 a month for St. Charles ("plumber st charles mo") and about 590 for Kirkwood ("kirkwood plumber"). Chesterfield gets about 390 and Ballwin about 320. Webster Groves gets about 20.
Word order matters here. "Kirkwood plumber" gets about 590 searches a month, while "plumber kirkwood mo" gets about 70, and Keyword Planner reports them separately. Check more than one wording before deciding a town is too small.
Our rule is that a town with enough searches of its own gets its own ad group, with a headline that names the town and a page written for it. St. Charles and Kirkwood clear that bar easily. Webster Groves doesn't, and it doesn't need to. Its searchers still see your ads through the main ad group and the location targeting, which the location chapters later in this guide cover. A business that builds 55 ad groups for 55 towns ends up with ad groups that get too few searches to tell you anything, often not even a Quality Score.
Run the same check for your own trade and market. The towns worth separating are usually the bigger suburbs, the places you most want work from, and any town where you have an office.
Google Has a Name for City Pages That All Send Visitors to One Page: Doorway Abuse.
City pages started as a way to rank in Google's regular search results, and Google has a rule about that use. Its spam policies for Google Search list "doorway abuse" and give as an example "having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page."
That is a rule for regular search results, not for Google Ads, and a city page with real local content isn't a doorway. But the pattern it describes is easy to slip into: dozens of near-identical pages whose only job is to push the visitor to the same contact form. A page like that does little for the person who clicked an ad for their town, because there is nothing on it about their town beyond the name.
A smaller set of real pages beats a long list of thin ones. The towns that earn an ad group are the towns that earn a page worth reading.
A City Page Earns the Call When It Proves You Work in That Town.
When an ad sends a town's searcher to a page, the page has a few seconds to confirm they're in the right place. A page that does this well carries a few things:
- The town and the service at the top. "Drain cleaning in St. Charles," in the first headline, matching the ad they clicked.
- The phone number in reach, the same tracked number from Chapter 1, at the top of the page and again further down.
- The real service area, stated plainly, so a searcher at the edge of it knows whether you come to them.
- Proof from that town: reviews from customers there and jobs you've done there, if you have them.
- Hours that match your Google listing. Nine of our 12 businesses gave conflicting hours, or around-the-clock claims their hours didn't back up, somewhere among the site, its code, the Google listing and their ads.
- Nothing that sends them away. We leave map and directions links off paid pages. The address as text is enough.
Two other guides in this series work through the same match in one trade: electricians, where each service gets its own page, and accountants, where one broad ad group pays for every mismatch.
Next: An Electrician's Own Website Sent Keyword Planner Toward Generators.
Knowing which towns and services deserve their own ad group starts with the right keyword list. Chapter 5 covers keyword research for a local business: how Keyword Planner reads your website, why your competitors' sites belong in the tool too, and how to weed out towns you don't serve.
Every chapter is on the guide's home page. If you'd rather have someone build it, our Google Ads management sets up each local account with ad groups and landing pages that match the searches they pay for.
