Melissa Popp of Rickety Roo has spent enough time inside local accounts to be unsentimental about the format. On the Unscripted SEO podcast she was direct about the state of the genre — and then direct about the fix.
Why Most Location Pages Are Doorway Pages In Disguise
“the majority of location pages I see out there. They suck”
Melissa Popp, Rickety Roo
Her diagnosis is not that they are thin on words. It is that they were never written to do a job:
“We ignore the idea of getting someone on a page and selling them and converting them and so you have these location pages out there that just are garbage.”
Melissa Popp
Swap the city name, ship fifty. That is a doorway page with extra steps, and it fails on both axes — it does not differentiate for a crawler and it does not persuade a human.
The Local Proof Elements Popp Looks For
Popp’s framing of what these pages are for is the useful bit:
“your location pages are supposed to be your bottom of the funnel content”
Melissa Popp
Bottom of funnel means the visitor is close to acting and needs the last few objections removed. That is what local proof is: named technicians who actually cover that area, reviews from that town, photographs of real jobs at recognisable addresses, the service radius stated plainly, response times, and any licence or permit that is specific to that jurisdiction.
None of that is generatable at scale, which is precisely why it works.
Structuring One Page Per Real Service Area
The rule of thumb: a location page earns its existence if you can write two hundred words about that area that would be false about the next town over. If you cannot, you do not have a location page — you have a service page with a place name in it, and you should consolidate.
Fewer, genuinely differentiated pages beat a full grid of near-duplicates. The strategy-level version of this decision is in location page strategy.
Google Business Profile As The Anchor
Popp’s first instruction to listeners was not about the website at all:
“And if you don’t have one, stop listening to this podcast and go create one right now.”
Melissa Popp
“Go to your Google business profile and make sure it’s filled out completely.”
Melissa Popp
The profile is the anchor the location pages hang off. She was equally specific about the detail people get wrong most often:
“for anybody who’s managing their own Google Business Profile listing, I would encourage you to go and make sure your address is correct.”
Melissa Popp
Working through Google Business Profile optimisation and local citation building before touching the pages is the correct order of operations.
A Location Page Template You Can Copy
Block by block, top to bottom:
- Local hero. Service plus area in the H1, one line of proof, a call button that works on mobile.
- Services offered here. Only what you genuinely deliver in that area.
- Named people. The technicians or team who actually cover it.
- Local reviews. Filtered to that town, with names and dates.
- Recent work. Two or three jobs with photographs and a sentence each.
- Coverage and directions. Map, radius, neighbouring areas, travel time.
- One clear action. Not four competing ones.
Build the first one by hand, all the way through, before you decide how many more are justified.