Percentage of Duplicate Content for Service Area Pages and Location Landing Pages

[Matt Chauhan]

1- What percentage of duplicate content is considered safe while building a service area page on the website?
2- What percentage of duplicate content is considered safe while building a location landing page on the website for GBP?

 

[Justin Mosebach]

John Mueller was asked about this a few weeks ago and he said "There is no number".

That said, these 3 classic posts by @Phil Rozek should help with optimizing those pages:

• 16 Ways to Create Unique “Local” Content for Cities Where You Want to Rank
• 25 Principles of Building Effective City Pages for Local SEO
• How to Make a “Service Areas” Page That Hunts

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Matt Chauhan, what @Justin Mosebach said (thanks, Justin).

It's great if you can differentiate each page a lot, but I have found that it's no big deal if you can't. Some of the most effective pages I've made are very heavy on boilerplate. As in 85% generic, sometimes. The 15% is very good - not lip service. I'm not suggesting you try to make pages that are mostly generic. Rather, my point is they can start off pretty generic, and you can disitinguish them more over time. That's a huge part of working on "location" pages: working on them over time.

A good cycle is something like this:

1. Create a page that's as unique and persuasive as you can make it.
2. Go heavy on internal links to it.
3. Let it sit for a couple of months.
4. Study it in Search Console and see what it does and does not rank for.
5. Improve the page, with content about specific jobs you've done (preferably in that place), FAQs, reviews, photos, more internal links in and out, etc.
6. Repeat steps 3-5.