--- title: "Local landing pages that rank, no doorway pages | OMB" description: "Local SEO pages per city, without doorway pages. What our research in Limburg shows and what a city page needs to rank." url: https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/blog/local-landing-pages-that-rank-without-doorway-pages/ language: en updated: 2026-11-08 --- > Markdown version of https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/blog/local-landing-pages-that-rank-without-doorway-pages/ for AI agents and LLMs. The HTML page is the leading version. Overview of the whole site: https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/llms.txt [Home](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/)[Blog](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/blog/)Local landing pages that rank, without doorway pages SEO # Local landing pages that rank, without doorway pages A local landing page per city is perfectly fine. As long as every page says something that is true for that city alone. Rubin Koot · Hoofdbakker 2 October 20265 min read In short - In Limburg, city pages with 74 to 99% identical text are ranking. Google calls that doorway abuse. - A city page needs a local case, a named review, a concrete meeting model and less than 40% overlap. - We fill one template with real data per municipality, and set pages without their own text to noindex. In this article (6) 1. What we saw in Limburg 2. What Google makes of it 3. Who really writes per city 4. What a city page needs 5. How we do it ourselves 6. How many pages you need Search for “online marketing agency Roermond” and you get a row of agencies promising they are just around the corner. Click through, scroll to the footer, and the address is on the other side of the country. Our bakery is in Roermond, so we notice. On 2 October 2026 we therefore picked apart the search results in Dutch Limburg. Who is ranking with local landing pages, how are those pages built, and what does it take to get there yourself without tricks? Spoiler: the bar is not high. But the way some agencies jump over it is not something I would copy. ## What we saw in Limburg We looked at twelve core keywords: “online marketing agency” and “web design”, combined with Roermond, Venlo, Maastricht, Sittard, Weert, Heerlen and Limburg, among others. We pulled the text from the pages at the top, and compared the city pages of the same agency with each other. How do you measure whether two pages are the same? We chopped every page into runs of five words, made the city name identical everywhere, and counted how many runs two city pages share. Navigation and footer count too, so almost every site has 30 to 40% overlap. Above 70%, the body text is largely the same as well. And then it got interesting. - At agencies from outside Limburg we found city pages with **90% and even 99% overlap**. In that last case, the city name was literally the only difference. - An agency inside the province runs on a template too, with **74% overlap** between two cities. - And they rank. All three show up in several city search results. - In the top nine for “online marketing agency Roermond” there was **not a single agency with an address in Roermond**. An honest footnote: we looked through a search tool, not through Google on a laptop in Roermond. The positions are an approximation, and we did not see the map pack with local businesses. Still, the pattern is clear. The fact that templates rank says more about how thin the competition is than about how good the approach is. ## What Google makes of it Google is fairly clear on this. In its spam policies it is called _doorway abuse_: pages that mainly exist to rank for similar searches. One of the examples Google itself gives: “pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page” ([Google Search Central, Spam policies](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies)). The same page also lists _scaled content abuse_: creating lots of pages with the main goal of influencing rankings. A template you fill 31 times with a different city name fits that exactly. The fact that something ranks today does not mean it is within the policy. It means it has not been noticed yet. Surviving until the next update is not a strategy. We also saw tricks that go a step further. A keyword in the address field of the structured data. Star ratings in the code of a service page. “The number 1 agency in [city]” without an office in that city. Don’t. The first two also clash with Google’s guidelines for structured data. ## Who really writes per city There are agencies that do it differently. Their city pages are often shorter, but genuinely written per city. The template 74 to 99% overlap. The same cases on every city page, a site-wide star rating, and "we come to you on location too". Written per city 6 to 37% overlap. A case from the region, a real address, and text you cannot simply paste into another city. Something else that stood out: whoever is actually based in a city often ranks there with the homepage alone. We saw that in Sittard, Weert and Heerlen. A real office cannot be rebuilt with a template. And in smaller municipalities, directories and Facebook pages float to the top. That points to little competition. But it is no reason to put a page there if you have nothing to say about the place. ## What a city page needs to rank Recipe: a city page that is not a doorwayFor any business that wants to be found in more than one place 1. A local case At least one client from that city or region, with what the work delivered. Not the same three cases on every city page. 2. A named review From a client in that town, with name and company. A site-wide star rating is nice, but says nothing about that one city. 3. A meeting model Everyone says "we come to you". Make it concrete: how far it is, where you meet and how you plan the first conversation. 4. Local context What is going on in that municipality: the villages, the neighbouring municipalities, the sectors. Only what you can back up. 5. Honest structured data A Service with the area you serve. No fake address per city, no stars in the code of a service page. 6. Less than 40% overlap Compare your city pages with each other, including navigation and footer. The pages that are genuinely written per city sit well below that. And then the simplest test of all. Remove the city name. Is the page still just as usable for another city? Then it is a doorway. ## How we do it on our own site Talk is cheap. So this is how we handle it ourselves. We work with one template, but fill it per municipality with real data. The villages in the municipality and the distance as the crow flies from our bakery on the Noordhoven come from the PDOK Locatieserver, the Dutch government’s geocoder. The region comes from the COROP classification by Statistics Netherlands (CBS). That is how the page for Beesel says the municipality also includes Reuver, and that it is 8.6 km away as the crow flies. But real data is not yet content of your own. Villages and kilometres make a page correct, not valuable. That is why every city page without its own text is set to **noindex** and kept out of the sitemap. It exists for whoever finds it, but we do not ask Google to include it. Only when we have something to say about a place does the page open up. In Roermond, our home base, those are the sites we built for MS Wedding Films and Dost Market. For Venlo and Weert it is Emmfloow, for whom we made separate pages per city for burnout coaching. A local case about local pages: it does not get better than that. Our meeting model is simple: a baker’s chat of one hour, which you put in our calendar with one click. What we are still missing are reviews that name the town. Honestly: we do not have those yet. In the same boat? Then just ask for them, from clients in that town, with one extra line: feel free to mention your town or location. And until they come in, put nothing there. A made-up review is worse than no review. Curious what that looks like? Take a look at our page for [online marketing agency in Roermond](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/online-marketing-agency-roermond/), the hub for [online marketing agency in Limburg](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/online-marketing-agency-limburg/), or the one for [web design in Limburg](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/web-design-limburg/). ## How many city pages do you need? Fewer than you think. Limburg has 31 municipalities. With two services you would quickly be at 62 pages. For us that would be 62 times the same promise, with a different name on top. Our research produced a more realistic number: one hub for the province, plus four or five cities per service where you genuinely have something to say. Smaller municipalities you include as a paragraph on the page of the nearest city. When a client comes along in a place, that place gets its own page. Not before. Rather five city pages that are true than 31 that pretend. A city name in the heading does not make a local loaf. What’s on it makes the difference. Rubin Koot · Hoofdbakker Rubin is the founder of Online Marketing Bakery in Roermond. You take the stage, we fill the room. And we make sure it buys. [rubin@onlinemarketingbakery.nl](mailto:rubin@onlinemarketingbakery.nl) · [More about the bakers](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/about-us/) **Further reading:** [Online marketing agency in Limburg](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/online-marketing-agency-limburg/) · [Online marketing agency in Roermond](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/online-marketing-agency-roermond/) · [Web design in Limburg](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/web-design-limburg/) How we work: [first the offer, then the room](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/how-we-work/). Want to get going with a brief like this? We do that in [the Sold-Out Session: your offer and your event structure in one half-day](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/sold-out-session/) . In this article 1. What we saw in Limburg 2. What Google makes of it 3. Who really writes per city 4. What a city page needs 5. How we do it ourselves 6. How many pages you need In short - In Limburg, city pages with 74 to 99% identical text are ranking. Google calls that doorway abuse. - A city page needs a local case, a named review, a concrete meeting model and less than 40% overlap. - We fill one template with real data per municipality, and set pages without their own text to noindex. Fresh from the oven! Questions ## Questions about this topic. What is a doorway page? A page that mainly exists to rank for one specific search, such as a service plus a city name, without offering the visitor anything of its own. Google calls it doorway abuse and counts it as spam. Am I allowed to make a page per city? Yes, as long as every page contains something that is true for that city alone: a local case, a review from a client in that town, a concrete meeting model. Remove the city name and if the page is still just as usable for another city, it is a doorway. How much may the text of my city pages overlap? We keep it under 40%, measured in runs of five words, including navigation and footer. That is our own standard based on our research, not a limit Google states. Do I need to be based in a city to rank there? Not for the regular search results, although it helps. In the map pack with local businesses, distance to the searcher weighs heavily. That is where you mainly stand a chance in the town where you are actually based. More from the oven ## Another slice? [SEO Is AI recommending your masterclass? Test it yourself 19 Oct 2026 · 5 min](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/blog/is-ai-recommending-your-masterclass/) [SEO New online shop, same rankings: ecommerce migration without losing SEO 2 Oct 2026 · 5 min](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/blog/ecommerce-migration-without-losing-seo/) [SEO GEO: how to get named in the answers of ChatGPT and Google 24 Sept 2026 · 6 min](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/blog/geo-getting-found-in-ai-answers/) [← Back to the blog overview](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/blog/) ## Your next event deserves a room that buys. Book a one-hour baker's chat. We figure out where your room leaks. If it's not for you, we'll tell you. [Book your baker's chat](https://calendar.app.google/xxHsojnQL4A574Me7) [Take the leak test](https://onlinemarketingbakery.com/en/leak-test/start/) You talk directly to Rubin, the head baker.