Location pages without doorway pages

What a doorway page is

A doorway page is one of a set of pages created to rank for variations of a query, where the pages differ only in the substituted term and all funnel to the same destination. In clinic marketing this is nearly always a page per town, identical apart from the place name, each linking to the same single clinic.

Google's spam policies name doorway pages specifically. This is not a grey area and it has not been one for a long time, which is worth knowing before somebody sells you a package of forty location pages.

Why they stop working

Three reasons, of which only the first is about search engines.

The first is that they are detected. Sets of near-identical pages are exactly the pattern that duplicate detection is built to resolve, and the usual outcome is that one is indexed and the rest are ignored, which means the effort produced one page.

The second is that they are useless to the reader. Somebody who lands on a page headed with the name of their town, which then describes a clinic eighteen miles away without saying so, has been misled. They leave, and the behaviour is visible.

The third is that they crowd out the pages that would have worked. A site with forty location pages and eight treatment pages has told a search engine, structurally, that it is mostly about places. It is not; it is about treatments.

When a location page is justified

One test: do you have premises there, where a patient can attend an appointment. If yes, the page is justified and necessary. If no, it is not, and there is no clever version of it that becomes justified.

The edge cases are genuinely narrow. A practitioner holding regular clinics at a second site one day a week is a location, provided the page says so plainly and gives the days. A referral arrangement is not a location. A postal address for correspondence is not a location.

What a real location page contains

• The address, formatted as on your profile, with a map.
• How to get there, including the nearest station or bus route and the walk from it, and where to park, with what it costs.
• What the building looks like, with a photograph of the exterior, because patients arriving for the first time need it.
• Who works there, named, with roles and registration, and which days.
• Which treatments are available there, which on a multi-site clinic is rarely all of them.
• Opening hours for that site, which frequently differ from the main ones.
• Accessibility, step-free access, lift, accessible toilet, which is information some patients need before booking.

A page containing all seven is substantial, useful and impossible to generate by substituting a town name. That is the point: the test of a location page is whether it could exist for a town you do not operate in. If it could, it should not exist at all.

Serving a catchment without pages

Patients travel, and a clinic legitimately serves a wider area than the town it sits in. Four ways to serve that catchment that are not doorway pages.

1. The service area on your profile, which exists for this purpose and is the correct mechanism.
2. Genuine travel information on the location page: the train from the larger town nearby, the drive time, where to park. This is useful and it naturally contains the place names.
3. Treatment pages that rank on their own merit, which reach people across the whole catchment because they are the best answer rather than the nearest one.
4. Prominence, from Module 25, The Google Business Profile, which is what actually widens a catchment over time.

The fourth is slow and it is the one that works. A clinic known well enough that people travel to it has solved the catchment problem permanently, and no page programme substitutes for it.

Cleaning up an existing programme

Many clinics arrive at this module with thirty location pages already published, usually built by an agency several years ago. The remedy is a consolidation and it uses the technique from Module 22, URLs, redirects and migrations.

Keep the pages for premises you have. Redirect the rest to the single page that is genuinely most equivalent, which is usually the treatment page they were funnelling towards or the nearest real location page. Do not delete them without redirects, and do not redirect them all to the homepage, which is the mistake Module 22, URLs, redirects and migrations warns about.

Expect the total number of pages to fall substantially and expect nothing bad to happen, because pages that were not indexed and not read were not producing anything to lose.