Google's scaled content policy covers the city page template
The spam policy on scaled content abuse took effect in March 2024, alongside that month's core update. It covers pages made in bulk to manipulate rankings, and it takes no interest in how they were made: a template with a token swapped, a writer paid by the page, a language model. Thirty-eight pages that differ by a city name are what it describes.
The AI answers arrive at the same place from the other direction. Asked who does AC repair in Frisco, an engine quotes a page that says something specific about Frisco, and twenty pages carrying one sentence about twenty towns give the AI answer nothing to lift.
What goes on a city page worth writing
The test is whether a competitor could put their own name at the top of the page and publish it unchanged. If they could, the page says nothing about the city.
- The technicians who cover it, by name, and the shop they drive from.
- The drive time, so the response promise on the page is one you can keep.
- The housing stock you know: the 1970s ranches on the east side with the original ductwork, the 2015 build-out where every house got the same builder-grade air handler.
- Jobs you did there this year, with the photos from those jobs.
- The utility that serves the city and its current rebate list, dated.
- The permit office and what pulling a permit there takes.
- Reviews from customers in that city, quoted, with the neighborhood in them.
That material comes from the dispatcher and the senior technician, and it takes about half an hour a city to get on paper.
Start with five cities, one page each
Write the five cities the trucks go to most. Add the sixth when you have something true to say about it. A shop that serves 22 towns and has honest material for seven should publish seven, and let the service pages and the Business Profile service areas cover the other 15.
One page per city, and none for a zip code, a neighborhood, or a town the trucks do not actually reach.
Where the pages live and what points at them
Put them under one path, /service-area/frisco-tx, linked from the AC repair and replacement pages. The service areas listed on the Business Profile should match the set of pages; when the two drift apart, the profile claims a town the website has never heard of.
Each city page has the same first paragraph job as a service page: the diagnostic fee, the range repairs land in, and how soon a truck gets there from your shop. Then the local material, then the phone number again.
A city page does not move the map pack
The three businesses in the map are picked mostly on how close they are to the person searching, and a page does not move a truck. A Plano shop writing about Frisco still sits below the Frisco businesses in that map, and no amount of writing fixes it.
What the pages catch is the organic list under the map, the homeowner who scrolls, and the AI answer that names a contractor. In a metro where the trucks genuinely cover eight towns, seven of those towns have nothing on your site until somebody sits down and writes them, and that is the part of SEO that takes the longest.