Background
Steven B. Marks, a member of our premium community, came to the group in November 2024 with a simple but powerful question: Should I create city pages for my client’s local SEO strategy? His client had four physical locations but wanted to target an entire state for one key service. The challenge was clear: without Google Business Profiles (GBPs) for every city, how could they capture that traffic?
The advice given was to build city-specific service pages: highly targeted pages optimized for transactional keywords like “plumbing services in Houston” or “24-hour emergency plumbing services in Houston.” This approach sparked a journey that completely transformed his client’s business.
Strategy Breakdown
1. Transactional Keyword Focus
Rather than chasing broad informational queries (which are increasingly answered by AI Overviews and GPT search), the strategy honed in on transactional intent keywords. These are the searches people make when they’re ready to buy or book, making them far more valuable.
2. Service + City Page Mapping
- Create a hub page for each city: e.g. “Plumbing Services in Houston.”
- Under that hub, build individual service pages: e.g. “24-hour emergency plumbing in Houston,” “pipe repair in Houston,” etc.
- Every service has its own page. No dumping everything onto one catch-all page.
3. Handling Duplicate Content Concerns
Many hesitate to create city/service combinations out of fear of duplication. Steven’s approach avoided issues by:
- Customizing title tags and HTML headers
- Using schema markup to signal exactly what each page covered
- Ensuring each page had unique value signals for Google
4. Indexing Best Practices
Don’t try to index everything at once. Roll pages out gradually, about 10 per week, so you don’t throw up red flags to Google. This slower pace also gives you time to check whether new pages are actually getting indexed. If you see the dreaded “crawled but not indexed” message (Google’s polite way of saying, “I read your page, I just don’t like it”), fix those issues before pushing hundreds more pages live.
5. Scaling with Automation
Creating thousands of service + city pages doesn’t have to mean thousands of hours of manual work. The process can (and should) be automated.
Why Segmenting Matters
When building at scale, resist the temptation to generate full pages in a single GPT or Claude prompt. Doing it in one shot leads to problems:
- Inconsistent word counts
- Variations in tone and style
- Higher risk of hallucinations
Instead, segment each page into structured sections and generate them individually. For example:
- context section
- Why hire us in {location}
- benefits of {service}
- FAQ section
- {on page schema}
- Meta Description
Each section is handled by a different automation node, ensuring consistent structure across all pages.
Example Build
The screenshot provided shows a real automation flow:
- Google Sheets provides the data inputs.
- Router distributes the tasks.
- Each GPT node creates one section of the page.
- Google Docs assembles the final draft.
- The output is pushed back to Sheets for tracking.
Benefits of This Approach
- Scalability: You can generate 1,000+ pages with the same structure, adjusting only the local service and city.
- Consistency: Pages look uniform while still being tailored to each location.
- Efficiency: The process is fast and cost-effective—limited only by your API budget.
With this method, producing hundreds or even millions of pages is possible without sacrificing quality or spending endless hours writing.
Results
- November 2024: Started with just 127 indexed pages.
- April/May 2025: Over 1,122 pages indexed. Phones and calendars flooded with leads.
- January 2025: Client hit 99 booked appointments in one month (not counting phone bookings). Best month ever.
- August 2025: Google Search Console shows 1,200 clicks in 28 days, up from just 600 in April 2023.
- Business Impact: Client had to hire additional attorneys and paralegals to handle demand. Filing totals for 2025 are already surpassing previous years, with months left to go.
- Zero Ad Spend: All growth came from organic traffic.
Why This Worked
- Scalability: Hundreds of city + service combinations covered all the transactional keywords competitors ignored.
- High Intent: Focused traffic meant higher conversions, not just vanity metrics.
- Community Collaboration: The original idea came from sharing openly in the community, which gave Steven the confidence to execute.
Key Lessons
- Don’t lump all services into one generic “Our Services” page.
- Map out every service you want to rank for, then replicate it across every city you want visibility in.
- Transactional keywords are where the money is. Informational queries are often swallowed by AI Overviews.
- Organic traffic can outperform paid ads when structured correctly.
Final Word
What started as a question about whether to create city pages turned into a textbook example of local SEO domination. With no ad spend, Steven’s client now enjoys record-breaking growth, proving that the right content structure can scale a business faster than most people imagine.
If you want to learn how to do this and get support from an active community, consider joining us at AI Ranking Premium.
