If you review location pages, you need to know whether each one helps customers in the place it targets. A page can name a city twenty times and still read as generic. OppAlerts compares it against a taxonomy of 4,117 US cities with populations of 10,000 or more to measure whether the text is about a place or merely mentions one. Non-US coverage is in development without a published release date.
The difference between naming and being about
Consider two paragraphs on the same service page.
We provide commercial cleaning in Boulder. Our Boulder team serves businesses throughout Boulder and the surrounding area. Contact our Boulder office today.
That names a city four times and contains nothing about Boulder. Swap in any other city name and it reads identically, which is the test.
Most of our Boulder work is in the office buildings along Pearl Street and the lab and research space east of Foothills. Lab space has cleaning requirements ordinary office contracts do not cover, and tenants there usually need after-hours access arranged with building management.
That could not be swapped to another city without becoming false. It is about the place.
A similarity comparison against a city taxonomy distinguishes these, because the first has no close city match and the second closely matches Boulder.
What a result says
You select a city and submit the text. The report returns the nearest cities and where your selected city falls.
The useful outcome is disagreement. If you selected Boulder and the report returns Denver, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs ahead of it, the writing reads as regional rather than local. That is a specific, actionable finding about a page that looked fine.
The use this is best for
Templated location pages. A business with thirty service-area pages generated from one template will find they return nearly identical nearest-city lists, because they are the same page with a name substituted.
That is a direct measurement of a problem most teams suspect and cannot demonstrate. Comparing two of the pages takes a minute and settles the argument about whether they are distinct.
The follow-up decision is a business one rather than a writing one: whether you have enough genuine local substance for thirty pages, or whether five real ones would serve better.
The risk this measurement creates
The obvious way to raise a city score is to add local detail, and the measurement cannot tell true detail from invented detail.
A contractor who does not work in a neighborhood should not list it. A business with one location should not imply several. A company that has never served a suburb should not describe familiarity with it.
Writing to the number here does more damage than in any other type of content scoring, because the customer arriving from that page has been misled about where you work and will discover it at the point of enquiry.
Improve the page with useful local details: areas served, conditions affecting the work, applicable requirements and questions customers in that city ask.
What it cannot establish
- It is not a local ranking signal. No search engine is consulted. The comparison is between your text and a stored city position.
- It does not replace what local visibility depends on, which includes a consistent business address, a business profile, and genuine local presence. This measures writing only.
- It does not verify local facts. Nothing checks that a neighborhood is real or that you serve it.
- It handles multi-city pages poorly. A page covering five service areas is about all five, so the result describes the blend rather than confirming one.
When a city page is the wrong idea
If your business has no distinct presence, work or knowledge in a city, a page about that city has nothing true to say and no measurement will fix that.
The honest alternatives are one page describing the region you serve, or fewer city pages covering places where you have real work to describe. Both perform better than a set of near-identical pages, and neither requires inventing anything.
Use the relevance check during review of a genuine service location. Add details that help local customers and reflect the service the business can provide.
See how city relevance is measured, optimizing local service content, or the US Cities taxonomy.