If you write local service pages, you need each page to address the place and the customers it claims to serve. Compare a location page against the city it targets and the report tells you whether the writing is about the place or merely mentions it. The taxonomy covers 4,117 US cities with populations of 10,000 or more. Non-US coverage is in development without a published release date.
The test before you run anything
Read your location page and substitute a different city name throughout. If it still reads correctly, the page is not about the city, and no measurement is needed to tell you that.
Most templated location pages fail this test. The measurement matters for the ones that pass it by a little, and for comparing pages at scale.
Running the check
Select the city as the target category and submit the page text. The report returns the nearest cities by meaning and where your selected city falls.
The useful outcome is disagreement. If you selected Tacoma and the report returns Seattle, Federal Way and Olympia ahead of it, the page reads as regional rather than local. That is specific and actionable on a page that looked fine.
The submission limit is 8,192 bytes, so a long page is checked in sections.
What to add, and what not to
The obvious way to raise the result is to add local detail, and this is where the exercise goes wrong.
Only add what is true of your business. 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.
The measurement cannot distinguish real local knowledge from invented local knowledge. Both move the number. The difference appears later, when a customer arrives from that page expecting service you do not provide.
Legitimate additions are the ones that also make the page useful:
- The areas you serve, named because you serve them.
- Conditions specific to the place that affect the work: building stock, climate, access, parking, typical property age.
- Local requirements that really apply: permits, regulations, inspection regimes.
- The questions customers in that city ask, which differ from the generic version more than people expect.
A worked contrast
Two versions of the same paragraph on a roofing page.
We install and repair roofs in Tacoma. Our Tacoma crews work with homeowners and businesses across Tacoma and nearby communities.
Three mentions, no content. Swap the city and nothing breaks.
Much of our Tacoma work is on the pre-1940 housing stock in the North End, where the original cedar shake is often under two later layers. The city requires a permit for a tear-off at that depth, and the inspection has to be scheduled before the new underlayment goes down.
That could not be swapped to another city without becoming false. It also tells a real prospect something they needed to know, which is why local relevance and usefulness go together.
Comparing pages at scale
If you maintain many location pages, check two or three against their own cities. Near-identical nearest-city lists across pages mean they are one page with names substituted.
The decision that follows is commercial rather than editorial: either you have enough genuine local substance for thirty pages, or five real ones would serve better. Rewriting thirty templated pages into thirty slightly varied templated pages is the outcome to avoid.
What the result does not establish
It is not a local ranking signal, since no search engine is consulted. It does not replace what local visibility depends on, including a consistent business address, a business profile and genuine local presence. And it does not verify that anything you wrote about the city is true.
Where a city page has nothing true to say because the business has no work there, no editing fixes it. What city relevance can establish covers that decision.
Before publishing a location page, check its local relevance against the service you provide. Add details that help customers assess that service and that the business can substantiate.
See the US Cities taxonomy, what city relevance can establish, or how it is measured.