The SEO Mistake I Make on Purpose

I don’t have location pages on this website.

There is no page targeting “web developer Northampton”, another for “WordPress developer Leicester” and a third for whichever town is far enough away to sound ambitious but still close enough that I would actually drive there.

From a local SEO point of view, that is a mistake.

It is also entirely deliberate.

I know location pages work. I recommend them. I have built them for businesses and I will almost certainly build more of them. If you provide a service within a defined area and want more local enquiries, you should probably have them.

I just don’t want them here.

That sounds contradictory, especially from someone who spends a reasonable amount of his working life telling businesses how to make themselves easier to find. It would be very easy to dress the decision up as some principled objection to local SEO, doorway pages or content created for search engines.

But that would be bollocks.

Good location pages are useful. The tactic is sound. I am simply choosing not to use it because I don’t want the outcome badly enough.

Location pages are not the problem

Location pages have acquired a slightly grubby reputation because so many of them are terrible.

We have all seen the formula. Duplicate a service page, replace the town name, change one sentence about the local area and publish it thirty times. Northampton gets a mention of the shoe industry. Kettering gets Wicksteed Park. Milton Keynes gets a roundabout joke written by someone who has never been there.

That is not a location strategy. It is a mail merge with delusions of grandeur.

Done properly, a location page gives someone a page that matches what they are actually looking for. It explains where the business works, which services are available there, what experience it has in the area and why somebody local should trust it. It can include relevant projects, testimonials, travel areas, response times and details that genuinely change from one location to another.

It also gives Google a much clearer understanding of the places a business serves.

For a local service business, that matters. A general service page may rank around the business’s immediate location, but it is often asking too much of one page to compete across every nearby town and city. Proper location pages create clearer relevance and give each area a sensible place to land.

So this is not a post advising people to remove their location pages. It is not even a warning against creating them.

If local enquiries are important to your business, build them. Just make them useful enough that changing the town name is not the only thing separating one from another.

I know what I am leaving on the table

I could create location pages for the places around me. The opportunity is not especially difficult to see.

I could build pages around web development, WordPress development, technical SEO and digital strategy. I could connect each service to Kettering, Northampton, Leicester, Bedford, Milton Keynes and a growing circle of places I can reach without needing to pack sandwiches.

Those pages would probably increase my local visibility. They could bring more commercially focused traffic into the site. They might generate enquiries from people who want exactly the services I provide and would prefer to work with somebody nearby.

That would be a perfectly sensible thing to do.

If this website existed primarily to generate leads, I would do it.

But it doesn’t.

This website has gradually become something else. It is less of a conventional portfolio and more of a public brain dump. It is where I work through ideas, document things I have tested, question bits of accepted wisdom and occasionally admit that something I was certain about was not quite as certain as I thought.

Some posts are useful. Some are probably only useful to me. A few begin with a clear point and wander off while I try to discover whether I actually believe it.

I like that.

It feels more representative of how I work than a polished portfolio full of final outcomes and carefully trimmed case studies. Real work is rarely that tidy. The interesting part is often the uncertainty, the trade-off and the decision made before the nice screenshot existed.

Location pages would not ruin that overnight. Six new pages are not going to kick the door in and turn the whole site into Checkatrade. But they would start pulling it in a different direction.

They would make the site more deliberately commercial. They would create a reason to think about local conversion paths, supporting service pages, regional proof and whether I had covered enough nearby towns. Once that system existed, the obvious SEO advice would be to expand it.

That is how a personal website slowly becomes a lead-generation website with a blog attached.

There is nothing wrong with that website. I just don’t want to build it yet.

SEO is a collection of levers

One of the more annoying habits in SEO is treating every available tactic as an obligation.

If a keyword exists, create a page. If a competitor has a page, create a better one. If an audit tool finds an opportunity, add it to the roadmap. Keep going until the website has pulled every lever, filled every gap and become an enormous monument to never saying, “That is enough.”

That is not strategy. It is completionism with a monthly report.

SEO gives you a collection of levers. Location pages are one of them. Internal linking, structured data, digital PR, topical coverage and technical improvements are others. Each can produce a different result, and each demands something from the website in return.

The job is not to pull every lever simply because you know where it is.

The job is to decide what you want to happen, understand which levers are likely to make it happen and then choose whether the result is worth the cost.

On a client site, that decision is usually tied to a commercial objective. More qualified enquiries. More sales. Better visibility for a profitable service. The right SEO recommendation is the one that helps achieve that objective, not the one that earns the highest score in an audit tool.

The same applies to my own site, except I get to choose a less commercial objective.

Right now, I want this website to build a body of work that represents how I think. I want someone reading it to understand my judgement, not simply discover that I can create a landing page for every town in the East Midlands.

It can still generate enquiries. It can still rank locally. It can still act as proof that I know what I am doing. Those things are useful, but they are not the only measure of whether the site is working.

I am not trying to extract the maximum possible number of leads from it.

That changes which levers are worth pulling.

Why call it a mistake?

Because calling it “strategic restraint” makes the whole thing sound far more impressive than it is.

According to the conventional local SEO playbook, leaving relevant locations uncovered is a mistake. There is available demand that I am choosing not to target. There are commercially useful pages I could create and have not created. There are probably enquiries I will never receive because the right page does not exist.

That is a real cost.

Pretending otherwise would weaken the point. A decision does not stop being a trade-off simply because I made it deliberately. Strategy is not a magic word that turns every omission into wisdom.

I make the mistake on purpose because I understand what it will cost and I prefer the alternative.

That is different from forgetting to create the pages, dismissing them because I cannot be bothered or claiming they do not work because I do not have them. I know exactly why I would build them. I also know what they would begin to change.

For now, I would rather leave some local traffic on the table than reshape the site around capturing it.

I can pull the lever later

None of this needs to become a permanent principle.

If I decide that I want this website to generate more local work, location pages will be one of the first things I reconsider. I can build them properly, support them with relevant evidence and connect them to a clearer service journey. The opportunity does not disappear because I have chosen not to chase it today.

That matters because strategy is partly about timing.

A good tactic used at the wrong time can distract from the thing you are actually trying to build. A tactic can be valid, proven and completely unsuited to the current objective. Knowing that does not make the tactic bad. It means the objective gets to lead.

For a business that needs more local enquiries, the answer is simple: create the location pages.

For this website, right now, the answer is also simple: don’t.

I am leaving an SEO opportunity on the table. I know it is there. I know how to use it and I have a reasonable idea of what would happen if I did.

I am just choosing not to reach for it yet.

That is the mistake.

And for the website I actually want, it is the right one to make.