Doorway pages and other SEO mistakes contractors make
A few common website habits work against your Google ranking instead of helping it, and a couple can get your site penalized. Doorway pages, keyword stuffing, pop-ups, and the other mistakes worth knowing about.
Most contractors don’t want to think about SEO. They want the phone to ring. Fair enough.
But a few common website habits work against that, and some of them are things contractors were told would help. Here are the ones worth knowing about, because a couple can get your site penalized by Google, not just ignored.
Doorway pages: the near-duplicate city pages
A contractor wants to show up in more towns, so the site grows a stack of nearly identical pages: Kitchen Remodeling in Walnut Creek, Kitchen Remodeling in San Jose, Kitchen Remodeling in Fremont. Twenty of them, each a copy of the last with the city name swapped in.
That’s a doorway page, and it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. Google names doorway pages in its spam policies. It’s good at spotting twenty pages that are really one page, and the result isn’t higher rankings. It’s the risk of a penalty that drags down your whole site. It’s also confusing for the homeowner who clicks two of them and realizes they’re the same page.
The distinction that matters: real service-area pages are good. If you actually work in Walnut Creek and build a page with real projects you finished there, real photos, and a real description of that market, that page earns its place. The problem isn’t having location pages. It’s having thin, duplicate ones with nothing unique but the town name.
The test is simple. If the only thing that changes between two pages is the city, you have a doorway page. If each page would still be useful with the SEO stripped out, you have a real page. A handful of real location pages beats twenty hollow ones.
Keyword stuffing
The old trick was to take the phrase you wanted to rank for and cram it onto the page as many times as possible. So a paragraph at the bottom reads: “As a Walnut Creek kitchen remodeler, our Walnut Creek kitchen remodeling team handles kitchen remodels for Walnut Creek homeowners searching for kitchen remodeling in Walnut Creek.”
It reads like a robot wrote it, because it was written for one. Google hasn’t rewarded this in years. It’s called keyword stuffing and it’s named in the spam policies right next to doorway pages. At best it does nothing. At worst it’s a spam signal that holds the page back.
Google stopped counting raw repetitions a long time ago. It works out what a page is about from plain language, so the tenth mention of a phrase tells it nothing the first didn’t. And a homeowner who lands on that paragraph can tell it was written to game a search engine, which makes you look less trustworthy right when you’re trying to earn a call.
The fix: write for the person. Say what you do, where you work, and what a project looks like. Mention the city because it’s true, not to hit a quota. A page that reads naturally already has the words Google needs.
Pop-ups that block the page on mobile
The full-screen overlay that drops the second someone lands, Sign up for 10% off, isn’t just annoying. On mobile, Google penalizes it. They call it an “intrusive interstitial,” and a site that covers its own content with one can rank lower for it.
If you want to offer something, put it on the page where a visitor can get to it when they’re ready. Don’t make them dismiss a wall to read your homepage.
A phone number that changes from page to page
Quiet and very common. Your business name, address, and phone number should be identical everywhere: every footer, your contact page, your Google Business Profile.
When they don’t match, an old number in the footer, a slightly different business name on the contact page, a suite number in one place and not another, Google loses confidence that it knows which business you are. For local search, where you’re competing for the map results in your town, that confidence is exactly what you’re trying to build. Pick one version and make everything match it.
A site that loads slowly
Google measures how fast your pages load and uses it as a ranking factor.
The most common cause on a contractor site is images. A photo straight off a phone can be six or eight megabytes. Put ten on a page and the site crawls, especially for a homeowner on cell service. Properly sized, compressed images often cut a page’s weight by 80 percent with no visible loss. It’s the single biggest speed fix on most contractor sites.
What these have in common
None of these are really “SEO tricks.” Good SEO and a good website turn out to be the same thing: pages that are useful, load fast, work on a phone, and tell the truth about your business.
Google spends enormous effort trying to rank exactly that kind of site. The shortcuts are effort spent fighting it. Build the site a homeowner would want and you’ve built the site Google wants to rank.
Common questions
What is a doorway page?
A page created mainly to rank for a search and pass the visitor along, rather than to be useful on its own. The classic version is a stack of near-identical pages, one per town, that differ only by the city name.
Are doorway pages against Google’s guidelines?
Yes. They’re listed in Google’s spam policies, and the penalty can drag down your whole site, not just the thin pages.
Are service-area pages the same as doorway pages?
No. A real location page, with actual projects, real photos, and a real description of that market, helps you. It only becomes a doorway page when it’s thin and duplicated. If the only thing that changes between two pages is the city, it’s a doorway page.