Unsolved Are my local pages watering down my website?

[blitzna101]

We operate in multiple cities, and for a number of years, have (mostly successfully) targeted each city with its own landing page. But lately Im seeing these pages drop in rankings,

If I ignored SEO tactics, and designed the site based on what I think would be most useful/helpful to people viewing the website, I would not have any location landing pages. I would have one strong page (eg, probably the home page), that says "and we operate in the following locations..." and then list them off.

The thing is, I dont really think these location specific landing pages have ever offered any real value to someone searching, other than just making it clear that we operate in their area (which doesn't need a landing page to make that clear).

They're basically variations of each other, key word adjusted for the location - done for the purpose of ranking locally. I mean, that sounds like spam.

But all the research says that I need landing pages for each location.

My question:

What would happen if I built one new page, and listed all the locations clearly on that page, and then 301 redirect the existing location landing pages to the new, single page.

Would I fall of the cliff?

[blitzna101]

@miriamellis my other concern with the way we're currently doing things, is that it's hard to amass reviews when we have multiple GMB listings.

Because our business is centrally organised, there is no real benefit to anyone reading a location specific review.

We're not like a pizza shop, where there's a myriad of factors specific to the location that could effect someones experience (eg, hard to get to, poor parking, oven burns the pizza, rude staff etc).

In our case, clients are basically dealing with the main location, but the equipment is dispatched locally.

[blitzna101]

@miriamellis For context, we do equipment rentals.

Pre-Covid, 90% of the time, we would either personally deliver, or ship the products to clients, but, they did have a option to collect from the location.

Post-Covid, with the exception of our main location, we now ship out or deliver 100%.

[MiriamEllis]

@blitzna101 Important question you are asking here. May I ask, do you have physical locations in each of the cities for which you've built a landing page and are you directly serving customers (face to face/socially distanced) or is your business model virtual, with no physical locations and no in-person customer service?