Local SEO win to share. We had 40 city landing pages, all basically the same service with the city name swapped. Classic doorway-page setup, and the audit rightly flagged them as near-duplicate. Google only ever ranked two or three.
After reading Marco's advice in the SEO Help section, I bit the bullet: consolidated 40 pages down to 12. For each survivor I added real local content — neighborhoods served, an actual local case study, city-specific FAQs, local business schema with the correct service area, and testimonials from clients in that city. 301'd the cut pages to the nearest relevant survivor.
Result: total organic traffic went up despite having 28 fewer pages, and now 9 of the 12 rank on page one instead of 3 of 40. Fewer, genuinely-local pages beat a pile of templated thin ones. Turns out Google would rather have 12 real pages than 40 spun ones. Who knew.
Thanks Marco — that 'swap the city name and see if it's still true' test was the wake-up call.