The standard approach to multi-location SEO is a template with variables for city, address, and phone. It scales beautifully and it produces pages that search engines correctly identify as the same document with substitutions, which is why so few of them rank.
Differentiation has to be substantive, and it does not have to be expensive. Genuinely local elements include the staff at that location, the services that branch actually offers, the neighbourhoods it serves, parking and access details, reviews from that location’s customers, and local landmarks that make the page useful to someone nearby.
A workable ratio is around sixty percent shared template and forty percent location-specific content. Below that threshold the pages start collapsing into each other. Above it, maintenance across forty locations becomes unmanageable, and unmaintained pages decay.
If your location pages differ only by the city name, you have not built forty pages. You have built one page forty times.
Each location also needs its own Google Business Profile, correctly categorised, with reviews responded to locally. The profile and the landing page reinforce each other; a strong page attached to a neglected profile underperforms badly, and the reverse is equally true.
For a client with more than forty sites we replaced a pure template with this structure over two quarters. Organic traffic grew roughly fifteen times, and almost all of it came from location pages that had previously existed but never ranked.
