DID BUILT/Portfolio/The Locations Engine

Programmatic SEO · Data Engineering

2,643 Pages. One Data Model.

A programmatic locations hierarchy covering 28,706 square miles of Illinois and Indiana — 60 counties and 2,583 communities, and every page starts from that place's real numbers.

Type
Programmatic SEO system
Industry
Local services · regional coverage
Services Applied
Data modeling · SEO · Front end · Structured data
Stack
Next.js 15 · U.S. Census data · JSON data model
Status
Built & staged · 2026
Live Site
detailedindesign.com/locations →
Locations engine hierarchy

The Challenge.

Ranking for local search across two states usually means a choice between thin, duplicated "city page" spam and hand-writing thousands of pages nobody can maintain. We needed real coverage — from Watseka along US-24 and I-65 to Indianapolis — without a single line of boilerplate content.

What We Built.

One data model, assembled from official U.S. Census sources — Gazetteer 2025, ACS 2023, and County Business Patterns 2022 — that generates a full state → county → community hierarchy. Every page is unique because every place's numbers are: population, land area, business patterns, commute data.

Census-Grounded Content

Every community page is generated from that place's real Gazetteer, ACS, and CBP figures — no filler paragraphs.

Three-Level Hierarchy

State → 60 counties → 2,583 cities, towns, townships, and districts, each with its own routed page.

AI-Crawler Ready

A dedicated llms-locations.txt index lists every county and community URL for AI search engines.

Reproducible Pipeline

Regenerating for new counties, states, or data vintages is a data update, not a content project.

The Stack.

Next.js 15 Dynamic RoutesU.S. Census GazetteerACS 2023CBP 2022JSON Data ModelSchema.orgllms.txt

The Outcome.

2,643Unique Pages Generated
60Counties · IL & IN
28,706Square Miles Covered

The engine turned regional coverage into a data problem with a one-time solution. This is the same discipline we bring to client builds: if your business needs a thousand pages, we build the system that generates them — mapped, quoted, and measured.

Need Coverage Like This?

Let's Begin.