PLUGIN 1: After looking into this site further, I noticed I have a plugin that has created a section in the sidebar called “Products”. Within the “Products” section is a category labeled “Locations”. This is creating the /locations/part of the URL. There are several pages like the example www.example/locations/city-state. This is for a filter based search on the website to see products, and locations some of the products are at.
PLUGIN 2: There is another plugin that was installed for a Google maps locations page. This is the www.example.com/locations/ page I mentioned in my original question. When you visit this page you can see a map with several location map markers on it. You can also see a specific location on the map by using a state dropdown option.
These two plugins are completely separate and serve different purposes (PLUGIN 1 is for products and locations of each product, and the PLUGIN 2 is only to show store locations).
With that being discovered, I don’t think I will be able to use /locations/ as a parent page even though that is an actual page. And I won’t be able to have the store location URLs as I originally wanted….www.example.com/locations/city, www.example.com/locations/city2, www.example.com/locations/city3.
I hope that all makes sense. Fyi….I took over this website a couple months ago and was not aware with how some of the customizations were set up.
Whoever setup the /locations/ store locator map page, should have used a different path such as /our-locations/ for example.