Local City Pages

[waqid]

Anyone have any input on the tactics being used for a national company trying to target local city pages. For instance, you might be a national printing company and you are trying to compete against local printers in cities by creating a specific page for that city + print keywords.

[MiriamEllis]

You are very welcome, Waqid!

[waqid]

Thank you for your response : []

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Waqid,

For search terms with a local intent, Google is definitely biased towards true local businesses with physical locations in the city of search. National companies often do employ the tactic you mentioned of building landing pages for various cities they would like to rank organically (not in the local pack of results) for. Unfortunately, this is often not handled well and results in national websites with hundreds or thousands of thin or duplicate content pages. Coincidentally, I brought this very issue up here in Q&A, asking for feedback from the community. Here is the thread, which I believe you will find to be highly relevant to your question:

http://moz.com/community/q/a-page-for-every-conceivable-city-in-the-us-seeking-community-feedback

Hope this helps!