Importance of City in Title?

[MrSem]

Anyone doing SEO for a local business ever tried to do an A/B test between city name in title and not in title?

Seems that if you have a Google Places for Business Listing and have correct NAP on your web pages, Google places heavy importance already on that when determining geographic relevance in their algo.

As a business expands, maybe not that far from their original service area but starts to offer services in other nearby cities some of which may be as big of a population as the city the business is located in, it seems to make less and less sense to put city names in the title if not for the basic reason of making the title too long.

But what if your primary area is basically three cities and including them pushed your title to say, 90 characters.  How much does city name in the title tag matter when you are already coming up the local 3-pack map listing on search results for the relevant cities?

[LureCreative]

This is a great question, in doing A/B testing with some of our clients we have generally seen improved rankings for a specific city if we include that city in the meta title of the website page. Since you are targeting 3 cities, I would consider writing unique "city landing pages", for each city and then only mention that one city in the meta title. If you do this, try to make each city landing page as unique and helpful as possible, with unique city data, customer review/testimonials from that city, etc.