For me as a SEO Company we believe that GEO targeting keywords may not be the most important, but they help you a lot to built your local market.
Most people as long as we have researched like to put an specific area for the service they look for and if you optimize your keywords with that geo target you will have plus points over others without them.
Also geo targeting helps google to understand where is your business based and when people that may not be using the geo word on their search query but are logged in on google and it knows where they live it will pull the information based on their target. Also is good to add that an extra word on your keyword is not much if you want to optimize for Web design and you put Web design GeoTarget it still takes just the Web Design in your keyword as an other keyword because is broken down by words. google matches words and phrases on your website.