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Miriam,

I'm usually wary of people plugging their own content, but this is totally relevant and awesome. Exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks.

Thanks Paul and everyone else for your excellent answers.

I think the general consensus for my strategy will include relevant city pages (maybe the top ten in each radius), that includes music venues, karaoke bars, open mic cafes and the like. Then, we'll have blog entries about relevant events in our service areas. It's a lot of work, but it's added value for our students and prospectives, so I think it's worth the fuss.

Thanks, William.

Do you have any advice on how to split up location content? Should I designate one page for each place, and then infuse that with unique content, or should I try to fit it all into one place?

The more I think about this, the more questions come to light. For instance: would making a little directory of, say, local open mic nights, karaoke bars, and venues help? Would including a bunch of outbound links to these places hinder us by giving away link juice?

My URL is: http://www.mollysmusic.org for the record.I run a music school that serves in-home lessons to a whole slew of cities. Since I only have 3 brick-and-mortar locations, I can't make google local profiles for all the cities served, but I want to get seen by those people searching in their own cities. Right now, our biggest competitor, takelessons.com, is top ranked for every single city you can think of, because they have individual web pages for every city served. Their content is repetitive and scrapey, and to me, that says "doorway page" which supposedly can get you de-indexed. I'm reluctant to do that because I'm afraid I'll get banned, but I have to compete. I also want a strategy that can scale when we move into new areas. Is there something that makes TakeLessons's content NOT a doorway page? What's the best practice for getting ranked in multiple individual cities if you run a service? Thanks in advance.