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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?

As usual with most discussion regarding sitemap, you will see 99% of people recommending them provide not concrete, fact based reason as to any actual benefit it provides.

• It provides no SEO advantage

• The reason that it's useful to users is like saying my primary navigation system and search function is too difficult to use.

• If you have a large website with lots of deep, frequently changing content, Google will recognize this and increase the crawl frequency and depth.

Sitemaps in my opinion or for the "tin foil hat" crowd.

But.. conversely, they don't hurt either.  If you have a plugin or script that automatically runs over and over to update it for you, then one could legitimately say "Why not?"

There are some obscure reasons one might use - like adding a gazillion new pages to an otherwise small website and wanting to get them indexed sooner or later.  But that's really the only one I can think of.