Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Our company originally started in one city, now it is in multiple and the city we started in is actually now less important to our business than some of the new cities.

We've of course have Google Places for Business listings for all our cities and are listed in the other prominent directories for each City (Bing Places, Manta, Superpages, etc etc)

We have created once city page for each city in our domain.  All this has improved our Local SERPs for those cities but they pale in comparison to our dominance in the city we started out in.  We did have the first city in our home page title, we took that out.

The obvious problem is from an SEO standpoint your home page is your "strongest" page but how do you make your home page rank top for multiple location intent searches:  "{city} {target keyword}"  ?

The 3-pack is KEY.  For example, for one city we make it into the local 3-pack but we are not in the organic SERPs on page 1 outside of the 3-pack.

As far as I can tell the major factor in 3-pack ranking is of course proximity of business to the user's location or user's location intent.  I would say followed by the natural ranking factors (or at least a large subset of them) that Google uses for its normal organic rankings, followed by Google Places reviews.  You would think the Google places reviews really make a difference, but not as much as you think.

So how do you dominate local searches in different cities when competing against local-only companies?  My only guess is you need to create as much content as possible.  You don't want to make micro sites I think as you lose all the link juice going to your main site.  But how much content can one make that isn't duplicative.  You can describe the same products and services over and over for each city but that's not useful nor wise.  I guess you could do some re-writing.  But other than a different address, phone, and staff members, if your service is identical for each city it doesn't leave a lot of room for useful content creation to improve local search SERPS.

I guess this begs the overall question, can a multi-city company ever dominate local SERPS when the search has a location intent (city name in the search) it there is even just a couple competing local companies doing some SEO work. it seems it is an extreme uphill battle if not next to impossible. (Never say never.)

Thanks for such a lengthy reply.   Much of it I'm not surprised as I sort of assumed it's a time issue combined with DA which benefits both local and national.

To give more specifics.  The business is a B2B service business.  The problem is, the service also has a highly popular associated product.  So I guess in a way I'm lucky as the thing that segregates people looking for product info versus service info is in most cases a location intent.  The product search will never have a location intent.  The service search will sometimes NOT have a location intent.  That is fine with us as we only have a by appointment only location only in a small subset of cities.

I've been testing and testing too.  I've been surprised how little weight Google puts on number of reviews and average review rating. I guess it's because that aspect can be fairly easily 'gamed.' It seems the proximity to user location or intended location and normal organic ranking factors like DA are king.  The former being most important obviously for local 3-pack when you have competitors with similar non-map organic rankings.

We also have our original city name in some of the image alt tags etc on our home page.  Our business location schema is perfect.  I think one factor is some of the other cities have not shown up yet on some of the business directories the original city has - but really, how much weight does Google give Superpages and the like when you virtually never see those domains in the SERPS with a location intent search?

I think the key is time and keep creating good, original content optimized for each city.