So, I haven't looked this up, I thought I'd just ask here.
So if I create a services areas page, with links to landing pages for each county/city that is serviced. And then I create the pages for each area, and leave the content blank but then pursue filling out the content. Is the absence of the content considered duplicate content? Would you get penalized for the essentially blank pages.
If so could you keep the pages but mark them as no-follow so that you are telling google that you want the page but don't consider it something they should index (and penalize you for).
You could put a from on those pages, which I would assume isn't considered "content". Or shouldn't be. and have the form preloaded with the location information for that service area.
The other issue that I see here is with the concept of "core" services. If you are a law firm and you have many lawyers and lines of business. You would then logically want to have each service area / line of business to have its own landing page.
So without complaining about the unique content problem, which I get, you structural want to build all of this out so that acts as a placeholder and exists in non-competitive areas, where despite the uniqueness of your content you are the only person with a given keyphrase. But you don't want to be considered spam.
So I'm not sure what the right answer is. I doesn't seem right not optimize for an adjacent city/service combination just because there is only so many things to say about that service.
The suggestion. "Service description pages" and "City landing pages", Is (I guess) a place where you can start.
Ultimately, I think this is a bias that google is supporting that is wrong. It assumes that an urbanized world is a positive because larger cities, while potentially more competitive because of the larger traffic, are going to have a unfair advantage over business is outlying areas. And non-location sensitive business (anything knowledge related) are going to be penalized for not being in urban areas. Ultimately I think this leads to poor organic search results, because the ability to determine the quality of a small business has nothing to do with its location. I suppose that it helps by allowing local business to be listed at all against stronger competitors, but I think it would be better to use a combination of signals. So that you show as local to the nears n people. So in a city like Seattle you might have an audience of a million, but in city of 50000 that runs into other cities of 50000 with 20 miles the definition of local should change.
I think when you break it down, geographic terms should always be parsed out so that cars seattle doesn't actually look for Seattle, but looks for cars (+ locations withing x miles of seattle) that also have high domain or page authority. I think that would lead to better results and would solve the problem of location based optimization so that we can stop wasting time on it.
It could start with a default service area size, but then calculate a services area based upon result density. So a search for a given business type would automatically return for three states away if the next closest business was 5 states away.
I'm sure some of this is already around, I'm just sharing my thoughts because this is a massively irritating and time consuming issue. But I suppose it just serves to push us further in the direction of content and link building. Equally unnatural pursuits for your average small business. Sometimes I feel like google should reward business that don't create content and somehow work on the less is more principle.
Is the best search result the one from a business paying crazy rents in a large city, or one in an adjacent city that is more affordable but equally qualified and doesn't show because they aren't in city limits.