What is the best way for a local business site to come up in the SERPs for a town that they are not located in?

[Mike-i]

At our agency, we work with many local small business owners who often want to come up in multiple towns that are near to their business where they do not have a physical address. We explain to them again and again that with the recent changes that Google in particular has made to their algorithms, it is very difficult to come up in the new "blended" organic and Places results in a town that you don't have a physical address in. However, many of these towns are within 2 or 3 miles of the physical location and well within driving distance for potential new clients.  Google, in it's infinite wisdom doesn't seem to account for areas of the country, such as New Jersey, where these limitations can seriously affect a business' bottom line.

What we would like to know is what are other SEOs doing to help their clients come up in neighboring towns that is both organic and white hat?

[EGOL]

Let's say you have a landscaping company who does work in several small towns.  You could make a separate webpage for each town and fill it with amazing photos of the work that they have done (with permission from the featured property owners) in each of the geographic localities.

This would serve not only as a page that might rank in the search engines but it would also be a great way of building credibility in that community.  If website visitors see that the company has done landscaping for the library, medical plaza, and some of the best homes then they will have greater confidence in hiring them.  So you get two benefits from these pages.

Important - be sure that you put the addresses on the site for all of these properties. 

These pages will have substantive content  and tons of BIG juicy photos with extensive captions that describe the plants the mulch - everything about the job.  These types of pages  might rank better than Joe Schmoe landscaper who has a skimpy webpage with yada, yada, yada Belmont landscaping.... yada yada yada landscaping in Belmont.

Make this site a gallery of work that shows that your company is active and doing all types of work for everyone who is anybody everywhere in the whole freekin' county.

[rsanchez]

As you mention, it is very tough (if not impossible) to come up in Google Places for a neighboring town.  I know this for a fact because I am currently working on SEO for a small business here in Texas with about 10 neighboring cities.  The best I have been able to do is get them in top 10 SERP's organic results for neighboring towns.  And Top Google Place and Organic results for their actual town listed in address when searched.

I have had some success by placing neighboring cities in title text and in page content while keeping content flow as natural as possible.  This did work for a few of the company's neighboring cities in organic results.

[KeriMorgret]

I don't do local myself, so I haven't tried this, but I have seen the suggestion of getting testimonials from customers and including the customer's cities next to their names in the testimonial.