Local SEO for service industry - one landing page for every town...in every county...in every state?

[kabledesigns]

Starting a second local based service site. Initially going to target a couple counties and move on from there as the business grows.

The first site of mine I set up a page for each town [service] + [town] + [state] + [zip]. I am afraid this could get out of control though if I don't have unique content on each page. For the last site I simply copied the page and replace the town name in each as well as the picture, picture title, and image name to make it look more unique for users but not necessarily Google. I had pretty good results but I want this next site to be done properly.

Should I only target a few of the major markets to begin with? What about long tail searches for smaller towns that currently bring in a good amount of business? I am concerned about having "too many" long tail pages for each town which would essentially become a listing of every town and county in the state if I was to maintain the pace I want to.

Also I would need a good amount of backlinks to each specific town page url if I wanted to do well in each of those specific markets right? Is this where the fine line between niche term and broad search is? Is there any happy medium?

[EGOL]

In the early 2000's you could grab the GNIS database, make a site like this, toss it up and make a lot of money as long as you had enough links to get it indexed and hold it there.... but by about 2005, sites like this would not stick in the SERPs if they were nothing but....

yada yada yada Bugtussle, West Virginia yada yada yada yada yada yada

yada yada yada Burgoo, West Virginia yada yada yada yada yada yada

Today, you need unique and substantive content on every page of the site to have it stick in the SERPs (assuming that you have enough pagerank to get it indexed and respidered on a regular basis).

I've thought about making sites like this but didn't have a $X00,000 budget to scratch the surface of the content requirement.

[DarinPirkey]

Local SEO like this is tough.  In general, I like to add local information about the city when building out the content for local sites with multiple cities.  I work with a carpet cleaning company who wants to rank for each city in three counties.  We had to create roughly 20 unique content pages and one of the ways we added new, relevant content is to add local city data to the page.  We used wikipedia to search for the county and got the city data for all the cities in that county.  It gives 2010 census data and what year the city was founded.  We then found the cities homepage and set up google alerts for information regarding each particular city (make sure you set it up for once a day or your inbox will be crazy).  We then created blog posts with the city being the category and linked back to the page with the carpet cleaning targeted for that particular city.  It seems to have worked well but I'm sure there are other ways to do it too.

Hope this helps!