Organic SEO for Local Towns

[CsmBill]

This is a fairly common question, but I am going to ask it again. I want to get ranked for many keywords: "hr outsourcing sheboygan", "HR outsourcing duluth", etc., all in my small state.

Doing some random research, there are few if any pages with exact match phrases in the URL, Title, Etc. = No competition) Moreover, Google is not popping google places ads for these terms.

My plan is to create fairly unique pages on my site optimized for each town.  Right now, the pages are at 65% duplicate. I would assume that all of my pages will have some degree of duplication - there are similar elements on every page.

If I run the content through a duplicate content tester, is there a % of unique content that would be fairly safe to avoid the duplicate content slap? Yes, I know it's more complicated than that semantic, heuristic, etc. - just looking for some general guidelines.

[smarties954]

This might work, but could be seen as doorway pages and could be penalized down the road.

After all you are creating pages for the sole purpose of targeting a keyword/area.

If you submit your company address, I guess google will show results in your area or near your area, so if you are competitve, it might not be necessary for you to create pages for each city near you.