Local Listings vs. Spreading Too Thin

[CleanEdisonInc]

Hello SEO Community,

I'm trying to find the right balance between adapting to Googles move towards local listings and not spreading out my site too thin.

We provide our services nationally and currently have local city listings (i.e. http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/city/IL-Chicago) but these do not show up in the SERPs for individual products + city (i.e. Building Analyst Chicago)

So I could make individual pages for each product in each city, but that would exponentially increase the number of URLs on the site and probably inundate me with duplicate content.

Is there a better way I could take advantage of local listings without creating all the duplicate content and other problems that would arise with individual URLs?

Thanks

[KarlBantleman]

I'd create a page for the top cities that you feel are important however don't just create pages just to target local search terms. If each course in each city is slightly different and you can tailor your content to match each city then it would be worth doing.

What I'd do is concentrate on building to the generics versions of the keyword and you should see the localised versions appearing in the SERPS.

[DarinPirkey]

Here is a great article from Miriam Ellis who is one of the moderators on SEOmoz

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403

It will explain a lot of the strategies that Karl has mentioned here in depth.

Good response Karl.