Building separate pages for local searches

[SEODinosaur]

I found one of our competitors developed URLs for every state in the US. They linked all these sites back to their site and they are ranking very high for each of these states.

Here are 2 examples

http://metalbuildingsmississippi.com/ #1 for "metal buildins mississippi"

http://metalbuildingsoklahoma.com/ #3 for "metal buildings oklahoma"

these pages don't even have a PR.

Would you recommend doing the same with my site, writing unique content for each URL and building links?

[plata]

Yes, that's a worthwhile strategy.  But don't just duplicate the content on each domain name - make sure there is unique and substantial content on each domain (don't just change the city name and keep the rest of the text the same).  Also, to get the benefits of doing this, don't duplicate content across the minisites and your main site.

[SEODinosaur]

How much influence will the domain have?

Should we use our current site "url.com/oklahoma"

or a new domain "oklahoma.something.com"  or a new domain for each state?

[plata]

For this strategy to work effectively you need to use distinct domain names.

Keyword domains tend to rank well for those keywords, but it will take time to have a measurable effect.  The domains (minisites) will still need incoming links to do well - at minimum submit them to a couple of relevant directories, but the more time you can put into promoting them, the better.

You should probably have localized landing pages on your main domain too, but make sure the content isn't the same as that on the keyword domains.