Title Tag Targeting Two Geographic Modifiers

[blueroom]

How would you suggest writing a homepage title tag which needs to target both state and city?

We are targeting these two phrases:

Lincoln personal injury lawyer
Nebraska personal injury lawyer

Any thoughts on how you'd write the title tag? I know targeting Nebraska will be challenging but it's what the higher ups want to do.

Would you suggest: Lincoln Nebraska Personal Injury Lawyer  ?

[AdoptionHelp]

"Lincoln Nebraska Personal Injury Lawyer" would work. Another possibility is to use "Nebraska Personal Injury Lawyer" for your home page, and then "Lincoln Personal Injury Lawyer" on an office locations page.

[LuminInteractive]

I would personally go with "Personal Injury Lawyer Lincoln NE". Google is smart enough to associate NE with Nebraska in this context (As can be seen by highlighting in the serps) and it's shorter.

[blueroom]

Hypothetically speaking, if keyword research suggested that Lincoln personal injury lawyer and Nebraska personal injury lawyer got more searches than personal injury lawyer Lincoln, would you still write the title in the same order? personal injury lawyer + geographic modifier

[LuminInteractive]

Good question. I think you can go either way.

Assuming that I was targeting all of Nebraska, not just Lincoln, I would:

Create a page targeting Nebraska and create sub-pages targeting the major cities in Nebraska.

For example:

Personal Injury Lawyer & Attorney Nebraska

Sub page: Personal Injury Lawyer & Attorney Omaha NE

Sub page 2: Personal Injury Lawyer & Attorney Lincoln NE

I would then link to each page with geo-specific anchor text. Once I got the main page high on the first page, I would try to rank the sub-pages for "Nebraska" as well to get an indented listing and take up more of the SERPS.

Another benefit of structuring the site this way is that if you had locations in each city, it would be very good for Google Places.

However, I would only follow this page/subpage strategy if I was confident in my link building strategy, i.e. that I could get enough geo-specific links for each sub-page. Otherwise, you might be walking into a Panda-type scenario where you have what Google perceives as extraneous, useless pages.