To use or not to use: Keywords with locations

[BBEXNinja]

Hello there. I work for a marketing agency that manages SEO campaigns for a variety of small businesses in South Florida. Let's say we have a client that sells cheap shoes at their store location. Obviously, we want to show up in Google rankings for search terms like "cheap shoes south florida" or "cheap shoes miami."

Now, my question is, when optimizing a website's content for various keywords, is it really necessary to include keywords with the location (which are often awkward for both reading and writing purposes)?

Ideally, I'd prefer to have text that always reads as naturally as possible. Text like this is just an eyesore:

Welcome to ExampleSite.com, home of the best cheap shoes Florida. We offer all kinds of cheap shoes Boca Raton. Your whole family doesn't have enough fingers and toes to count how many cheap shoes West Palm Beach we have in stock! Contact us to ask about our cheap shoes Miami discounts today! Olé!"

What say you? Is there a way to work around ugly SEO text like this while still effectively ranking for GEO terms? Thanks!

[irvingw]

Well "cheap shoes florida" is not correct grammatically, so right off the bat that should be "cheap shoes in florida"

Your sentence above is spammy and painful to the reader and targets four different regions on one page. If you want to go the region route, then each page should target a different area. Especially if the main keyword is medium or high competition, you'll need targeted dedicated landing pages with unique content in order to rank for state long tail searches.

This takes care of your spammy copy, because you're only including one state in the content, and it also really needs to be under optimized and only a few times in the copy - don't overdo it. Definitely needs to be in the title tag and H1 tag.