How can I rank a national site for local terms

[MotoringSEO]

Hi All

I have a website that covers all parts of the UK and I wish to be found for terms such as "car for sale London" "car for sale Manchester" and so on.

In the past I have created separate landing pages for each town and city but with the quality score of a page becoming more of a ranking factor it is hard to make 300 + town pages interesting and useful.

Is it best practice to do what I am doing and improve the quality of each of the pages or would I be better off removing the old pages and using some other technique to rank for the local searches?

Thanks for your help

[GeorgeDavis]

Ask yourself if you really think that multiple city pages are different enough in nature and content to bother.  Are you legitimately offering those services in those cities or are you just being greedy with traffic?

If you really think it makes sense, I would start by building out the top 5-10 term+city variations and spending a LOT of time on each one making it truly different from the others.  Claim and optimize your Google maps listing in each city, build up content relevant to that city alone, build links from local sources like Yelp or other websites that will portray a strong local connection.

I do not recommend building out 300+ term+city pages.  Start with 5 and see if it really makes sense.

Two articles I recommend you read in full :

• Ranking for Keyword + Cityname in Multiple Geographies
• Local Search Ranking Factors