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Hi Kaitlin! The radius from which Google draws local and localized organic results is really dependent on competition. There won't be a single answer to your question, because it's going to be different in each case. For example, if you are located in a very rural area with few options, Google will reach out beyond the borders of your town to adjacent towns to return results to make up a full set of results. In some cases like this, there won't even be a 3 pack, but solely organic results. When you are dealing with a large city, you are much less likely to see this outreaching behavior on Google's part, because they will have plenty of results right near the user within the city. The only exception to this would be if the business is offering something very unusual and there are few or no competitors inside the city. For a Service Area Business, the rule of thumb is to go for local pack rankings for their city of location and organic rankings for their service cities. It's rare for a service area business to rank in the local pack for any city where they lack a physical location, unless, again, they are offering something very rare. Doing research on Maps will help you determine the general radius from which Google is drawing results for a particular query, but it's extremely important to remember the user-as-centroid phenomenon, especially when dealing with cities. Google will show different results to users at one end of the city than to those at the other end of it. Educating clients about the fact that there are no static rankings is vital these days Hope this helps!

Those pages will need to be recreated and then have a 301 redirect placed on them directing all existing authority to be passed onto the newly created city targeted pages. I suggest pulling the data before the redesign that shows how much traffic was being sent to those pages that were killed and showing this to your client. Doing this should help them see that whoever suggested killing those pages in the redesign shouldn't be making decisions. Once you've 301'd the old pages, that are showing 404's, to the new city targeted pages go into Webmaster Tools and submit them to be indexed/crawled right away.

Hi Kaitlin, Consider this perspective regarding your duplicate content, especially seeing as your content and keywords seem to be geo-targeted to different areas. For this example, let's use a keyword like 'air conditioning repair Houston' Let's say that you've written the best 1000+ word page on the internet about the keyword 'air conditioning repairs Houston' and Google have ranked that article/page in the top 3 results. They ranked it because it was highly informative and well written. Now let's say you just swapped the word 'Houston' to 'California'. Would that article technically still be the best information on the internet about 'air conditioning repairs California'? Well, unless someone has written one better in California, I believe it would be. All Google cares about is showing the best information in relation to the search query. They couldn't care less if it's duplicate. That's a problem for site owners to bicker over if someone else is using someone's content. As far as Google is concerned, that article is still the best article on the internet about 'air conditioning repairs California', which is why they'll allow it to rank first. They don't care that there's another 99.9% similar article about 'air conditioning repairs Houston', as that's a different keyword, and the searcher is searching for different information. Even as an internet user yourself, do you care that the amazing information you're reading is available in another state? As long as your query is answered with the best information possible then who would really care. All of the top high authority news and entertainment sites circulate duplicate content all day long. The duplicate content penalty is for pages on your domain only. If you have multiple pages under a single domain that have duplicate content, that's where the misunderstood duplicate content penalty applies. It doesn't apply if you use the same content on a different domain. You might not rank as well using duplicate content on a different domain, but you definitely won't get penalised for it. I've tried and tested duplicate sites a few times, exact same words, images, themes etc. Although the niches weren't that strong, the complete duplicate site was soon ranking in 1st place for all of the same keywords as the original duplicate site, just in a different area. That's because the content answered the searcher's query the best. All that changed was the location, but Google still considered it to be the best content on the net about that particular keyword. Here's another example, let's say you published a great article 10 days ago about a generic keyword. Let's assume my site is a DA60+ and PR5 and your site is a DA10 and PR-N/A. And now I publish the same article on my site, who do you think will rank better. In the worst case scenario, I would rank second, but more than likely I would rank 1st. My point being, that even though it's copied 100%, I'll still rank with it.