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Egol is right - pages like this can persist in quieter niches, especially if there are not a huge number of other results to take the thin results' place. I notice that this guy's page for London has a lot more content, probably indicative of the fact that the competition for rankings and business is a lot higher in London than it is in surrounding areas.

Hi, My main advice to you is to not worry about they are doing to rank above you.... I know that might seem counter-intuitve, but at this point it seems that is not really helping you, it is only making you focus on a goal that might not bring you business. As Eric says, 1. Are you sure these are good keywords that bring targeted traffic? If so, take away the idea of forensics, since you do not want to emulate what they are doing, you want to do things that make you stand apart from them... I am sure you have heard someone throw around the word "content" Well so am I.... Content...... Make sure you are providing a user experience on your website that would garner true interest in content that people looking for you, or looking for information around items/services you may provide. Build this content, and build a social circle around it, build relationships and the rankings will come, if they are truly using "Black Hat" tactics they will eventually either get penalized, or you will outrank them due to you will be providing a more genuine user experience with genuine content. Also this more sets you up for the future, as Search Engines might not be the only game in town for long, so making a more well rounded "person-centric" strategy in my opinion is better than worrying about why competitor a or b is beating you for a single term in Google. Hope this helps

By putting your contact details in your 2nd site as a jpeg - therefore not readable - you can overcome the problem.

Hi MagicianUK, Very good question. Linda Buquet did an awesome piece on this topic just a couple of months ago. Suggest you read: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-seo-ranking/849-local-keyword-research-tools-tricks.html Of course, there is not going to be an answer which speaks to every case, but Linda's research is very illuminating. Hope you'll find it helpful!

I've seen similar things happen...what I try to do is one of two things... 1. If I can, I come up with a creative(and natural) way to work both into the title and then work both variations naturally into the content. I don't tend to repeat a string of singulars and plurals in the url. I just pick whichever is the better traffic keyword. 2. If I cant come up with a way to work the singular and plural into the title, I pick whichever is the better of the two options(let's say the singular) and use that one in the title. Then I'll make sure to work the secondary term(the plural) into the content of the page. I'll try to incorporate it into an or tag too if it makes sense. I've seen people saying that Google treated the singular and the plural versions of search terms the same...but I've seen evidence to the contrary in my experience.