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Hi Luke, This is a common practice for service area businesses (like plumbers, electricians, carpet cleaners, etc.) who are located in one city, but serve clients within a larger radius beyond their location city limits. It sounds like what you are describing is a bit different - a client to whom customer come from a variety of cities. I do not believe Google would have any problem with what you are doing, provided that you follow what you've planned to do in making the content for these city pages unique. I think a nice thing to do on these pages would be to add some testimonials from customers who come to the business from these other locations. Now, whether these pages will greatly impact your client's ability to rank well for the service+city keywords is up in the air. It really depends on the competitiveness of the industry and locale. If the client is in a situation of modest competition, these new pages could achieve some new visibility and drive some new, qualified traffic, but if the client is in a dog-eat-dog vertical, the new pages may not be able to be of big help. It's really one of those 'it depends' situations. Bottom line, though, it is not my experience that Google views such content as manipulative in intent if the content has a real reason for existing.

The only caveat is this: SEMrush scrapes the top 20 results. It does not, however, scrape a 10-result page 1 and a 10-result page 2. It scrapes a 20-result page 1. If you look at 10-result SERPs and 20-result SERPs, you'll see that they're slightly different. It's much more likely that you'll see multiple results from the same domain on a 20-result SERP. So be aware that if SEMrush tells you that you own the #2, #3, and #4 spots for a given keyword, that's probably not true on the standard 10-result SERP.

Thanks Oleg and Matt for the really helpful feedback

Thanks Robert and Ryan for your great input on this, Luke

Thanks for your responses everyone. Really helpful and much appreciated, Luke

Thanks EGOL, Brent and Irving. Some good advice there. It's not really traditional Guest Blogging Irving in that content providers get fee instead of a link - and are pointing links in from their external sites, so a little loss of control there, though without any anchor text guidelines and so forth.

Thanks Marie, Irving, EGOL, Andy - excellent advice as ever!

Some great feedback here - firstly, thanks EGOL - I'm focusing 100% on content on a new site. Should be interesting - and that's a good point re: vandalism. I am concerned with the consequences of negative SEO / scrapers, clones, etc., though. Would be so good to be able to cut nasty incoming links in some way (I can but dream...) Love that saying too Donnie! Good points there Marie - yes I get plagued by that stuff too - I'm beginning to wonder whether many of these comments are more about hoping some lunatic will click on the link than about manipulating SEO though. To be totally honest, I wouldn't mind if Google laid down specific rules for linkbuilding. We advise that site owners should only proactively build no more than 10 links/page from relevant sites. The rest should be generated naturally. Something far more specific than we have at the moment. And thanks Arpeggio. A very good point indeed. I agree.

Thanks Donnie and Oleg - good advice there! Couldn't believe how many dodgy sites were hitting this particular site. Around 15% of links (out of not many links - around 300) from dodgy outfits all doing more or less the same kind of stuff.

I will have another go I think

Thanks guys - appreciated.

Thanks for your useful feedback Dan, Anthony and Marisa - much appreciated

I have been in a similar situation myself and it is a judgement call - I always tend to air on the side of caution. How I look at it with a lot of the paid directories is the fact that they aren't purposefully manipulating search doesn't mean they aren't going to be hit at some point and when they are you don't really want to be associated with it in my opinion. A lot of business directories purely exist on customers paying for entry and advertising and are not therefore overly concerned with their SEO. You could, as I have done, ask to talk to their development team/technical - you could also analyse whether they are using no follows on links and ask for examples of their white label sites. Depends how much time you want to put into it and whether you think it could be truly worth using them if you weren't endangering your SEO work..