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I want to be clear that I'm not referring to a re-crawl, but a re-index.  Now I realize there are a gazillion ranking signals and most of the stronger signals are probably not on-page signals (although page title, headers, and anchor text combined is probably a relatively strong signal) so that for most situations, on-page changes are going to like move you from the middle of page 2 to top 3 (except for obscure - low competition long tail keywords of course.) So is there a delay between re-crawl and re-rank (I'll use that term instead of re-index).  I also realize the rank can change based on changes on the other sites in the SERPS.  I suppose the re-rank delay could be verified by taking a 'sacrificial' page and totally changing the title, headings, and other on-page items to a completed different keyword theme and see how long it takes for the rank to go down for the previous keyword theme and up for the new theme. I would think Google would quite possibly add a delay, even a random delay length, to discourage people from constantly requesting re-indexing of a single page to see the rank change.  Granted the change if any would be small since on-page signals as I mentioned are a sliver of the signal pie.  So most SEO's I would think would be of the opinion this 'trial-and-error' is a waste of time?

Well there's another 'mystery listing' in the same search now.  Same case, business is not in close proximity, no reviews, poor orgranic rank.  It is starting to look like indeed Google rotates in a random listing - sort of like it gives newer advertisers/ads some exposure in the Adwords auction to build some  analytics data to see how effective the ad is (to see if they can make some money off it.) This sort of makes sense from the 3-pack standpoint because businesses listed there will obviously get higher CTR and then would be self-perpetuating so to speak so that if the 3-pack was solely based on reviews, organic rank, CTR, and other aspects, the businesses in the 3-pack would almost never change.  So they need to add some sort of random rotational function to give other businesses a "chance" to demonstrate their relevance.  So one of the 3-pack spots may be rotating newer listings despite have little or poor local ranking factors such as organic rank and reviews.  Just my educated guess based on lots of observations.

Good morning! Thanks so much for bringing your question to the community. This is what I'd recommend: Instead of having a landing page for each city + a contact page for each city, I suggest you combine them. The landing page should contain the contact information, as well as the content. No need to make visitors go to two different pages. So, simplify here, and 301 redirect the 10 contact pages to the 10 city landing pages. Definitely don't recommend building out yet another set of pages for this additional content you've described. Make the single landing page for each city as comprehensive and unique as possible. Put all of the relevant content about your services in a given city on that city's landing page. It is important to avoid weak, duplicate pages, for sure. Hopefully, you can tell different stories on the different pages, even if the services you offer are the same. Some good ways to diversify the narrative on a landing page include showcasing your projects in the city and including reviews from customers in the city (both text and video w/transcript). You might find this post helpful in building very strong and substantially unique city landing pages for your business: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages Hope this helps, and please feel free to ask any further questions.