As promised, here is the first installment on different local search situations.
First situation: You are located in a rural, small town or ex-urban area, and your customers come from the surrounding area.
If there is only one town of any size in the area., chances are people will put that town name into their searches. Another possibility is to search on the County name or some other geographical identifier (such as a Valley name), or possibly an area code.
This is the easy one. You only have one or two geographical identifiers to work with. If you asked a resident of the area how they would describe where they are located, that’s the answer to how people search, right there.
Optimize for that one or those couple of locators and you’ll usually be in business.
The only hazard is the area may be fragmented with a bunch of small towns of similar size. In that case you may be need to run click ads (run in your entire service area) to pick up some searches.