Local Search or Global?

I know this post has been done time and time again, but I think I may have a unique case. I have been doing SEO for 3 years and know what im doing... I just want a second, third, fourth or however many opinions I can get in the direction I'm about to go in.
I work for a local business and have been handling their seo for the past 6 months. For those months I have brought their site to page one for numerous products they offer to the local markets. In the past 2 weeks they have done the statistical analysis and have decided to dump a ton of funding into my job. I work on the seo solely right now, handling keywords day in and day out.
I have thought about moving to the root keywords and taking the city names off of the keyphrases. For example "Los Angeles Pet Shop"... I now want to rank for "Pet shop".
The keyword data shows I will get much more traffic to the site. I understand that it will be nationwide, and much traffic will not convert, but since we have a local host, we can gather those searchers who only search for "pet shop" instead of "los angeles pet shop". I am already ranking in the first ten pages for these root keyphrases, and can easily rank to the first 2 pages in a few weeks.
The problem is.... I do everything whitehat. Is this something I want to spend company money and time doing? As seo-ers we hate wasting time, so im sure some of you can sympathize.
I am confident my local rankings will stay put, but I will cross over into a whole new market of people....
Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks.

Do you have any use for non local traffic? Do you ship, etc. or are you only looking for walk-in traffic?

Crixus said:

Do you have any use for non local traffic? Do you ship, etc. or are you only looking for walk-in traffic?

Click to expand...

No but knowing the average internet searcher... Not everyone types in the city when searching for something. They simply type the generic general terms. I would like to capitalize on these Googlers.

Ok, so the question is how will you capitalize? Are you looking to just get the users in your area who didn't type the city?

Yes, exactly. Also, I am with a company that is rapidly expanding. I guess I could facilitate this expansion with work elsewhere.
And maintain my current local SERPs at the same time.

It may be worth it if you're in a large city/metro area, depending on how competitive the base keywords are.

Take the population of your area, divided by the nation's pop, and that's the % of general visitors that will be in your area.

good advice... It may very well be worth it. I think I have decided to continue promoting the local market while targeting the general terms. Probably devote 70% of my time to general and 30% to local.
I'll let you know how that turns out.

good advice... It may very well be worth it. I think I have decided to continue promoting the local market while targeting the general terms. Probably devote 70% of my time to general and 30% to local.
I'll let you know how that turns out.