Local SEO: do you use landing pages?

I want to rank my webdesign business for several cities in my direct neighbourhood.

"webdesign city A"
"webdesign city B"
"webdesign city C"

I see several competitors who build landingpages for each of these locations with just changing the title and location in the text.
They use the same text on each landingpage.

Why do they rank with duplicate content?
Should I just do the same or are there better options?

You shouldn't use the same landing text for each page..... But I have seen many websites rank like this to this day!

I don't know why google hasn't dropped the sites to be honest!

I have several clients that target different locations. I usually create a separate subdomain for each city and put different content on those pages. I also make sure everything is linked together so the link juice passes through the entire site when I am building authority links.

Like you noticed, local landers are important if you want to rank outside of your typical reach.

Your competitors rank with duplicate content because competition is low.

I wouldn't do the same, but to each their own.

If you want to be better than your competitors you definitely shouldn't do the same. Just work on your content and you will see the result soon

contact me if you like to build pages like that
i am an expert of this longtail keyword ranking thing and we do rank many sites


1 st thing the contents are not duplicate they are just unique articles we spin it but we submit the pages to google at same time so their is no problem at all

yes my opinion is you should do it so you can rank longtail keywords in google

Just do best content and different landing pages

Different URLs is totally fine, but I wouldn't recommend using the same content on each page. You could easily get content created on odesk or elance though for a cheap amount of money.

The best way to do this is to build a page of general business related information and "flavor" it for the city by mentioning the city in the page a couple of times.

For instance:

Say you are a carpet cleaner. Build a page about one of your services, suppose it was "hot water injection carpet cleaning".

You could write an article explaining what this service consists of, why steam cleaning is best, and so on.

If you were to put a case study of a carpet cleaning job from a local job on the page in this manner, it will be enough to bring in the keyword.

H2 tag:
Case Study, 2 story house in Sioux Falls.

Details:
This house was an older home in the tandywine section of Sioux Falls, being settled as part of an estate. Dry Humpers Cleaners were called in to see if the old carpeting could be saved blah blah blah...carpet came out great..blah blah blah...turn your Sioux Falls home into a showcase.
(keep this above directly under the heading tag in the same div)

Remember that ranking in the local SEO algo is not accomplished by keyword targeting in the usual way people do keyword targeting. It is done with onpage SEO, not backlinks.

Your site will rank for the content of your pages whatever that is based on how well you embrace the local algorithm.

What you are going for is keyword inclusion on the page that you will rank. Any well written page can rank for dozens of keywords in the local algorithm, because the ranking does not rely heavily on backlinks.

I am not saying backlinks are not useful here, just that when you do the local algorithm correctly, you need only a few quality backlinks to rank if any at all, unless you are in a large, SEO savvy business vertical.

I personally do not use Landing pages for my clients who want multiple listings.

Use video and rank them the same way as websites. backlink a 3 month campigan and ta da!

Yes, I'd recommend to use different landing pages and start A/B testing to check the ones that get you better results.