When it comes to multi or one website approach. I have had success with both depending on the objective. In some cases I was able to work with great domain names in a few different cities that helped for seo rankings in a short time. So we opted to use separate sites for each location and have done well with seo and local. But, most what I recommend is to add location pages for each of a companies individual branches that include things like driving directions and custom map and local reviews.

As to whether that new feature performs better than other methods that businesses have been using to try to address the issue on their own, the jury is still out. A number of initial reports indicated some problems with ranking placement for those who initially jumped to participate. A lot of us felt it was a bit like being an early-adopter of a software beta feature.

If that criticism of the new service area feature is correct, then it wouldn’t be advisable to be an early adopter, but to wait until some of the bugs are ironed out, post-launch.

My prediction is that this new feature will need to become the primary means of accomplishing geographic placement across cities for service providers — as opposed to attempting to get multiple faux street addresses or setting up microsites targeting each city.

Even prior to this new feature, my stronger recommendation was to use one website, not multiples, and develop content within that site which helped target each city within a major metro area.