I'm familiar with the SAB best practices outlined here.

Here's my issue: Doing local landing pages as described here might not be ideal from a user experience point of view. Having a "Cities We Serve" or "Service Areas" link in the main navigation isn't necessarily valuable to the user when the city-specific landing pages are all places within a 15-mile radius of the SAB's headquarters.

It would just look like the company did it for SEO. It wouldn't look natural.

Seriously, it feels like best practices are totally at odds with user experience here. If I absolutely must create location pages for 10 or so municipalities within my client's service area, I'd rather NOT put the service areas as a primary navigation item. It is not useful to the user. Anyone who sees that the company provides services in the [name of city] metropolitan area will already understand that the company can service their town that is 5 miles away. It is self-evident. For example**, who would wonder whether a plumbing company with a Los Angeles address also services Beverly Hills?** It's just... silly.

But the Moz guide says I've got to do those location pages! And that I've got to put them high up in the navigation!

This is a problem because we've got to do local SEO, but we also have to provide an ideal experience.

Thoughts?