I agree with you. Some marketing people believe that we cannot beat out smaller companies is that we are too diverse in services. We do great with niche keywords and markets, but are being beat by companies who only focus on one of our key services. That is why they thought sub domains  would do better, but I remember Rand posting something on sub domains vs sub folders, but cannot find the original source.

Thanks for your answer...

We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example.

One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com.

I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past.

What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.

I would check out Wistia. As a pro-member there is a SEO discount. You save about 20 bucks a month for SEO videos. You can keep metrics of watched videos, heatmaps, video sitemaps, options to have the video embedded on your site and video sitemaps. Definitely worth the price.

http://www.seomoz.org/pro-perks

http://wistia.com/

I agree with you. Some marketing people believe that we cannot beat out smaller companies is that we are too diverse in services. We do great with niche keywords and markets, but are being beat by companies who only focus on one of our key services. That is why they thought sub domains  would do better, but I remember Rand posting something on sub domains vs sub folders, but cannot find the original source.

Thanks for your answer...