Hey Gerry, I work on a team that makes websites and offers monthly SEO and we've been trying to solve this EXACT thing for the past couple of years with mixed success. The best balance I've found so far is creating geographic-targeted landing pages that are designed to mirror the home page. It's not bullet-proof, but it works so much better than trying to get a home page or an about page to rank for multiple locations by just stuffing geos.
The way I figure it is that from a search perspective, if you're googling "Nissan dealership near Dallas, TX" - you probably expect to find the home page of a Nissan dealer, but Google really isn't going to rank a dealership 30 miles outside of that city just because they stuff that city as a secondary or tertiary GEO in the text of the page.
This is an example of that kind of page for one of our dealers: https://longviewnissan.com/nissan-dealership-near-tyler-tx/
Anecdotally, I've experimented quite a bit and found that the title tag, the URL, and the H1 make a big difference, but Google seems pretty indifferent to the density of the geographic keyword and that trying to target multiple cities with one page bears diminishing returns.
We usually create separate pages for "used car dealership near city" vs. "OEM dealership near city" for that same kind of reason.
Would love feedback and thoughts on our approach, like you said - so many industries have this figured out and automotive has tons of room to make gains.
