Ok

[Goku770]

Ok so I'm wanting to target Tampa as my city of service, so I'm going to do local SEO on it. My question is, in about 2 years I want to expand my services to other cities in certain states. Now I don't know too much about national SEO, but can anybody provide any tips as to what I should in order to prevent the local SEO and national SEO from working against each other?
In other words, does any body have any advice as to what national SEO techniques could have a negative impact on my local SEO efforts.

When I type in my service area business, I see no local balloons, they are just mainly results from national SEO.
My industry is sign spinning. If you search "sign spinners in Tampa" you get results on a national level.

 

[mborgelt]

Not all keyword phrases will trigger "Pack Listings" aka the 7 pack of local results with the local balloons. The phrase "Sign Spinners in Tampa FL" does not trigger "pack listings" and there is nothing you can do to get Google to display a pack for this.

In your niche, you may have a hard time finding appropriate keywords that will trigger pack listings. My advice is if you want to focus on ranking for that phrase, you should focus on organic optimization