Ken, I can't answer your question about local search. I would have thought you could operate an
SEO company anywhere there is a phone line.
I live in the biggest village in he area, so we do have all of those things.
I run an info site, where I tend to put up a new page for every question I receive that is not adequately answered by the others. There is some internal linking for common topics, buta lot of things have to be treated on their own.
A lot of the stuff floating around the net is garbage for 99% of the population, but there may well be a reason for it. I guess one of hte problems is that many people do not remove old pages, but simply add new ones.