High potential in localized marketing?

I've been following the posts here for a while without ever bothering to register and post, but the recent posts about using online marketing skills to make money from offline businesses got the cogs in my head whirring, and I have some thoughts I just have to get out in front of the real thinkers.

Making high-ranking sites for local businesses isn't anywhere near as difficult as, say, getting a top Google listing for weight loss products or something. But while making a single high-ranking site for a local business can be profitable short term, and get you a trickle long term, its a beast that kills itself fairly quickly. After all, you can't offer EVERY lawyer in town a top 5 Google listing. Not to mention a lot of businesses will be hesitant to shell out a large lump sum.

So I got to thinking about review and indexing type sites. Once again testing my thoughts using a number of 'Somerandomcity lawyers' searches, I found that while there were a number of large indexing sites with token (often empty) listings for local areas, there were NONE that were focused on a local level.

Now, my thought is this. How much potential do you more experience marketers see here? Could a somewhat business savvy person make a decent profit using paid index sites optimally SEO'd for just a single city? Or do those large index sites have enough juice going to make up for their lack of focus?

For those who don't understand the kind of sites I'm talking about making, here's an example. (If someone wants to grab this info and make something out of it, let me know how it works out :p)


ChattanoogaLawyers.org
SEO'd for things like "Chattanooga lawyers/legal aid/attorneys/dui lawyers/etc"
Offers a profile-style page to chattanooga lawyers for some monthly fee, with lawyers catagorized by specializations, and "featured lawyer" type things available for various categories for an extra fee?

The way I see it, IF this works the way I think it would, it would be more profitable in the long run than just grabbing a quick lump sum for a SEO'd page. After all, once you have a site template, you can duplicate it for various businesses/cities.

Now, assuming you CAN get that top local listing over the broader sites, it would still take some work getting members. I'd think mailing out letters similar to what David Preston recommends in his "A Stupidly Simple Cash Cow" thread would work well. Get them to call you, then SELL them on it with the facts:Everyone finds stuff using the internet now, and if you aren't on this first site, you are gonna be screwing yourself hard.


So, now that I've put my idea out, lets see what is wrong with it. I'm sure I've made a bad assumption somewhere. Maybe those big sites really are impossible to beat even with local keywords like "CITYNAME BUSINESSTYPE", or something.

Your thoughts?