60+ Pages on a Similar Topic, but Geography Matters - Google Confused Sometimes - Need Help

We have an overarching topic, we will call it, Topic X, that we promote on one of our websites. We have over 60 region-specific pages on this topic.

Our pages are long, 5-12k words on Topic X in each specific Country/State/Province. A small amount of the content is reused, but reworded to avoid duplication penalty, and 95%+ of these long pages are completely original and the content is solely related to that specific location.

When we say Google is "confused" it is because every now and again we see a state ranking for a country search. This could be as simple as Google geo-targeting its results, but we are paranoid and want to be sure we hammer home the idea of each page being specific to a single location so that when people search "Topic X Canada" they get the page for Canada, and "Topic X Hawaii" yields the page written solely for Hawaiian readers.

The reason we do this type of separation detail is because Topic X has a lot of legal ambiguity, and is completely legal in some places, gray market in others, and 100% black market in others jurisdictions.

Thus, in order to properly promote (or not) Topic X, we need to inform people of the law in their specific location. In order to do this, we have created numerous pages. Much of this targets the USA (51 of the pages).

Our strategy thus far is to create our page titles and URLS with the Topic X Keywords, but also other regionally specific words if possible. And this works, Google sees all 60+ pages and ranks them all for their geo-location, BUT, we think there are some issues. Before we get into that, some examples of how we distinguish the US states since there are 50 of these and they are likely the most duplicated content:

Title for Alabama: Topic X in Alabama - Legal and fun and available to all
URL for Alabama: how-to-topic-x-in-alabama

Title for New Jersey: Topic X New Jersey | Avoid this past time, it is illegal!
URL for New Jersey: how-to-topic-x-in-new-jersey

Title for Texas: Topic X in Texas - Know the law Partner
URL for Texas: how-to-topic-x-in-texas

Hopefully you see where I am going with this. We vary up the H1s, but always include the main KW. The URLs are all the same but include that they apply specifically to a single state.

We also have these articles for each Country and they are very similar, but here is a quick example:

United States: Topic X in the USA
topic-x-for-americans

Canada: Topic X in Canada
topic-x-for-canadians

Australia: Topic X in Australia
topic-x-for-australians

You get the point here I think.

For the country level pages, we have added little hints to help Google understand that each page applies only to its individual country. Some of the things we have done for example are:

• hreflang the country pages for en-US, en-CA, en-AU, default (we use US for that since it is the largest market, all our code passes hreflang tests)
• set other metatags for each country, US example: <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-US" />
• set other metatags for each country, US example: <meta name="geo.region" content="US" />

For the state level pages however, we have more difficulty. There are no language hints we can use. We do utilize the geo.region metatag however, as in this example:

<meta name="geo.region" content="US-CA" />

The state pages, as well as the country pages, we wish to further differentiate and slam the point home to Google and other search engines that the content is SPECIFIC TO THAT REGION/LOCATION/COUNTRY/STATE.

What other metatags, code, or other tricks can we use to help us in this cause?