One literally does not need a tool or that many backlinks to rank well for the name of a small town and local-search related keywords.

This lack of competition is why so many case studies are based on local geographic based keywords, particularly with city names that relate to smaller towns.

Rather than pick on an actual SEO case study (which I don’t want to do) I will use an SEO competition as an illustration of the ease of ranking local search keyword phrases.

The competition a while back was to see who could rank and hold on for the search phrase, Rhinoplasty Plano Texas.

The winner of that competition was a website constructed almost entirely of Lorem Ipsum Roman Latin words. Only the heading tags were written in English.