We have a ecommerce website that can deliver products all over the country. We have seen at least one of our other competitors create an index page for every city in the country. So the pages essentially have the same content, but contain a different city name in various key parts of the page. They do not have multiple locations/stores or anything.
They have managed to get a lot of these pages listed in Google so that when a user searches for the product in a particular location, they pop up at the top.
My question is, would it hurt the website rankings in terms of SEO if we were to do the same? We can deliver to all over the country. I haven't really found out definitively if this is a no-no in terms of SEO?