Best Practices for areaServed Schema Markup?

[RattlingTram]

Wondering how any Schema experts (could we maybe have a schema forum on here?) would advise targeting areaServed in markup?

It seems intuitive to me that using a TEXT type here and just specifying each individual suburb served as an individual item (my understanding is it won't accept multiple values comma separated) is probably going to be best for local seo, as "suburb served" is such a key component of local searches, but I also think that mentality is taking a traditional SEO keyword-based approach, and schema isn't necessarily all about keywords so much. So the alternative suggestions I can see would be using either a geoshape or geocircle (probably better cause its easier). Obviously we're trying to rank for "service x in suburb y", which probably recommends TEXT - but "service x near me" is also critical, so is geocircle better to give Google a concrete sense of "how near" the business is?

I really appreciate any assistance, this is the most helpful community forum I participate in anywhere, thanks everyone.

 

[Rich Owings]

The JSON-LD example at the bottom of this page shows how to do a radius. I *think* you can use multiple values like this:

"areaServed":
[
"area 1",
"area 2"
]

 

[RattlingTram]

The JSON-LD example at the bottom of this page shows how to do a radius. I *think* you can use multiple values like this:

"areaServed":
[
"area 1",
"area 2"
]

Appreciate the response, Rich. Thankyou.
Not least becuase geocircle will be the simplest one to implement, lol.

 

[JoyHawkins]

My advice would be to skip this schema type. We tested it and it doesn't impact ranking and I haven't seen anything visually change in the SERPs after adding it so I'm not really sure what the point of adding it is.

 

[RattlingTram]

Thanks Joy, I appreciate the response, not very least as I know you're data/evidence driven with this stuff, so I'm sure what you say is correct.

However I actually just got my developer to do some clever stuff which autogenerates service area schema using a few custom fields in Wordpress (because I enjoy nerding out about this stuff as much as anything), and I figure it cannot hurt. Even if Google doesn't use the data in any useful way today, it may well do so tomorrow is my attitude and the hard work is done already, lol. Thanks again.

 

[rgblocal]

Thanks Joy, I appreciate the response, not very least as I know you're data/evidence driven with this stuff, so I'm sure what you say is correct.

However I actually just got my developer to do some clever stuff which autogenerates service area schema using a few custom fields in Wordpress (because I enjoy nerding out about this stuff as much as anything), and I figure it cannot hurt. Even if Google doesn't use the data in any useful way today, it may well do so tomorrow is my attitude and the hard work is done already, lol. Thanks again.

Love the sound of that. Something like a text filed for cities served or did you go the geo radius route?