Best Practises for GMB Services?

[ABran]

For a while now, Google has been crawling our client sites and suggesting ALOT of services. A lot of them are duplicates or related. Please see screenshots attached and an example below for an HVAC client:
- AC Units
- Ac Units
- Air Conditioning Units
- New Air Conditioning Unit
- Our Air Conditioning
- Your Air Conditioning

Generally, we have been updating GMB services with the client's main services. However, all these suggested services are making me doubt this strategy.

What is the most effective strategy/best practice for adding services? Can there be too many similar services or variations of service keywords such as above? What Google is suggesting doesn't seem to benefit the user but could it help with rankings?

Please let me know your thoughts

 

[Colan Nielsen]

The services do not impact ranking so I would just try and keep it as simple as possible but no simpler. Cover all your core services but don't worry about all the different variations. Don't look at them as keywords.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Google will sometimes pull these in as justifications in the 3 pack. So make sure you're covering all your core services at a very minimum.

 

[valentinb13]

I have not seen anything this egregious in my client's GMBs but what I've been doing is just getting rid of any that are definitely not relevant to the client.

 

[KieranThomas]

I'm really glad you asked this @ABran as I've literally just got off a really frustrating call with the GBP support team to try to get their confirmation on how to handle these.

The reason it was so frustrating was because the advisor didn't seem to know what he was talking about.

Here are some of his golden nuggets...
(Please DON'T do these! Just sharing in case it gives anyone a chuckle on a Friday afternoon)

1) "You can only have 1 primary category per business. If you need to add another primary category, you must... (wait for it).... "create a new GBP listing"... I kid you not!

2) As a digital agency we naturally offer design, development, PPC and SEO, so (for example) in the services we've listed "SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)" as a service.

In contrast, Google suggested circa 10-12 other SEO terms such as "SEO Recommendations", "SEO Advice", "On-Page Optimisation", "Web Design seo", "SEO Strategy", and more).

His response.... "You should list them all within your business description".
(Yes, we did have a discussion about our concerns of keyword stuffing & spamming!)

Yep.... apparently we should now list all of the hundreds of tasks we do, as potentially they can be classed as individual services, and therefore should be included within the description to ensure we show in relevant searches.... and we should do that whilst keeping our description "Short and sweet" (Yes, I did politely explain how advising us to list all services doesn't really go hand-in-hand with keeping things "short and sweet")


The call went on for around 45 mins and my head is now flat at the front from all of the [head] > [desk] action.

 

[Eoghan_Aircam]

+1'ing Colan, don't overinvest in this section of the list. No ranking impact and a section that's overwhelming for a user might do more harm than good in terms of driving higher listing CTR!