Best Service Area Practice for Business with Large Service Areas

[hollycenations]

Hi all! I am trying to figure out the best way to proceed with our service areas for our store locations.

Each store serves a wide territory across a state, and the territory sometimes creeps along the edge of other states as well, depending on the store location. The territories are too large to be able to fit all the zip codes, cities, or counties that are included in that territory (the limit is still 20, right?)... so that really just leave us with state, which is super unspecific.

Do you guys have any recommendations on how we should define our service areas, given this info? Is there anything I'm missing?

 

[whitespark]

Hi Holly. Did you know that setting the service areas has zero impact on rankings? There really isn’t much value in defining the service areas. The only thing it does is draw a red outline on your map to display the area that the business is willing to service.

So with that in mind, it’s probably best and simplest to just set it to the entire state. If that area is too big, then I’d just add the major towns and cities.

Hope this helps.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@hollycenations, you can also add counties, which is handy in cases like yours (where maybe you don't service the whole state, or there's some overlap between states). Some counties are giant, and you wouldn't need anywhere near 20 of them to cover a given service area. As Darren said, it doesn't matter in terms of rankings, but of course it's good not to turn off would-be customers by showing a service area that's two shoe sizes too small on your GMB page.

Now, to the extent rankings (both Maps and organic) are the concern here, it all comes down to your site, particularly to your landing page. I've talked about that in other forum threads, on my blog, and elsewhere, and don't want to be repetitive (if I can help it). But I will say that on individual locations' landing pages (and preferably elsewhere on the site) it is beneficial to cram in a large list of specific communities you work in. Yes, that's partly for SEO purposes, but it's also information most people will find relevant.

(There's more to optimizing those pages, of course, but you mentioned the service area itself as the pain point, so I wanted to focus on that.)