Efficacy of driving around and searching for own business to boost traffic

[BSDChicago]

I operate a SAB in the NW suburbs of Chicago. I operate within a ~10 mile radius and within that radius I serve about 25 DIFFERENT suburbs. I've created location specific landings for each and some do well but others can't seem to grab a foothold. I've done my best on a limited budget to learn what I can about SEO and how to structure my site (there's still a long to-do list though) but I feel like I'm struggling to compete with a lot of the physical businesses that exist within my service area. There are a couple of larger and wealthier suburbs that I would like to in the local pack/rank for. These suburbs are mostly residential and as such I don't have any, or many, competitors within them. When conducting a search for my top keywords with wealthy suburb X name, there's generally only a couple of results OUTSIDE the suburbs themselves.

Since I'm low on budget but have a lot of time, how effective would it be to use a device that is not connected to any of my accounts and drive around conducting searches with my keywords, and then scrolling to find my own business, staying on the site for a couple of minutes, and finally contacting myself through my email. Making sure to make the traffic seem as organic as I can of course.

Now that I've typed that explanation out, it sounds quite a bit scammy, but how effective might something like this be?

 

[klharris08]

Don't do this.

 

[dale-jepto]

Agreed, that would be a waste of time. Spend the time instead making sure that you have your GBP filled out, and speaking to your customers about leaving a review.

 

[BSDChicago]

Agreed, that would be a waste of time. Spend the time instead making sure that you have your GBP filled out, and speaking to your customers about leaving a review.

My GBP is filled out and updated with the correct information. I recently had new review cards made up to hand out (before I was just verbally asking for reviews on Google) and I have started to get more in the last few months.

I believe I am still suffering from some form of a SAB move bug however as I'm still ranking in the top 40-50 results for my old location across many keywords resulting in impressions and a few clicks here and there. The GSC performance module also shows up when searching for those keywords in the old location. I stumbled across a thread on a different forum a couple of weeks ago that I can't find again which outlined the possibility where the verification address that is on record doesn't/didn't get updated after my move causing the listing to rank in both the old and new locations, even though the service area did update and take effect.

 

[dale-jepto]

Unfortunately, changing the service areas doesn't affect rankings in any way and is just used by Google to showcase the areas you focus on to customers within the Knowledge graph.

If you have moved locations I assume you have seen this? 3 Steps to Move Your Service Area Business Google Business Profile Without Destroying Your Ranking

 

[BSDChicago]

Unfortunately, changing the service areas doesn't affect rankings in any way and is just used by Google to showcase the areas you focus on to customers within the Knowledge graph.

If you have moved locations I assume you have seen this? 3 Steps to Move Your Service Area Business Google Business Profile Without Destroying Your Ranking

I actually just discovered that blog post a couple of days ago and created a new GBP. I'm going to contact support later on today to move the reviews and delete the old GBP. I'm hoping for the best. I can't see what my other option would be beyond this besides creating a whole new company/brand.