Help! GMB Service Area Business Questions

[ancientcharge]

Hello fello SEO’s! I’ve got some GMB questions that have been wracking my brain for the last couple weeks and need some ideas.

Tl;dr - How should we properly set up service-area GMBs? Create GMBs for every county we serve? Additional context and questions below:

I have an enterprise level client who operates in the flooring industry. One thing that separates them from the pack is they don’t have physical locations (service area business) despite serving mostly the entire continental US.

Currently, I am working to cleanup the GMB profiles because they have been neglected. My idea/what I think is the norm, was to create GMB profiles for the major markets they served. Within those GMB’s we would target major counties served within that area aka the service areas.

However, I was met with some push back on this. Someone mentioned that we should instead be creating individual GMB profiles FOR EACH county that was served. I cautioned against this mainly because of the amount of work it work it would take to create/maintain/drive reviews for/etc if we had a GMB set up for almost every county in the US.

Now that we got that boring context out of the way, my question to you is this.

1. How should we properly set up service-area GMBs? Create GMBs for every county we serve? Or Create GMB’s for main markets only and list the counties served in the GMB profile backend?
2. For each GMB profile create, a matching city-page will also be created. What information should be listed on the city page? Obvs, NAP, map, reviews, etc. I’m talking about copy. Is one of our keywords in “laminate flooring installation Los Angeles” should that keyword be optimized in the Los Angeles City page? Or should the LA city page be a hub, and have multiple surrounding pages optimized around keywords. For example, just having a page dedicated to the keyword “laminate flooring installation Los Angeles”

Helpful answers appreciated!

 

[Tony Wang]

Can you share the business name, or at least more info? How do they operate? Is it a franchise?

To create a gmb listing, there needs to be an address where the business is actually located, even though it won't be visible. For example, the franchise operator can work out of his home, but that's the address he has to use.

If there's some local office space they use, that will be the address. You aren't allowed to use an employee address, so that's out of the question.

If its not a franchise, how does corporate maintain a local presence?

Without an address, you will NOT be able to create a listing for every county, or even every major area.

For an SAB, it used to be that you could only have one listing per state, but with larger states I think more are allowed now, don't know the exact rule on this. Unless it's a franchise, with specific territories that are exclusive, then each franchise can have a listing.