How to best set-up a Service Area Business

[Nathan_NZ]

Hey all,

I've scanned back through the past 7 pages and I haven't found the answer I'm looking for so I thought I'd ask here.

What is the best approach for doing Local SEO for a service area business such a plumber?

They service specific suburbs within a city as well has a couple of different cities and suburbs for those cities, yet they only have one physical address.

Can you set-up separate GMB listings in each city and use the address of an employee or franchise owner in that city? Is this allowed?

The other thing I would like to know is, is having 1 GMB listing targeting 20+ suburbs and cities as effective as having 6 separate GMB listing targeting those same 20 suburbs and cities.

Thanks

Nathan

 

[StephanieNewton]

Hi Nathan!

To answer your first question, you can't set up different listings for different service areas. You'll need to have one GMB listing for each business. So if you're a plumber operating in three different cities or zip codes, you'll still only be entitled to one listing.

Google does let you select multiple service areas however, so that should mean you can still rank in the relevant areas. It's against Google's guidelines to use employees' addresses for a service-area business so I would definitely stray away from that.

You can read more about setting up SABs in GMB here and here.

In light of the above information, your second question becomes somewhat redundant but Tim Capper at Online Ownership shared some really interesting content on having multiple and/or overlapping areas specified as a SAB. (You can only actually have 20 service areas on Google anyway!)

If you need further guidance, Google has guidelines for SABs you can look into here.

 

[Nathan_NZ]

@StephanieNewton This is a big help. Thanks.