Huge Change for Service Area Businesses in Google My Business

[Oleg Donets]

Yes, no need to add service areas as it will do nothing.

Thanks Scott!

 

[JoyHawkins]

You can add service areas if you want to a storefront listing but it currently does nothing other than change the map layout.

 

[OneBlessedDude]

Y'all some smart folks!

OK so... to flip the coin if I've got a SAB with a brick and mortar but in the wrong "city," should clicking the "clear address"

make it so the address isn't shown and just make it show up in the "service area's"

As right now the full address is showing on maps

 

[OneBlessedDude]

I would assume that the address doesn't matter provided there is a name & phone number match.

Agree with Joy, the address is (and always has been hidden) so there would be no impact.

So does this mean:
Goog DOESN"T add or remove weight/relevance for correct or incorrect Addresses for SAB's, it only cares about Name and Phone number?

 

[JoyHawkins]

@OneBlessedDude I had a client who moved who was an SAB and I updated GMB and his website only (no citations) and his ranking actually went up across all keywords the next day.

I have not seen any evidence that would show why Google would consider the address important.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@OneBlessedDude, my spidey sense tells me the address still matters and will continue to matter in one way or another, though maybe less than before. It's possible Google takes into account the address listed on your site and on the directories and aggregator sites where you haven't hidden (or can't hide) your address. A couple of relevant posts from Bill Slawski:

Google Local Search Patent Application on Ranking Businesses at a Location

https://gofishdigital.com/how-organic-distance-based-search-results-may-be-demoted/

The exact location of a business's address will probably matter somewhat less, in which case links and reviews will probably matter even more, especially to the extent they tell Google where you are and what area(s) you serve.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Makes sense Phil. Google still wants to deliver good results to a searcher. One of those ways is to check that a business is really located at a particular place by cross referencing against other directories, regardless if you have told Google to show that address or not.

I'm sure there will be some maximum distance between the address that was used to verify a listing and the area that is chosen as the service area before a flag is raised. At least I am hoping.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Yan Gilbert, exactly. Info on site, info from directories, location of reviewers, text of reviews, relevance of sites from which you've got links, searchers'/customers' location data, and Google's query logs would all go into the soup, I would imagine.

 

[mborgelt]

Thanks for bringing the forum's attention to this, Tim! Thanks to everyone sharing their experiences these will indeed be interesting times for local SEO!

 

[Tim Colling]

these will indeed be interesting times for local SEO!

Quite often, "interesting times" lead to new SEO services revenue.

 

[latin_sydney]

Is there a maximum number of suburbs or service areas that can be added? I added +6. I did notice some movement but couldn't be sure as I'm posting daily Gpost , getting reviews weekly and adding content on the website. Will be increasing to +15 service areas to see if I see more movement.

 

[Justin Mosebach]

Anyone else confused as to why you can add both "USA" and "United States" as service areas?

 

[Yan Gilbert]

@Justin Mosebach
Both show up as choices through the regular Google API as well. They both geolocate to the same spot. So many things to test, but I'm guessing that it would give the highest rankings at that point, which is where Google says is the center.

 

[Justin Mosebach]

@Justin Mosebach
Both show up as choices through the regular Google API as well. They both geolocate to the same spot. So many things to test, but I'm guessing that it would give the highest rankings at that point, which is where Google says is the center.

It'd be interesting to know if they both outline the whole US, if one only is the continental US, etc. BTW, Local Falcon is sweet

 

[brettmandoes]

Hello everyone, I work in the enterprise local space and have a fairly large data set that may shed some insight. For the sake of protecting client privacy I can't say anything too specific but I will say that it's in the home service sector. I'm managing over 90 local websites for this client, each on their own domain (not subdomain), and we setup each one the same way. The content is on brand, and localized so there isn't a ton of variation. They have what we call a primary market, and up to 25 "secondary" markets. The primary is where they are physically located. Secondary are the locations outside of their city/town/suburb. Locations are primarily US, and some CA. I'm tracking over 18000 keywords daily across roughly 1600 locations. Each of this client's GMB profiles are setup with service radius as an SAB.

From our dataset it is universal that proximity was a factor for the client, regardless of the fact that they were setup as an SAB. They all ranked higher in their "primary" market. For example, if I setup shop in Virginia Beach, I always rank higher in Virginia Beach than I do in surrounding areas like Norfolk. For this reason I believe the address was an important piece of NAP information, and is also why we have sectioned out the keywords as primary or secondary by location.

Theoretically this change should have prompted an improvement in those other markets. I have seen little movement, either up or down. We have not changed the Service Areas from radius targeting yet and are working on more detailed tracking to see how that goes. For the time being, it appears this change is largely cosmetic. I'll update this thread if I am able to move the needle one way or another and provide any more insight. Really hoping that proximity is removed as a ranking factor for Service Area Businesses, but also keeping it real, I don't think Google likes using data that SEOs provide for ranking signals so I'm not too hopeful this is resulting in anything meaningful.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

It'd be interesting to know if they both outline the whole US, if one only is the continental US, etc. BTW, Local Falcon is sweet

Thanks.
I think it is just the continental US with those inputs. Just for comparison, here is what Google gives as the center of Hawaii. Not sure what calculations they use to come up with a center of an oddly shaped geographical area (and how that may affect rankings given these recent updates).

 

[JoyHawkins]

@brettmandoes thanks for sharing. We're seeing the same thing here.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

So I'm still a little confused.

There seems to be people in the thread saying that their ranking in the service areas they provided has gone up. Some are saying they've seen no effect.

Is this right?

 

[JoyHawkins]

I'm pretty confident that no ranking signals have been changed (yet) or we'd be seeing changes broadly across tons of clients & verticals.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I'm pretty confident that no ranking signals have been changed (yet) or we'd be seeing changes broadly across tons of clients & verticals.

That's what I thought.

This is an interesting change though, no? I mean are they headed in the direction of allowing people to rank in their service area? Theoretically this makes more sense for quality search results, to have people who can cover the area ranking in that area. But practically, you have to think this would be highly abused by spammers?

Or maybe not. I mean eventually a company, if they can't service that area, would get tired of getting calls from that area, right? Maybe that's the way forward.