Huge Change for Service Area Businesses in Google My Business

[Justin Mosebach]

I know this is an old thread but I'm just wondering: is this still true?

I added about 20 small surrounding cities a long time ago. I just had a pretty savvy with GMB friend tell me that his views dropped after adding service areas, so he removed them. I found this post via Google search of the question.

Do you currently recommend service areas? Do you know whether they could possibly cause a negative impact on ranking in those areas?

Yeah, just be careful with it... I prefer using counties instead of cities. If you use cities, it's literally using the legal boundaries of the city. Counties obviously covers all of the cities.

 

[JohnMarathonAir]

Yeah, just be careful with it... I prefer using counties instead of cities. If you use cities, it's literally using the legal boundaries of the city. Counties obviously covers all of the cities.

Thank you. So what impact does it have? Helps? Hurts? Nothing?

I'm just wondering bc I am nervous about changing anything when suspensions seem to be happening with small edits.

 

[Justin Mosebach]

Thank you. So what impact does it have? Helps? Hurts? Nothing?

I'm just wondering bc I am nervous about changing anything when suspensions seem to be happening with small edits.

If you're a business that actually serves customers in a specific area (and not just at your store/office/etc), then yes, it's worth doing.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I have never seen service areas impact ranking. Views are also not a metric that I would trust at all as it's not a reflection of how many people searched on Google and saw your listing.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Thank you. So what impact does it have? Helps? Hurts? Nothing?

Ranking-wise it has no impact. It visually updates the map that shows up in your Knowledge Panel and there is a little drop-down on mobile devices that shows your service areas.

 

[Justin Mosebach]

Ranking-wise it has no impact. It visually updates the map that shows up in your Knowledge Panel and there is a little drop-down on mobile devices that shows your service areas.

We had a new client that was not ranking well at all. Once we changed the service areas from a few cities to the entire county, they started doing significantly better.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Interesting. So no other changes were done at all during the time frame? Nothing was changed on the website or no new links were created etc?

 

[Justin Mosebach]

@JoyHawkins I just checked: it happened last May, but it looks like I had also optimized their GMB categories (forgot that part!)... I bet that's the main reason for the jump. Glad I checked

 

[consultant]

I haven't touched my listings since Google switched from radius services areas to specific location service areas. All 25 of my listings are ranking as good or better than they were before Google got rid of radius. Yet of course all these listings have pending updates wanting me to go enter my service areas. If my areas haven't changed and neither have my rankings, is there any reason to spend all that time entering new service areas? Seems Google, to maintain the integrity of their local search, did a pretty good job at transitioning me out of radius themselves and did the work for me.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Personally, I wouldn't spend the time re-entering them unless your map looks weird in the Knowledge Panel on the business (where service areas are displayed).

You also might want to check how it looks on mobile. The service areas sometimes show up in a drop-down.