Is it possible to add pins to your GMB Listing to expand our area of influence and rankings?

[kkielty]

I have a client who has a wide service area, several counties but because his business address and all his citations point to his address in one of the smaller cities, he never ranks for the bigger cities. He is currently targeting the state of NC. Recently a solicitor told him about Google changing direction to allow companies like his (home services) who work away from their office to add pins to expand our area of influence and rankings. Has anyone heard of adding pins to your GMB listing to rank for the big city next to your city?

I think my client also wants to appear to have multiple locations based on the home location of several of his workers...since a lot of them work from home. Does each different location require its own URL, address and phone number?

Given the above, what do you recommend as the best course of action?

 

[whitespark]

There isn't a way to add additional pins to a single listing. A business will generally only rank in the local results around the area that the listing is registered in, even a service area business.

Your client can do the following:
- open another location in the city they want to rank in, but this needs to be a real office that is staffed.
- target the areas they want to rank in with city pages. They won't rank in the local results, but can rank in the organic results and drive traffic and business. See this guide on how to create good city pages.
- target the areas with Google Ads.

I'm curious about what this solicitor was talking about. My hunch is that it might have been Google Local Services Ads.

 

[kkielty]

Hi Darren, thank you for your thorough response. People soliciting by phone will really say anything to sound new and shiny, it's the phone version of phishing for business. I suspected it was just scammy solicitating but wanted to hear it from an authority who deals with these questions all the time.