Service Area - Zip Codes vs. Counties

[Niki Gross]

Has anyone seen changes to service areas for SAB clients within the GMB dashboard that you did not initiate? I have multiple listings with edits to service area - which I'm aware Google could have pulled from other sources. Some listings show a reduced number of zip codes (not surprising considering the new limit of 20) while other listings are showing counties as the service area. Are both counties and zip codes accepted?

 

[DClark]

I have seen service areas added to GMB listings that were not initiated by the admins (GMB owners, managers, etc.) of a listing.

Quick zip code rant...

• Zip codes are commonly mistaken as being geographies.
• Zip codes are really just for making delivering mail more efficient for the USPS.
• The area a zip code represents on the map may coincide with the service area for a business, but some zip codes can have very odd shapes that typically would not be limitations for a business to provide service in the real world.
• Generally speaking, I would recommend using neighborhoods, city names, or counties to represent the areas the business serves over zip code.
  • However there are some zip codes hold a certain amount of prestige (eg 90210) and are more commonly used as a search term.
• Zip codes are not invalid to provide, but they can be limiting in ways that are not always obvious.

 

[TomW]

Hi Niki,
Google automatically converted a lot of service-areas on listings to be within the limit of 20 during the past day or so. Some of the auto conversions that I have seen didn't go so well.
Yes, you can combine different types. So you can pick a combination of zip codes, cities, counties, etc as entries for the service area.

 

[whitespark]

What @TomW said.

We saw this happen across a lot of our client listings as well.