Service Areas Clarification Needed

[Nathan_NZ]

Hi all,

I’m new to Local SEO and this forum.

I have a question and I haven’t been able to find an answer to it.

Does adding service areas help increase the visibility of a GMB listing?

If my client has an office and if I add nearby suburbs as service areas, does this mean they would be seen more often in the search results as opposed to not using service areas at all?

In the forums I have read there is no ranking value in setting service areas? Is this correct?

Maybe my understanding of what a service area is for is incorrect? Could someone please clarify what a service area is used for?

I’ve read this explanation from Google but my situation is different.

How to use a service area on Google for service-area & hybrid businesses - Google Business Profile Help

When you list your service area, it lets customers know the geographic area where you can provide your products and services. Important: If you don't

support.google.com

In my specific case the client would not go to see a customer. But they do cater to people that live in nearby suburbs. So are they allowed to use service areas?

Thanks

Nathan

 

[dannanelli]

Hi all,

I’m new to Local SEO and this forum.

I have a question and I haven’t been able to find an answer to it.

Does adding service areas help increase the visibility of a GMB listing?

If my client has an office and if I add nearby suburbs as service areas, does this mean they would be seen more often in the search results as opposed to not using service areas at all?

In the forums I have read there is no ranking value in setting service areas? Is this correct?

Maybe my understanding of what a service area is for is incorrect? Could someone please clarify what a service area is used for?

I’ve read this explanation from Google but my situation is different.

How to use a service area on Google for service-area & hybrid businesses - Google Business Profile Help

When you list your service area, it lets customers know the geographic area where you can provide your products and services. Important: If you don't

support.google.com

In my specific case the client would not go to see a customer. But they do cater to people that live in nearby suburbs. So are they allowed to use service areas?

Thanks

Nathan

Hi Nathan,

I can't say for certain but here are some resources that may help.

Darren Shaw did a great study and he mentioned that adding service areas may have an impact but removing a service area from a GMB listing did not affect rankings. See slide 53 on his deck here: https://whitespark.ca/blog/from-zero-to-local-ranking-hero-mozcon-2019/. Keep in mind, this was just one study.

There is also a thread here about service area GMB listings: Changed to SAB and Traffic Dropped Big Time - Local Search Forum

Hopeful someone else can chime in here with some good info.

 

[Nathan_NZ]

Hi Nathan,

I can't say for certain but here are some resources that may help.

Darren Shaw did a great study and he mentioned that adding service areas may have an impact but removing a service area from a GMB listing did not affect rankings. See slide 53 on his deck here: https://whitespark.ca/blog/from-zero-to-local-ranking-hero-mozcon-2019/. Keep in mind, this was just one study.

There is also a thread here about service area GMB listings: Changed to SAB and Traffic Dropped Big Time - Local Search Forum

Hopeful someone else can chime in here with some good info.

Thanks Dani!

I was lucky enough to be at MozCon and saw Darren Shaw’s presentation. This is the reason I wanted to seek clarification on the benefit of using a physical address and service areas.

Because I didn’t know any better I had recommended that my client add service areas but now I’m thinking its not really necessary and I’m better focusing on other more valuable activities.

 

[freerunr]

@Nathan_NZ, here are a few comments from threads on this very forum that may answer your question (from trusted experts, including @whitespark himself!):

Huge Change for Service Area Businesses in Google My Business | Service Area Businesses

A few things to note about this update which is rolling out to all SAB's. 1. SAB's will now be able to create a listing without designating an address (Verification may still be required in most instances) 2. Increased focus on place-based service areas to provide human-readable descriptions 3...

www.localsearchforum.com

Service Areas and Physical Address | Google Business Profile (GBP) & Google Maps

Does anyone on here use a physical address in their GMB and have areas served? I always thought areas served would only be useful for businesses who don't want to show their address but I've been seeing some people do both. Is there any benefit from doing this?

www.localsearchforum.com

Add Service Area Tab - GMB? | Service Area Businesses

Hello Fellow Members, I am managing a few brick and mortar stores for a business, I am relatively new to GMB management. Kindly ignore to my stupid question if it is. Can Add Service Area be used by physical store businesses? Thanks Javed

www.localsearchforum.com

 

[BipperMedia]

Hi all,

I’m new to Local SEO and this forum.

I have a question and I haven’t been able to find an answer to it.

Does adding service areas help increase the visibility of a GMB listing?
.....

Hi Nathan! This is a great question... and let me give you feedback based on our experience with a few of our clients.

We've actually tested this for one of our clients that has 2 business locations / businesses: a landscape business and a garbage pickup business; however, their offices are located in a small suburb town just outside of a larger metro area.

They, of course, do landscaping and garbage pickup all over the surrounding areas and the majority of their business comes from the adjoining large metro area.

So by all definitions... they are the typical example of a "service area business".

We decided to test the idea of including surrounding zip codes as service areas... and we really dove in on this by including every zip code within and around each of the surrounding areas they want to target.

We also included the city names of the major adjacent city and all surrounding cities that coincided with the zip codes.

So in essence, we included every zip code and every city name in their service areas.

I've attached a screenshot of the list of service areas so you can see what I'm talking about... this is just a small sample size of their total targeted service areas list within their GMB.

I've also included a screenshot of their productivity via GMB Insights of their "Actions" where you can see the huge increases in productivity since implementing this strategy (see attached GMB Insights graph).

In summary... I am definitely a believer in targeting multiple service areas within your GMB as a strategy to expand the presence and exposure for a business in Google local search.

*** BUT.... and this is a big but... this strategy is frivolous without the business / GMB having a substantial amount of location authority.

Any business / location will need enough location authority to compete at a wider radius around their verified location.

Think of this as a "radius of influence" or "radius of authority".

If you have a small amount of location authority, you need to pretty much be standing in or next to your business to see yourself at the top of local search.

If you have a substantial amount of location authority, you can be found and gain traction (productivity) at increasingly wider radiuses.

If you are defining service areas that extend out to the 5 or 10 mile radius level, you need to have a substantial amount of location authority established for that business... which means a substantial footprint of your citation distribution portfolio - both in scale (volume) and magnitude (authority)... and no... Yext, Moz Local, HIBU, etc... are not going to cut it... sorry!

Again, the main driver of location authority is the scale and magnitude of your citation distribution portfolio -- both in structured and unstructured citations.

You can read more about location authority here:

Location Authority - The Power to Rank in Local Search

Location Authority & Local SEO: learn how location authority fuels your power to get found by customers in Google Maps and Google local search. READ MORE!

bippermedia.com

I hope this reply was helpful... let me know if you have any questions!

Bobby

 

[Nathan_NZ]

@Nathan_NZ, here are a few comments from threads on this very forum that may answer your question (from trusted experts, including @whitespark himself!):

Huge Change for Service Area Businesses in Google My Business | Service Area Businesses

A few things to note about this update which is rolling out to all SAB's. 1. SAB's will now be able to create a listing without designating an address (Verification may still be required in most instances) 2. Increased focus on place-based service areas to provide human-readable descriptions 3...

www.localsearchforum.com

Service Areas and Physical Address | Google Business Profile (GBP) & Google Maps

Does anyone on here use a physical address in their GMB and have areas served? I always thought areas served would only be useful for businesses who don't want to show their address but I've been seeing some people do both. Is there any benefit from doing this?

www.localsearchforum.com

Add Service Area Tab - GMB? | Service Area Businesses

Hello Fellow Members, I am managing a few brick and mortar stores for a business, I am relatively new to GMB management. Kindly ignore to my stupid question if it is. Can Add Service Area be used by physical store businesses? Thanks Javed

www.localsearchforum.com

Thanks. This is a big help and has answered my specific question.

 

[Rich Owings]

Just curious -- has anybody else seen a benefit from adding service areas?

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I think the standard advice currently in the industry is that it doesn't work. You never know when Google could flip the switch though. They would do it and not even tell us. So I keep waiting for it to work. And when it does, it will probably be reported by the people looking for it, which means the people we are discounting as people who are wrong about it working currently. So it gets a little risky sometimes to discount people going against the grain. One day, one of them could be very, very, very right. But we won't listen because of all the "cried wolf". Keeps me interested in people when they say it works but so far has left me disappointed haha.

 

[Cordell Crowley]

Just curious -- has anybody else seen a benefit from adding service areas?

All of our clients are florists/flower shops, and so they have the walk-in store but also do floral deliveries to certain postal codes/surrounding nearby towns and whatnot.

For businesses in the larger metropolitan areas like Houston and Los Angeles, we don't really notice a huge difference in ranking but it can help for showing up on searches for nearby suburbs and whatnot. For the smaller areas where a business can deliver to 10+ different small towns in a wide area, specifying the service areas is actually a huge help for showing up more prominently in the neighboring towns that are different from their address.

I can't speak for how it would work for other business types, but for our florists, it makes a big difference.

 

[areadirector]

We decided to test the idea of including surrounding zip codes as service areas... and we really dove in on this by including every zip code within and around each of the surrounding areas they want to target.

We also included the city names of the major adjacent city and all surrounding cities that coincided with the zip codes.

So in essence, we included every zip code and every city name in their service areas.

Hey Bobby, I am working on this myself. Are you adding the zip codes in schema using the service area type?

 

[mattstephenskc]

Hi Nathan! This is a great question... and let me give you feedback based on our experience with a few of our clients.

We've actually tested this for one of our clients that has 2 business locations / businesses: a landscape business and a garbage pickup business; however, their offices are located in a small suburb town just outside of a larger metro area.

They, of course, do landscaping and garbage pickup all over the surrounding areas and the majority of their business comes from the adjoining large metro area.

So by all definitions... they are the typical example of a "service area business".

We decided to test the idea of including surrounding zip codes as service areas... and we really dove in on this by including every zip code within and around each of the surrounding areas they want to target.

We also included the city names of the major adjacent city and all surrounding cities that coincided with the zip codes.

So in essence, we included every zip code and every city name in their service areas.

I've attached a screenshot of the list of service areas so you can see what I'm talking about... this is just a small sample size of their total targeted service areas list within their GMB.

I've also included a screenshot of their productivity via GMB Insights of their "Actions" where you can see the huge increases in productivity since implementing this strategy (see attached GMB Insights graph).

In summary... I am definitely a believer in targeting multiple service areas within your GMB as a strategy to expand the presence and exposure for a business in Google local search.

*** BUT.... and this is a big but... this strategy is frivolous without the business / GMB having a substantial amount of location authority.

Any business / location will need enough location authority to compete at a wider radius around their verified location.

Think of this as a "radius of influence" or "radius of authority".

If you have a small amount of location authority, you need to pretty much be standing in or next to your business to see yourself at the top of local search.

If you have a substantial amount of location authority, you can be found and gain traction (productivity) at increasingly wider radiuses.

If you are defining service areas that extend out to the 5 or 10 mile radius level, you need to have a substantial amount of location authority established for that business... which means a substantial footprint of your citation distribution portfolio - both in scale (volume) and magnitude (authority)... and no... Yext, Moz Local, HIBU, etc... are not going to cut it... sorry!

Again, the main driver of location authority is the scale and magnitude of your citation distribution portfolio -- both in structured and unstructured citations.

You can read more about location authority here:

Location Authority - The Power to Rank in Local Search

Location Authority & Local SEO: learn how location authority fuels your power to get found by customers in Google Maps and Google local search. READ MORE!

bippermedia.com

I hope this reply was helpful... let me know if you have any questions!

Bobby

Hey Bobby and @Nathan_NZ,

It's been a few years since this thread was updated, but it's the best one I've read. And it's a debate I'm trying to resolve now. Could you please share an update on how these tactics have panned out since then, including their current effectiveness?

I run marketing for a law firm with offices in 5 metro areas spanning western Missouri to central Kansas, and we're struggling to place well in local pack SERPs for certain practice area searches outside the immediate vicinity of some of our offices. We're working with an agency currently who specializes in the legal industry, and their predominant (if not sole) focus is organic SEO. So we've been working hard at city-specific pages, content, and markup since launching our new website back in March. However, to my knowledge, we aren't doing much if anything to boost "location authority" as you've described it.

Besides your insight on the current effectiveness of building location authority and the use of service areas in GBPs, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the applicability of these tactics to law firm businesses with aspirations to reach a larger geographic metro area without opening offices in each municipality.

Thanks in advance.