Should I match my competitor's services listed in GBP?

[Jessica C]

I am analyzing a GBP competitor that is doing better than me. One thing that is glaring to me is the amount of services listed vs my GBP.

Competitor has 125 services listed on their GBP. Many are just different word variations of the same type of service. Competitor also has 1 primary category and 2 additional categories. I have 38 services listed (only 15 are the same as competitors), 1 primary category (exact same as competitor) and 3 additional categories (only 1 of these additional categories is the exact same as competitor). Every single one of the competitor's services make sense for my business. On top of this, competitor has service descriptions for 32 of the 125 services and I have none.

My question is: should I add ALL of the services that my competitor has (and descriptions) that I do not have (110 total) to catch up to competitor. I thought it was worth a shot BUT I am not sure if this will trigger suspension. I am so nervous of that lately. Is there a limit to how many services you should add? Do I need to space it out so I don't add too many at once?

 

[zackrobinson]

There is no official service limit, but behavior patterns do matter.

 

[Jessica C]

There is no official service limit, but behavior patterns do matter.

do you think services and their descriptions matter in GBP?

 

[JS Girard]

do you think services and their descriptions matter in GBP?

Descriptions have no effect. You can put them up for other reasons (e.g. explaining the way you do it, or if there's a version you don't do...), but keywords in there are meaningless

Service themselves do have an effect, but it's not particularly strong, even for custom services. It's stronger for custom services that Google doesn't know what vertical it should correspond too... and sometimes they don,t pick what you want (e.g. "heat exchanger cleaning" got assigned to HVAC instead of duct cleaning, which was a blow to one of my clients). I also saw very frequently google liste another service than the searched one in "Offers:" justification even when the matching service was on the GBP.

That being said, I think keywords on the linked webpage have more direct effects than the services. You should still have the services that you offer listed. For obvious reason, do NOT list services on your GBP that you don't actually offer. On the other hand, you can list more variants in your GBP services than on a webpage without looking too stupid. The service list is not so visible that it's likely to turn a measurable fraction of people away when they see a slightly bloated list.

 

[Jessica C]

Descriptions have no effect. You can put them up for other reasons (e.g. explaining the way you do it, or if there's a version you don't do...), but keywords in there are meaningless

Service themselves do have an effect, but it's not particularly strong, even for custom services. It's stronger for custom services that Google doesn't know what vertical it should correspond too... and sometimes they don,t pick what you want (e.g. "heat exchanger cleaning" got assigned to HVAC instead of duct cleaning, which was a blow to one of my clients). I also saw very frequently google liste another service than the searched one in "Offers:" justification even when the matching service was on the GBP.

That being said, I think keywords on the linked webpage have more direct effects than the services. You should still have the services that you offer listed. For obvious reason, do NOT list services on your GBP that you don't actually offer. On the other hand, you can list more variants in your GBP services than on a webpage without looking too stupid. The service list is not so visible that it's likely to turn a measurable fraction of people away when they see a slightly bloated list.

ok thank you. I was mainly wondering if the descriptions have any effect on rankings. A competitor of mine is owning ranking and has quite a few descriptions, so I was thinking there was some effect. All keywords on linked webpage are the same, backlinks same, etc. Im just trying to crack Maps ranking.

Both my competitor and I have services that seem to have been auto-added by Google. a few look more like random search terms. I'm not removing them, but I also dont know how they got there.

 

[zackrobinson]

There is no official service limit, but behavior patterns do matter.

Yes, services and descriptions help Google understand relevance, especially for long-tail queries — but they’re a supporting signal, not a core ranking factor. They work best when aligned with categories, reviews, and strong service pages on the website.