Google is making it easier for businesses that service a particular area to get found by consumers searching for services like theirs in Google Maps and Search. In a recent post on The Keyword, SMB Product Lead for GMB Tom Pritchard shared the details.
“Every day, you find a new challenge in a new location across the areas you serve. You might be a plumber or an electrician or a landscaper, but above all you’re a business owner. We’ve recently made a few updates to Google My Business, so you can now share your service areas and information about your business via Google Maps and Search—so you can get found and tap into the many people searching for businesses like yours everyday.”
Developed by the SMB team, these updates also offer enterprise and multi-location brands the opportunity to increase the visibility of your service-area locations in local search. Here’s what’s new…
A New Set-Up Wizard for Service Area Businesses
Google aims to make it easier for service area businesses to get onboarded in GMB with a wizard tailored for the unique needs of businesses without a physical location. It allows the business to specify a service area rather than a static address.
Image credit: Google Keyword Blog
Service Areas Can Be Designated by Zip Code or City
Say you are a plumbing brand with thousands of licensed service area plumbers across the country. You may have dozens within a single large city. You can be precise in specifying which areas of large cities each of the individual businesses serves by using zip codes to define each one.
Or, where multiple cities are being served by a single franchisee or owner, you can have a single GMB presence for them, too.
Edit Your Service Areas As Needed
Once you’ve defined the service area for a location, you are not locked in to that area. The settings can be adjusted as needed. Inside the GMB dashboard, you can also edit the “service area” and “storefront address” fields separately, removing one or the other if it is not applicable to that service area business.
Bringing It Together: Manage Your Service Area Businesses At Scale
Claiming, setting up and optimizing your GMB profile for a small business is one thing. Multi-location brands and enterprises face unique challenges in ensuring brand controls and consistency while empowering local franchisees, managers, and owners to manage their local profiles across hundreds or even thousands of service areas.
Rio SEO’s Open Local Suite is built for brands like yours. Local Pages can provide a dynamic locator and responsive pages for each of your service areas to drive engagement from online search to calls for local service. Local Listings gives you unprecedented control of your online listings across the brand, ensuring the type of data accuracy that instills trust in search engines and consumers alike.
Our team can create a custom solution to claim, set up and optimize all of your service area GMB profiles, enhancing your online presence and driving business results in all of your service areas.
Take advantage of our free local audit today and discover the opportunities awaiting you across all of your local markets.
