Interesting case study on service areas
I WAS WRONG 😞
The conclusions I came to in this video and post are WRONG. It wasn’t the service areas that affected the rankings.
Check out my update post to see what it was!
Local SEO experts generally agree that setting service areas in your Google Business Profile does not affect ranking. This was also voted one of the top 10 myths in the Local Search Ranking Factors survey.
However, I’ve recently come across some indications that setting service areas might impact ranking. Watch my video below to learn more.
It is widely believed that setting the service areas in your Google Business Profile does not affect ranking. It actually ranks #7 on the local search ranking factor myths, and I even made a video mocking people who believe this myth.
But wait a damn minute because something interesting came up recently that makes me question this.
So Jimmy sends me this tweet back on October 30th, saying that he and his wife have a Christmas light installation business: “Our catchment area is half our county and half the county north of us. I thought I’d try to show our home address. Instant drop to all geos more than 15 miles away.”
Very interesting. Let me explain in more detail what is happening here.
His actual business is registered in Saratoga Springs, which is not overly populated. As a company that installs Christmas lights, he actually wants to drive more traffic to the larger areas in the north: South Jordan, Draper, Lehi.
What happened was that his address was not previously visible on the list. Then he turned on the address and his ranking dropped! After a few weeks, he said, “Well, that doesn’t work,” and decided to hide his address again.
Once he hid his address, boom, all of his rankings in those service areas resurfaced.
Well, this is the very first evidence I’ve ever seen that setting service areas on your Google Business Profile has any ranking impact, so I’m very excited.
If you have a business in the area that you could test, or if you have already seen this phenomenon on your Google business profiles, please let me know. I would like to see more evidence of this. This is new information for the local search industry and we would like to have more data on it.
Good, see you next time.
AUTHOR
Darren Shaw
Darren Shaw founded Whitespark in 2005. The web design and development company, however, Darren’s passion and curiosity for all things local search led Whitespark to launch the Local Citation Finder in 2010, followed by Local, mainly focus on local SEO rank tracker.
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