If you travel to a customer’s location to provide services, you’ll want to ensure that your Google My Business listing has a service area.
What do you mean by service area business?
Many types of companies could be a service area business. Organizations from the following industries are often meet the criteria:
- Towing
- Delivery
- Construction
- Cleaning
- Landscape management
- Transportation
- Pet grooming
What is a Google Maps service area?
The feature lets customers know how far from your base of operations you’re willing to go to serve clients.
Keep in mind that this range is not meant to indicate where you might be willing to ship or mail products. It’s specifically designed to express where employees can physically travel to perform work.
How does Google determine service areas?
Google used to use numerical values to set up service areas, creating a radius to reflect how many miles a company was able to go. To provide more flexibility and a higher degree of specificity, however, this was changed relatively recently.
Now, GMB users instead supply a list of acceptable areas, which might include individual counties and cities or entire states. You’ll find the service area setting in your listing’s information below the address field. Make sure you clear the latter and leave it blank if you don’t want customers coming to you as well!
Be careful about listing the entire United States as your service area
One last tip: Google treats listings with vast service areas, such as those that cover the entire country, with a wary eye. Overextending your reach in an attempt to maximize visibility may increase your chances of getting your listing suspended. Make sure you are specific and honest about your company’s limits!
