If you’ve been following Whitespark, you know that our annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey has always shown that setting service areas on your Google Business Profile does not help you rank better in those areas.

However, this survey doesn’t stop people from disagreeing and discussing their various opinions online.

I recently took part in one of these discussions on Twitter, which ended up with me doing in-depth research on the topic in the hopes of clearing up these service area questions once and for all.

I’ll share my research process and results in this article. But first, let me set the scene.

What are Service Areas

There is a section in the location settings on your Google Business Profile called “Service area”. This section allows you to specify which parts of the city/state you provide your services in, and it’s typically used by businesses that visit customers in their homes or travel to various locations for their work (such as plumbers or electricians).

Basically, service areas are meant to show people that even though your business is located on the south side of the city, you service customers on the north side, too.

For the longest time, SEOs have known that this section does not impact local rankings. This has also been a huge point of frustration for service area businesses, which, thanks to Google’s local algorithm, can only rank in a small radius around the address associated with their Google Business Profile (this radius varies based on how competitive the area is). This is true regardless of whether the business chooses to display or hide their address on the Profile.

The Twitter Beef

Every self-respecting local SEO knows that Google changes things all the time, so, while something may have been true for years, it might not stay true forever. This is why, despite all the research that shows service areas do not impact rankings, I always keep an open mind.

Back in May, my colleague Jim Allen reached out to me with an intriguing screenshot of his rankings before and after setting service areas:

At that point, I had seen multiple people talk about similar results, so, I published a post about it on LinkedIn and Twitter. Here’s what I said:

This post came across the feed of a guy named Chaz, who replied, “This isn’t new. Lol too many local SEO’s just don’t test and blindly parrot bad advice from Google Business ‘product experts’.”

He then went on to say, “I love how you say local SEO’s always knew service areas had no impact, as if you speak of the entire industry. Let me help you clarify your statement a little, Local SEO’s that blindly follow the pack and didn’t do their own single variable testing always accepted.”

My statement that “local SEOs have always known service areas don’t impact rankings” is based on the Local Search Ranking Factors, which is an annual survey of the most well-respected, well-known “product experts” in local search, whose literal job is to do local SEO research and testing all the time.

And all their valuable expertise from “the trenches of local SEO” then gets surfaced in this survey.

But that wasn’t good enough for Chaz, who proceeded to tag me in his Facebook Group and challenge me to share my tests.

So I did.

My Service Areas Tests

I wanted my tests to be very controlled. I chose to conduct them on this Google Business Profile because I had not made any changes to it that could interfere with my data. This way, I could test the impact of service areas and service areas only.

Here’s how the tests went down:

Test 1

May 13th

1. The following service areas were already set on the Profile:

• Fresno, CA, USA
• Los Angeles, CA, USA
• San Fransisco, CA, USA

2. I removed all of these service areas in order to start with a clean slate.

3. I set up the Local Falcon grid rank tracker to track this business’s local rankings every day.

4. I had already been tracking this business’s rankings in the Whitespark Local Rank Tracker for a while, so I let this tracker keep running for the duration of this test as well.

May 21st

I changed the service area of the GBP to be Clovis, CA 93611, which is in the upper right corner of the ranking grid.

May 27th

I checked the rankings in the Local Falcon grid tracker. Here is what they looked like compared to May 21st:

If you look at the upper right corner of both grids, you will see that there was no change in the business’s rankings in the service area being tested.

I also checked the Whitespark Local Rank Tracker, which showed me very similar results:

I had no luck with this zip code. Rankings stayed the same despite the addition of a service area to the Google Business Profile.

Test 2

My first test failed, but I decided to try again. This time, I picked an area that was closer to the business’s physical location – Fresno, CA 93710 – which is the next zip code over from where the business is located.

Here’s how it went:

May 27th

I changed the service area to be Fresno, CA 93710.

June 2nd

I checked if adding this closer service area had any impact on the GBP’s rankings:

Again, there was no ranking impact.

Conclusion

Based on these tests, I can conclude that adding service areas to your Google Business Profile still has no impact on local rankings.

But it’s important to remember that Google is changing things all the time, so it’s possible that one day service areas might become a local ranking factor.

As Alec Baldwin said in Glengarry Glen Ross, “ABT”:

A – Always
B – Be
T – Testing

Always be testing!