Skip to content

Learn

Do I need a Google listing for every town I work in?

No. Google's rules give a business one listing for each real location it staffs, and a company that drives to its customers usually has one. Instead of extra listings you set a service area on the listing you have, and you put a page on your website for each job in each town. Extra listings at addresses you don't staff get taken down.

What Google allows

One listing per location, and a location means a place with your staff at it during the hours you say you're open. A mailbox rented in the next town isn't one. Neither is a friend's garage, a co-working desk you don't sit at, or an address you pay for and never visit.

On the listing you do have, there's a service area setting where you name the towns you drive to. That's the built-in answer to the question, and it's the one Google intends you to use.

What happens when somebody tries it anyway

Fake locations are one of the things Google's spam team works on hardest, because they're the most common abuse of the map. A listing at an address you can't verify gets suspended, and the suspension can land on your real listing as well.

That's the whole risk in one sentence: a listing that was working, gone, while you appeal. It's a bad trade for a listing that was never going to hold.

What the service area setting does

It tells Google, and a person reading your listing, which towns you'll drive to. Put your real range in it and keep it honest. A service area covering half the state on a two-truck company doesn't help anything.

Don't expect the setting itself to move you up. A controlled test found no ranking change from editing it, so it's there to describe the business rather than to promote it. The thing that gets you shown in a town is a page about the work you do there.

The part that does the work instead

Each town has its own list, and Google fills it from businesses whose own website says, in plain words, that they work there. One listing plus one real page per job per town is the shape that covers a whole footprint without breaking a rule.

It's also less to keep straight. One phone number, one set of hours, one place to answer reviews, and a set of pages a person can read. When the number changes you change it once. When you add a town you add a page, and nothing on the listing has to move for it.

One customer's before and after

A concrete coating company

River Falls, Wisconsin. Same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site.

more often on Google
3,864 to 22,885
5.9x
more visits from Google
106 to 284
2.7x
Towns they show up in
Wisconsin and Minnesota
27

What this means for you

Open your listing and check three things: that the address is a place you staff, that the service area names the towns you'd really drive to, and that the hours are right. Then look at your website and count how many of those towns have a page. That count is the real gap.

Bindingstone keeps the one listing lined up with the site and builds the page for each job in each town you drive to, which is the part that puts you on another town's list.

Ready to show up in every town you work in?

Your site can be live in about ten days. After that, the towns you drive to can find you.