How Google builds the list for a town
Search for your work from two towns twenty minutes apart and you get two different lists. In your own town you're on it. In the next town over, the one you drive to every week, you're not. It's got nothing to do with how good your work is. Google just doesn't know you work there.
Google works out where the person searching is standing and builds the list from businesses it believes work there. It gets that from what the business's own website says and from the Google listing that goes with it. A site that names one town gets one town.
Say you do garage floors out of Eau Claire. Someone in Chippewa Falls, 13 miles up Highway 53, searches for garage floor coating and gets a list of names. If your site only talks about Eau Claire, you're not on it.
Where word of mouth stops
Word of mouth only goes as far as your customers' friends. Everyone else grabs their phone and searches. That's most of the people in the next town, and they've never heard your name.
Google won't say your name for you unless your site gives it a reason to. A crew that works in Chippewa Falls three days a week still isn't on the Chippewa Falls list if the website never says the town's name.
What a page for a town has to be
The fix is a page on your site for that service in that town, written like the rest of your site. Not a mention of the town on your home page, and not one page copied for every town with the name swapped. A page like that has nothing to say about the town, and Google has no reason to show it.
A real page says what the service is, that you do it in that town, what the work is like there, and how to reach you. It has your name and your number on it, the same ones as your Google listing. One page for each service in each town you work in, and every one of them written.
It takes time. A new site starts from zero on Google and builds over the first few months. Give it that time.
What it did for one contractor
A concrete coating company we built for, out of River Falls, Wisconsin, got a page for every service in every town they drive to, on both sides of the St. Croix. In the same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site, they came up on Google 5.9x more often and got 2.7x more visits, and they show up in 27 towns across Wisconsin and Minnesota.
The towns didn't change and the work didn't change. What changed is that their website now says, town by town, what they'd been telling people at the counter for years.