Welcome back, this is John Locke and today I want to talk about a big change
that has happened in Google My Business. Most of the people that I have
talked to now have seen this roll out. At the beginning of September,
around September 5th 2019, they made this little change to the page on
editing your service area in Google My Business. What they have done now is
they added this little note that says, you can no longer set your service area
as a distance around your business. If you previously entered a distance around
your business, you will not be able to edit it. Instead you will need to specify
your service area by city, postal code, or other areas. One thing that you can
do is you can add either cities, you can add counties,
you can add states, you can add countries. It doesn't mean that you're going to rank
for that designated area in the map, in Google Maps. In that three-pack map at
the top of the page, when you search locally, you're still going to
probably only rank for your local area. But you are no longer able to set a
radius around your location. You must specify either zip codes, or
cities, or counties, or states, or countries, or a combination of those. Now
you can also, if you don't serve customers at your business address, if
you're a home-based business, you can leave the address field blank. You can
still enter your service area, and you can still enter both your address and
your service area. This is what I do.
Search Engine Roundtable wrote about this on the fifth. This
shows you how long between Google announcing things, and then rolling it
out it generally takes. Today is the 22nd
of September, and this was announced on the fifth, so this is about 17 days.
Yesterday I saw this in my Twitter feed, that people can no longer edit this.
There is not even an option to have the radius around your your place anymore.
This announcement says it's removing the remaining distance based service area
businesses (the radius option). Google is going to be converting them to the closest named area. So Google
said service area businesses currently based on a distance will automatically
be converted to the closest named areas. For example, San Francisco California, or Islington
London.So it would probably be good, if you in the past, if your Google My
Business used a radius around the center of your business, for you to go in and change
this. I guess Google started this process last November. That's almost a year.
Now they're moving to complete this process. so this is what it is. This
is an article that I will be updating. I think I already put a update in here. It
says your service area can no longer be changed to a radius. So I will
add this video to this page. My name is John Locke. My business is Lockedown
Design and SEO. I'm here every single day making videos on SEO. If you have a
question, leave it in the comments below. I'll be happy to answer it, and I'll see
you tomorrow. Until next time, peace.