Why your small business is not showing up on Google Maps

I spend my days telling small business owners that their Google Business Profile is costing them calls. Last week I finally read my own.

My profile said I served Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It also said I served the United States. What it did not say, anywhere, was Three Rivers, Michigan, which is the town I actually work from.

I had been running that profile since February.

What was actually in there

A service area business gets to list up to 20 places it serves. Mine had 13 entries, and here they are exactly as Google had them stored:

Ohio, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, United States, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Midwestern United States.

Twelve states, plus "United States," plus "Midwestern United States." No cities. No counties. Not one entry smaller than a state, and not one entry within an hour of my desk.

If you had found me in Google Maps and wondered whether I could actually help a business in Sturgis or Elkhart, my profile gave you no reason to think so. It read like a spam listing.

Why this is worse than it looks

Google publishes a rule on this, and it is not ambiguous. In the guidelines for representing your business, it says the boundaries of a service area "shouldn't extend farther than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based." You can read it yourself in the Google Business Profile guidelines.

Miami is about 18 hours from Three Rivers. I was not slightly over the line.

Overreaching on service area does not get you found in more places. It dilutes how relevant you look everywhere, because you have told Google you have no particular connection to anywhere. For a local business, relevance is most of the game.

The part almost everyone gets wrong

Here is what I had wrong too, and it changed how I fixed it.

Adding a city to your service area does not make you rank in that city.

For a service area business, the heaviest proximity factor is your real address, the one Google hides from the public. Mine is in Three Rivers. That is what Google measures searchers against. Listing Cincinnati would not have earned me a single Cincinnati ranking, and deleting Texas did not cost me anything, because I was never ranking in Texas to begin with.

So what is the service area list actually for? It answers one question for a person looking at your profile and for Google's understanding of your business: do you serve my area, and are you credible about it.

That reframes the job. You are not trying to cover the most ground. You are trying to describe a footprint a reasonable person would believe.

What I replaced it with

I work a corridor. South Bend and Elkhart are about 40 minutes south. Kalamazoo is 35 minutes north. Grand Rapids is a bit over an hour, Lansing about an hour and a half, Fort Wayne about an hour forty five. All four corners sit inside Google's two hour boundary.

The obvious move is to list 20 cities. I did not do that, for one reason: 20 cities leaves gaps. I would have named Grand Rapids and Lansing and left every town between them blank, and the towns between them are where a lot of my work comes from.

Counties are supported in most markets, and one county entry covers every small town inside it. So the list became six cities and fourteen counties:

Cities: Three Rivers MI, Kalamazoo MI, Grand Rapids MI, Lansing MI, South Bend IN, Fort Wayne IN

Michigan counties: St. Joseph, Cass, Branch, Berrien, Kalamazoo, Calhoun, Barry, Allegan, Kent, Ingham

Indiana counties: St. Joseph, Elkhart, Kosciusko, Allen

Exactly 20. Barry County closes the gap between Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids. Kosciusko closes the gap between Goshen and Fort Wayne. Kent covers Grand Rapids plus Kentwood, Wyoming, and Grandville without spending three separate slots on suburbs.

The six cities are in there because I have pages on this site for each of them. Lining up what the profile claims with what the website actually covers is worth the slots.

Two things that will waste your afternoon

You have to delete before you add. My first attempt at this silently failed and I could not work out why. The cap is 20 total. I had 13 in there and was trying to add 20 more, which is 33, so Google just refused the additions without telling me anything. Delete every existing entry, confirm the list is empty, then start adding.

There are two St. Joseph Counties, and if you work near the state line you need both. St. Joseph County, Michigan is Three Rivers and Sturgis. St. Joseph County, Indiana is South Bend and Mishawaka. They look identical in the picker apart from the state suffix. Add the same one twice and you have burned a slot and left a hole in your map without noticing.

What this fixed, and what it did not

I want to be straight about this, because the honest version is less exciting than the case study version.

This did not make my phone ring. Service area is one input. It was a suppressor, and removing a suppressor is not the same as adding demand. I still have work to do on reviews, which is a much bigger lever, and I have written about that separately.

What it did fix is that my profile now describes a real business in a real place. Google can tell where I am and who I serve. A person reading it can tell the same thing. Before, neither was true.

If you want the deeper version of how Maps ranking actually works, that is on the Google Maps visibility page. If you want the broader picture on getting found by people nearby, start with local SEO for small business.

Go look at yours

Open your Business Profile, go to Edit profile, then Location, then Service area. It takes ten seconds.

If you see a state in there, or a region, or the words United States, you have the same problem I had. If your own town is missing, you have it worse.

I fixed mine in about fifteen minutes once I understood the delete-first rule. There is no cost and no downside, and it is the kind of thing that sits there quietly working against you for months.

I am not going to pretend I caught this quickly. I did not. I had a profile telling Google I serve Miami while I was driving to Goshen. If you want a second set of eyes on yours, the free Report Card covers this and about forty other things, and I will tell you what is wrong whether or not you hire me.