Table of Contents
What is a Service Area?How to manage Service Areas in the Platform?How does it work?Which combinations can be managed through the platform?Are multiple service areas supported by Google? How many?Are we overwriting the Service Areas?What is a Service Area?
The service area is for businesses that visit or deliver to local customers. For example:
- A business that visits or delivers to customers, but doesn't serve customers at its business address (e.g. a plumber, private lessons or cleaning service).
- A business that serves customers at its business address, but also visits or delivers to customers (e.g. a restaurant that also delivers food).
If your business serves customers within a specific service area, you can list it to define the area your business operates in. Listing your service area helps let customers know where you'll go to visit or deliver to them.
How to manage Service Areas in the Platform?
Keep in mind that this functionality is currently only supported for Google. If you add a service area in the platform via the user interface or the API then we will update the ServiceAreaBusiness objects on Google Business Profile.
Service Areas can only be managed on a per-location basis in the platform, via api but not via the export function.
For more information, read about Service Areas for GBP here
How does it work?
It is available as a field in Location’s Basic Data tab where you can define the name of the relevant service area. You'll need to specify your service area by city, postal code, or other area(s), like San Francisco, CA or Islington, London.
Take into account that this feature is category-based and not every category would support it (e.g. gas station, coffee place).
The autocomplete feature pulls the suggestions for the area from Google.
Note: Please also take note of this change on GBP
Service-area businesses that used to be based on a distance (=setting a service radius of XX miles/km from your business location) are no longer supported on Google and all locations that used to have a radius are automatically converted to the closest named area. (September 3, 2019)
Please find the article here
Which combinations can be managed through the platform?
There are multiple combinations that can be set up depending on the business needs:
- location with just address
- location with the address & service areas (’hybrid’ locations)
- location with just service areas
Google does not allow having none of the settings mentioned above.
Read more about the different BusinessTypes in the Google Business Profile API documentation here.
Are multiple service areas supported by Google? How many?
Google currently supports up to 20 service areas per location. If more are needed, we recommend expanding the existing ones to cover larger areas.
What happens when a Google Business Profile location is connected to the platform?
When the connection is established, we detect the existing Service Areas and store them in the location's "Profile suggestions" tab.
Note: Release of the Service Area feature in the platform
Release 3.74 - Prior to releasing this feature to avoid changing Google Business Profile profiles for existing customers, we imported all Service Areas from GBP into locations in the platform. (September 10th, 2019)
Are we overwriting the Service Areas?
This field is managed like any other field:
- If the location is hybrid and has no Service Area defined in the location profile, we delete it in GBP. (e.g. if the customer didn’t accept the Service Area suggestion prior to connecting/syncing)
- If the location is Service Area-only and has no Service Area in the platform, we use the default service area 'zip code'.