For whatever reasons there has been an uptick in users asking, “Will it affect my rankings if I change my Google My Business page to a SAB (service area business) listing?”.
My answer (under certain circumstances) is no, your rankings should not be affected and to show this I switched my local business page to a service area business listing.
Under What Circumstances Wont Rankings be Affected
As already stated (under certain circumstances) and these are:
- The local business page has been around for at least a year
- There are citations in existence with the location for the business
- You have the address on site and location in structured data, even if using GeoMidpoint for SAB
Changing from Local Listing to Service Area Business Listing
For this test and I would also recommend following this step is to define your area when you change your listing over to SAB. My business is located in Corby which is in the county (state) of Northamptonshire which is in the UK.
So I added these as my service areas – remember as a local listing your address is listed and used to display it to searchers for relevant area based search queries – which you want to maintain!
I added Corby, Northamptonshire and the UK (you don’t need to add the whole country – I did this for this testing).
See: Changing local listing to SAB listing
Ranking Affect of Changing Local to SAB
Change to SAB was made on the 23rd July
Large drop on the 24th of July which recovered by the 27th of July.
Tracking Changes
Note: I only tracked changes that were already in existence (will my rankings be affected).
I tracked for all three locations – Corby, Northamptonshire and the UK.
| Corby – Tracking | |||
| Keyword | Before Change | After Change | Difference |
| corby seo | 1 local pack | 1 local pack | 0 |
| seo corby | 1 local pack | 1 local pack | 0 |
| local seo corby | 2 local pack | 2 local pack | 0 |
| seo services | 2 local pack | 2 local pack | 0 |
| Northamptonshire | |||
| Keyword | Before Change | After Change | Difference |
| corby seo | 1 local pack | 1 local pack | 0 |
| seo corby | 1 local pack | 1 local pack | 0 |
| local seo corby | 3 local pack | 2 local pack | 1 |
| UK | |||
| Keyword | Before Change | After Change | Difference |
| corby seo | 1 local pack | 1 local pack | 0 |
| seo corby | 1 local pack | 1 local pack | 0 |
| local seo corby | 2 local pack | 2 local pack | 0 |
So in terms of local rankings, your positions will not be affected for your initial local area and local search queries.
What you would need to focus on once changing to a service area business is to increase your relevance for your selected areas. This could be in the form of some niche service pages and location pages on site. Depending what the business provides you could also create location work portfolios of work undertaken in those areas.
Am I changing the listing back to a local listing? – No.
I serve customers world wide and very few local businesses actually contact myself, but I am going to remove UK from my listing because Google in its wisdom has still has not figured out the exact definition of the UK and looks very messy.
Online Ownership provides a Google My Business Consulting Service for troubleshooting and ranking issues, feel free to reach out for a no obligation chat.