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The towns you put on the map, and the ones you leave out
You leave this lesson with the list of towns you actually cover, pulled straight from your own calendar, not drawn in broad strokes on the map.
By Yodai · Published on September 6, 2026 · Updated on October 12, 2026
Google lets you mark your service area with up to 20 zones: cities, zip codes, or other areas. It won't let you set a radius in miles around your home base. The temptation is to fill all 20 or mark the whole county: if you work in one town, you add all the ones around it too, and the main city while you're at it. More places, more searches, you think. But Google asks that the area be as specific and precise as possible, and that its edges stay within about a two-hour drive of your business. And in a town where nobody knows you and you don't have a single review, you're competing with the businesses that actually work there.
The question isn't how many towns fit on the map. It's how many you can actually reach on any given Tuesday without throwing off your whole day.
What Google looks at behind the area
If your listing doesn't show a storefront, the service area is the only thing telling people where you work. And marking it doesn't make Google show you the same way in every one of those places: according to Google's own help, local results are ranked mainly by relevance, distance, and prominence, which is how well-known the business is, and that factors in things like reviews. If you say you cover fifteen towns and all your reviews come from two of them, you've got nothing backing you up in the other thirteen.
Marking the whole county is easy, but it's blind: it lumps together a town 10 minutes away on the highway with another 40 minutes down a mountain road. Writing the list by hand forces you to decide one by one, and that decision is what protects you.
- 1Pull up your calendar from the last three months
Write down every job and the town where it happened. A notebook or a spreadsheet works fine, you don't need anything fancier. - 2Count how many times each town shows up
A town with just one job in three months isn't your zone, it was a one-off that month. - 3Set a time limit, not a mileage limit
Decide how long you're willing to drive without eating into your margins: 30 minutes, 40, whatever works for you. Cross off anything outside that, even if it looks close on the map. - 4Write the final list on your listing
Town by town, using the official name. No "and surrounding areas," no listing the whole county.
- Marked in one shot, without thinking town by town
- It pulls in areas you've never worked, and you compete there with nothing to back you up
- If your vehicle or your workload changes, it goes stale without you noticing
- You write in each town yourself, one by one
- It matches the jobs and reviews you already have there
- You review it every few months as your workload shifts
Which to pick: Go with the hand-picked list almost every time. If you're in an area of very small, scattered towns that don't fit in 20 names, use their zip codes or a broader area that groups them, if Google offers it, without going past what you actually cover day to day.
With that breakdown, the list almost writes itself. Towns A, B, and C make the cut because there's repeat work there and, with any luck, a review or two backing it up. Town D stays off the list this time, even if you did good work there; if it comes up again a few times at your next review, then you add it. Your listing ends up reading exactly like this: Service area: Town A, Town B, Town C, no "and surrounding areas."
When to update the list again
You don't write the list once and forget it. Every three or four months, count up the jobs by town again, just like you did the first time. If a new town starts showing up repeatedly, add it. If one you had hasn't come up in six months, drop it. Adding and removing towns from the list costs you nothing: the change goes through Google's review and, once approved, can take up to 48 hours to show. What doesn't help you is leaving places on there forever where you no longer work: your listing ends up promising something you can't deliver anymore.
- You now have the list of towns you actually cover, counted straight from your own calendar, not drawn in broad strokes on the map.
- Any town with fewer than two or three jobs in the last few months is out
- You know how often to revisit the list to add or drop towns as your workload changes
- Next lesson: the postcard Google sends you to verify your listing, and why it doesn't reveal your address to whoever sees it