If you run jobs all over the place but your Google listing only shows up near your yard, you are basically paying Google with missed opportunities.
This is the situation we see constantly with established construction firms across Scotland and the wider UK. Solid businesses, good photos, good reviews, real teams on the ground – but their Google Business Profile (GBP) is set up like a shop. Or worse, it is set up like they are trying to rank everywhere, so Google quietly stops showing them.
A proper Google Business Profile service area setup is not about gaming the map. It is about making it easy for Google to understand where you genuinely work, and making it easy for the right clients to find you without attracting tyre-kickers from places you would never travel to.
Your service areas in GBP tell Google which locations you serve if you deliver work at the customer’s location. For construction, landscaping, roofing, drainage, joinery, and most trade and contracting work, that is the norm.
What it does not do is magically guarantee rankings across all those towns. Google still relies on proximity, relevance, and prominence. Service areas are a supporting signal, not the main engine.
Here is the practical impact. When service areas are set sensibly, you tend to show more often for searches that include those places, and you are less likely to get weird visibility gaps where Google is unsure whether you actually work there.
When they are set badly, you can trigger the opposite: thin visibility, confused results, and occasionally account verification headaches if it looks inconsistent with the rest of your footprint.
GBP lets you operate as a service-area business, a location-based business (walk-in premises), or both.
If clients do not visit your office or yard, do not pretend they do. Marking yourself as a storefront when you are not can create the wrong expectations, invite irrelevant footfall, and in some cases can cause issues if Google asks for evidence of signage and staffed opening hours.
If you do have a staffed premises where clients can genuinely visit by appointment, you can show an address and still add service areas. Plenty of design-and-build and specialist contractors do this well.
If you are home-based or you operate from a yard that is not client-facing, you are usually better hiding the address and using service areas properly. It keeps you compliant and it aligns with how you actually deliver work.
Google is not allergic to service areas. It is allergic to inconsistency.
You can add up to 20 service areas. They should be places you genuinely serve, and they should line up with what you say on your website, on citations, and in your reviews. If your profile says you serve Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, and Inverness but your website only mentions “Edinburgh and the Lothians”, Google has no reason to trust the profile.
Also, do not add service areas just because you want to rank there. Adding the whole of the UK for a firm that realistically works within 45 minutes of Stirling is the sort of thing that looks like spam to both Google and competitors who know how to report listings.
One more point people miss: your service area does not replace your real-world base. Google still anchors your visibility around where it believes the business is located. That is why a sensible radius strategy matters.
This is where most advice online becomes useless, because it pushes either tiny radii or huge coverage. Real construction businesses have margins, crew logistics, and job values. The right setup depends.
Start with your actual travel tolerance for profitable work. A domestic roofer might happily go 10 to 20 miles for the right job, but not two hours each way for a repair. A commercial contractor may travel further if the contract value supports it.
Then factor in where you want better clients from. If you are sick of being compared to the cheapest quote in a saturated postcode, a smarter play is often to target nearby areas with higher project values or more commercial demand – as long as you have the operational capacity to service them.
Finally, consider your review footprint and brand recognition. If most of your reviews mention Fife and your projects page is full of Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy work, forcing visibility in Perth and Aberdeen is an uphill fight. Build outwards from where you already have proof.
You do not need 20 service areas. You need the right ones.
If you add too many, you dilute the signal and you often end up with a random mix of towns that do not match how customers search. In the UK, people tend to search by town or city plus the service: “groundworks contractor East Kilbride”, “commercial roofing Edinburgh”, “kitchen extension Stirling”. If your service areas are a scattergun list of villages nobody searches for, you are not helping yourself.
For most established firms, 8 to 15 well-chosen locations is usually plenty. That might be a mix of your primary city, key surrounding towns, and a couple of high-value corridors where you routinely win work.
This is the clean, compliant way to do it.
First, decide whether your address should be shown. If customers do not visit your premises, hide it and operate as a service-area business. If you have a genuinely client-facing office, show it and keep your opening hours honest.
Next, in your GBP dashboard, go to Edit profile, then Location and areas, then Service area. Add locations by town/city rather than trying to hack it with broad regions. Google will suggest standard place names – use those.
Now sanity-check the list against how you actually sell and deliver. If you would not send a team there for anything under £25k, but most searches there are for £300 repairs, you might be inviting the wrong calls.
Then align your website. This is the bit that separates firms who “set it up” from firms who make it pay.
Your site should clearly state your core areas in plain English, ideally on the main service pages and the contact page. If you serve Edinburgh, West Lothian, and Falkirk, say that. If you want to win commercial work in Glasgow, make sure your commercial service pages and case studies back it up with real projects, not vague claims.
Finally, give it time and watch the data. Within GBP Insights you can see where requests and calls come from. If one area generates nothing but time-wasters, remove it. If another area quietly produces high-value enquiries, you can double down with a location-focused landing page and stronger proof.
The first is mixing service areas with an address that should not be public. If your listing shows a residential address and you are not set up for visits, you are creating friction and risk.
The second is chasing every surrounding town because “more is better”. It usually is not. You end up competing in areas where you have no brand signals and no content support.
The third is inconsistency across platforms. Your GBP says one thing, your website says another, and your directories are a mess from years ago. Google reads that as uncertainty. Uncertainty means you show less.
The fourth is ignoring category and services. Service areas are not a substitute for correct primary category selection and a properly filled-out services list. If you are a general contractor but your category is set as “Handyman”, you will attract the wrong market regardless of your service area setup.
If you are trying to move upmarket, you might deliberately tighten service areas to filter out low-value work. That can reduce call volume but improve lead quality. For a £1M to £5M contractor, that is often the right direction.
If you are expanding into a new area, adding it as a service area before you have proof can work, but it is slower. The faster route is to pair it with genuine signals: a strong project case study in that location, local supplier relationships that lead to mentions, and reviews from that area. You are giving Google evidence, not just intentions.
If you run multiple crews from multiple bases, you may need separate listings. This is where it gets technical, and where people get suspended by creating duplicate or fake locations. Done correctly, multi-location setups can scale visibility. Done badly, it becomes a clean-up job.
Sometimes your service area setup is fine, but you still are not getting the calls you want.
That is usually because the rest of the system is weak: thin service pages, no conversion structure, poor review velocity, or a profile that has not been actively built with posts, photos, and real-world proof. GBP is a lead channel, not a business card.
If you are serious about turning local visibility into predictable enquiries, you need the listing, the website, and the follow-up process pulling in the same direction. That is exactly the kind of end-to-end build we do at Wicked Spider® – direct with the expert doing the work, not a call centre and not a junior ticking boxes.
A good service area setup makes Google understand where you operate. A good acquisition system makes the right people trust you enough to call.
If you take one action after reading this, make it this: set your service areas to match your real delivery footprint and your commercial goals, then back it up with evidence on your site. When Google sees consistency, the map stops being a lottery and starts behaving like a proper channel.
