Here is a piece of local search that catches out most businesses without a shopfront. If you do not show a public address, Google works out roughly where you are from the areas you say you serve, and it places you in the middle of them. Add enough distant places and that middle stops being anywhere near you.
Why distance is decided for you
Local rankings weigh how close you are to whoever is searching. A business with a shop has an obvious answer. A service-area business does not, so Google infers one, and the inference is only as good as the list you gave it.
What this looks like in reality
Take a studio in a Cheshire village that also serves the surrounding towns. That is a tight cluster, and the middle of it sits close to home, which is what you want. Now add the whole county, and a city thirty miles the other way. The middle of that footprint lands miles from the village, out where nobody is searching for you.
Nothing about the profile looks wrong. The categories are right, the reviews are good, the hours are correct. It simply competes as though it were somewhere else, and the searches happening on its own high street go to businesses that look nearer.
The instinct that causes it
Every business adds the big places for the same reason: it feels like it widens the net. It does not. Listing a city does not make you competitive there, because you are still a long way from everyone searching in it. What it does is weaken you where you were genuinely strong.
What to do instead
- List the towns and villages you actually work in, and stop
- Remove county-wide and city-wide entries unless you are genuinely based there
- Keep the cluster tight around where you want the work to come from
- Cover the wider area with pages on your own site, which is where broad reach belongs
Where the broad reach really comes from
The profile is the wrong tool for covering a region. Its job is to win the searches happening near you. Pages on your own site are what compete for the wider terms, and those have no distance limit at all.
Get the two doing separate jobs and both improve. Ask the profile to do both and it does neither well.
The short version. Your service-area list is a location setting, not a wish list. Keep it tight, and let your website chase the wider area.
