Addressing my Twitter beef

If you’ve been following Whitespark, you know that our annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey has always been clear on service areas:

Setting service areas on your Google Business Profile does NOT help you rank better in those areas.

Or so we thought.

I recently got into what you might call a “Twitter beef” with a local SEO guy who claimed that service areas do, in fact, impact local rankings. He said that people who believe that service areas have no impact “blindly follow the pack”, whereas he and other local SEOs have long known that they do because they have done their own research.

So, I decided to respond with my own research. Here are my findings that will hopefully settle this debate once and for all 👇️