The verdict
Twenty slots, ranked in three tiers rather than picked off a map. Tier one is the communities your patients actually come from. Tier two is realistic secondary catchment. Tier three only gets used if slots are spare. Ranking by commercial reality rather than by radius is the whole method, and it produces a shorter, better list than drawing a circle.
The usual way this gets done is a circle on a map and everything inside it, in whatever order the interface accepted them. That produces twenty entries where the fifteenth is a village nobody has ever driven from and a community that supplies a tenth of the practice sits at number nine.
Here is the version I build for clients, which takes about half an hour and is done once.
Tier one: where patients actually come from
Start from the practice management system, not from the map. Postcodes of active patients, sorted by count.
That list is usually shorter and stranger than anyone expects. Practices are routinely surprised by which neighbouring community supplies the second-largest share, and it is almost never the one closest by road. Referral patterns, commuting routes and which supermarket people use all distort it.
Everything on that list goes in first, in that order, regardless of distance.
Tier two: realistic secondary catchment
Places you get occasional patients from, plus places that are genuinely plausible on the same basis as tier one but where you currently have nobody.
The test for a tier two entry is whether you could name the reason somebody would come. A transport link, a large employer, a referral relationship, a neighbouring community with no equivalent practice. If the only reason is “it is nearby”, it is tier three.
Tier three: only if slots are spare
Small communities on the edge of the range, satellite villages, places you would accept a patient from but would not expect one.
These go in last and only if you have not reached twenty. This is the tier where padding happens, and padding is the thing to resist: a list of twenty where five are aspirational reads worse than a list of fifteen that is all true.
What to leave out deliberately
The exclusions that improve the list
- Counties and regions. They cover tiers one and two in two slots and read as vague to a person. Named towns are what somebody would say out loud.
- Postal codes inside towns you have already listed. Overlapping geography, and it spends the budget twice, which is its own mistake.
- Anything past the point where nobody would realistically travel. Google’s outer limit is about two hours of driving time for the overall boundary, with up to 20 areas, but two hours is a cap and not a target. For a clinic the real limit is whatever people will do weekly.
- The city centre, if you are suburban and it is competitive. Listing it does not make you visible there and it dilutes what the list communicates.
What the tiering is actually for
Two things, and neither is ranking.
The first is the person reading. A ranked list that starts with the communities you genuinely serve reads as a real description of a practice. A circle on a map reads as a circle on a map. Nothing in the field moves the geometry, because Google measures distance from the business to the person searching, so the audience for this list is human.
The second is that building it forces the analysis. The half hour spent sorting patient postcodes is worth more than the field it produces, because it tells you which town pages are worth writing and which reviews to ask for. That analysis feeds the three things that actually do help you reach the next town.
The field itself does not affect ranking, which is the point of the post on what service areas are and are not. The list is a by-product of an exercise worth doing anyway.
The short version
- Start from patient postcodes, not a map. The order surprises people.
- Tier one is where patients actually come from, ranked by count, regardless of distance.
- Tier two needs a nameable reason. A transport link, an employer, a referral. Not just proximity.
- Tier three only if slots are spare. Fifteen true entries beat twenty with five aspirational.
- No counties, no overlapping postal codes, no competitive city centre you cannot reach.
- Two hours is a cap, not a target. The real limit is what people will do weekly.
- The analysis is worth more than the field. It tells you which pages to write.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where the catchment analysis turns into a page plan.
