The verdict
You get twenty service area slots. Listing a town and then also listing the postal codes inside that town spends several slots saying one thing, because the geography overlaps and the smaller entries sit inside the larger one. Twenty is a budget. Spend it on twenty different places.
This is a small thing and I keep finding it, usually on profiles where somebody has clearly tried hard. Twenty slots, all full, and eleven of them describing the same six square miles.
What is happening
Google gives you up to 20 service areas and asks you to be as specific and accurate as possible, with the overall boundary staying within about two hours of driving time.
The instinct that produces the overlap is reasonable: be specific, so use postal codes. Then somebody else adds the town name for clarity. Now the town and the codes inside it are both listed, and the codes are geographically contained by the town. You have said the same thing at two levels of resolution and spent several slots doing it.
The same applies to the other direction, which is more common than you would think: a county or region listed alongside four of the towns inside it.
Why it is a real cost rather than a tidiness complaint
Because twenty is a hard limit and most practices have more than twenty plausible places.
Every slot spent on a redundant entry is a town you could have named and did not. If your catchment realistically covers twenty-six communities and eleven of your slots are duplicated geography, you have named nine of the twenty-six. That is the cost, and it is invisible because the field looks full.
It also makes the list worse to read, and a person reading it is the main reason the field is worth filling in at all, given that service areas do not affect ranking. Google’s own description of local results turns on relevance, distance and prominence, with distance measured from the business to the person searching, so no amount of list-building changes the geometry. The list is for the reader.
Named towns beat everything else
Given a choice between a county, a postal code and a town name, use the town name.
A county covers a lot of ground in two slots and reads as vague to a person deciding whether you are a realistic option. A postal code is precise and means nothing to most people, who do not know which code they live in. A town name is what somebody would say out loud if you asked them where they live, which makes it the version that does the job the field is actually good at.
How to rebuild the list cleanly
- Write out every community you would realistically travel to or draw from. Ignore the limit for now.
- Delete anything that contains another entry. Counties, regions, metro areas. If you have named the towns, the container is redundant.
- Delete every postal code where you have the town. Keep a code only where it identifies an area with no useful name.
- Rank what is left by how likely a patient is to come from there. Not by distance. Commercial reality, not geometry.
- Take the top twenty. If you have fewer than twenty, stop. Padding with places nobody travels from helps nothing.
The wider point
This is the same mistake as claiming both a specific and a general category, and as declaring a region in your structured data alongside the cities inside it. Saying one thing twice at different resolutions feels thorough and is just a way of using a budget up.
Ranking the list properly is the part worth spending time on, and I have set out how I tier one in twenty towns, tiered.
The short version
- Twenty slots is a budget. Overlapping entries spend it twice on one place.
- A postal code inside a town you have already named adds nothing.
- So does a county alongside its towns. Same mistake, opposite direction.
- The cost is the towns you did not name. Invisible, because the field looks full.
- Prefer town names. It is what a person would say out loud.
- Rank by likelihood of a patient coming from there, not by distance.
- Fewer than twenty is fine. Padding helps nothing.
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 local SEO is where the profile and the pages behind it get treated as one job.
