Google map pack confusion

[RobWilson]

Hi there!
My name's Rob and I'm the owner of Nimble Nerds in Sydney, Australia. We provide on-site visits to customers at their locations to provide IT Support.

I would love some insight on my confusion please, as I can't get my head around it after months.

I've made individual pages targetting individual suburbs, eg 'computer repairs putney'. I noticed that only suburbs without individual tailored pages were showing in google map pack. So to test it I deleted my Putney page so it would re-index to the home page. Not only did this not result in appearing in that suburb on Map pack I also lost my SERP ranking as well.

Is it still good to make individual pages for suburbs please?
Is this going to negatively affect my map pack rankings in suburbs where they're pointing to the homepage?
Does map pack only point to homepages?

Confused! Ahah

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Rob!

Thank you for bringing your question to the forum.  If I'm correct in understanding that you have a Service Area Business (SAB) then here's what I can tell you:

1. You are not allowed to create multiple GMB listings for your service areas, in most cases. Most SABs are allowed a single listing ... not multiple listings covering all the cities/suburbs they serve.  So, you could be having trouble because you've created ineligible listings. Definitely read Google's guidelines on this: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en

2. It's fine to create whatever pages on your website you want to in order to represent your service area. However, only create such pages if they have a real purpose beyond targeting keywords. Recommend that you read: https://moz.com/blog/rank-beyond-location

3. For your eligible GMB location, you can either choose to point the listing to your homepage or to a landing page on your website. The homepage will typically have higher authority, so some businesses with multiple physical locations do choose to point all of the GMB listings to the homepage URL. Others feel it's better UX to point mutli-location business listings to the location landing pages on the website. It's a choice each brand has to make. So, for a legitimate physical location of the business, if you had a listing pointing to the homepage and then changed the URL to point to a location landing page with lower authority, that could cause a drop in local pack rankings.

I hope this feedback is helpful. Main thing will be for you to determine the number of listings you are eligible for, based on your number of physical locations. Please, feel free to let me know if you have any further questions.