Selecting Your Audit Area
Your audit area is the geographic region SAIGE measures your rankings against. Pick it well and your heatmap actually reflects how customers find you. Pick it badly and you're optimizing for an area where your customers don't live.
The two audit-area modes
Storefront mode
If you have a physical location customers visit (clinic, med spa, law firm office, real estate brokerage), pick storefront mode. SAIGE centers the audit area on your address and expands outward to the typical customer-drive-time radius for your category — usually 3 to 8 miles depending on density.
Service-area mode
If your business goes to the customer (roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping), pick service-area mode. SAIGE asks for the suburbs and zip codes you serve, then audits and ranks across all of them — typically 30–60 surrounding suburbs from one location.
How to set service-area suburbs
From the left sidebar, click Settings → Audit Area. You'll see a map with your business center pinned.
Type each suburb or zip code into the search box. SAIGE auto-suggests against your local geography. Click each one to add it to the area.
The map highlights every suburb you've added. Most home-services businesses cover 30–60 suburbs from one location. If a suburb you serve isn't appearing, type the zip code instead.
Save and SAIGE recomputes your audit area for the next ranking sweep, usually within 24 hours.
Why the audit area matters for ranking
Google's local algorithm weights proximity heavily. You can rank #1 in your immediate suburb but #15 in a suburb 12 miles away even though you serve both. The audit area tells SAIGE which markets to optimize for in parallel — geo-tagged photos, suburb-mentioned post copy, and citations spelled with the right service-area variants.
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