The municipal boundary is the SEO problem, and almost nobody configures for it
Mulund is the last Mumbai suburb on the Central Line before Thane, and the line between the two municipal corporations runs straight through a single continuous commercial catchment. A customer standing in Thane West may be a five-minute drive from a Mulund clinic and a forty-minute drive from anywhere else in Mumbai. They do not know or care which corporation collects their rubbish; they search for what is near them, and they use 'Mulund' and 'Thane' interchangeably depending on which one they happened to type first. Google, however, cares a great deal. Your Google Business Profile's address anchors your relevance to a point, and your service area tells Google how far that relevance legitimately extends. The overwhelmingly common Mulund setup — a verified address, no service area defined at all — tells Google to treat you as relevant to roughly your own street. Every Thane-side searcher who would have walked in sees somebody else. The fix is unglamorous and it is most of the win: define the service area across the boundary to the localities you actually serve, name those localities in on-page content and FAQs so the relevance is corroborated off the profile as well as on it, and keep everything anchored to one real Mulund address. One strong listing that reaches across the line beats two weak ones on either side of it, every time.
