Service Area or Shopfront: How Google Treats You Differently

Most trade businesses set this up once, in a hurry, years ago. It is worth two minutes now, because getting it wrong is the single most common reason a Google Business Profile disappears.

The two kinds

A business with premises customers visit. A showroom, a workshop with a counter, a yard people come to. You display the address. People can turn up.

A service area business. You go to them. Plumbers, electricians, arborists, mobile mechanics, landscapers. Your address is hidden and you declare the places you cover instead.

Google documents both in its guidance on service areas for your business. The distinction is not cosmetic. It changes what is public, how you are verified, and what gets you suspended.

Which one are you

The test is simple and people talk themselves out of it: does a customer ever come to your address for business?

Not a supplier. Not your bookkeeper. A customer.

If the honest answer is no, you are a service area business and your home address should not be on display. Running a business from home and publishing the address puts it on the map, in Street View, attached to your name. Most people do not want that and do not realise they chose it.

There is a third case worth naming, because it causes most of the confusion. A yard or workshop that customers occasionally visit to collect something, but which is not set up to receive them, is a judgement call. If there is no sign, no parking and nobody there half the week, treat it as a service area business. A profile displaying an address that looks closed when somebody drives past does you no favours.

Why hiding the address does not hurt you

The most common objection: if Google does not show my address, how will it know I am local?

It knows. You give it the address during verification and it keeps using it. Proximity to the searcher is still one of the three things deciding local results, exactly as described in Google's explanation of how local results are ranked.

What changes is what the public sees. Not what the ranking is based on.

What gets profiles suspended

This is the part worth taking seriously, because a suspension removes you from the map entirely and reinstatement is slow and often unsuccessful.

• An address you cannot substantiate. Virtual offices, mailbox services, a mate's commercial unit, a co-working desk you use occasionally.
• Displaying a home address while behaving like a service area business, particularly where the address cannot be verified as a business location.
• Multiple listings for one business at different addresses to cover more ground. This is the one people are most often advised to do by somebody who should know better.
• Keywords stuffed into the business name. "Dave's Plumbing" is your name. "Dave's Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Christchurch 24/7" is not, and it is against the guidelines for representing your business.

That last one is tempting because it sometimes works briefly. It is also one of the easiest things for a competitor to report.

What a suspension actually looks like

Worth knowing so you recognise it rather than assuming you have slipped in the rankings.

The profile stops appearing in the map results and in search. If it was a hard suspension the listing is removed outright; a soft one leaves it visible but unverified and unmanageable. Either way the first sign for most businesses is the phone going quiet, which is a terrible early warning system.

Reinstatement means an appeal with evidence that the business is what you say it is: signage, a rates bill or lease, vehicle livery, licensing. Having that to hand before you need it is sensible. Fixing the cause before appealing is essential, because appealing without changing anything is how businesses burn their attempts.

Setting the service area sensibly

Two mistakes, opposite directions.

Too big. Setting it to the whole region because more must be better. It does not extend your reach, and it makes the profile less clearly about anywhere in particular.

Too vague. Listing a region rather than the towns and suburbs inside it. Name the actual places.

The right answer is the places you would genuinely drive to for a normal job. If you would turn it down, leave it out.

The two-minute check

1. Open your profile and look at whether an address is showing
2. Decide honestly whether customers come to it
3. Look at the service area list and remove anywhere you would not actually go
4. Check the business name is your business name and nothing else

Most profiles I look at fail at least one of those, and all four are free to fix. It is the cheapest part of the local search work and the part most likely to be quietly costing you the map.

If you have not set the profile up at all yet, start here instead and make this decision as you go, because changing it afterwards is more disruptive than choosing correctly on the day.