Service area businesses, and when to be one

A service area business is one that goes to the customer instead of the customer coming to it. A plumber, a mobile dog groomer, a domestic cleaning company, a wedding photographer, a man with a van. A Google Business Profile for this kind of business should have a designated service area and a hidden address,¹ and Bing Places lets businesses that bring services to the customer hide their address in the same way.² Getting it right matters more than most owners expect.

What the setting actually does

When you mark a profile as a service area business, the street address is hidden from public view. What shows instead is the area you say you cover. You still give Google the address, because it needs a real location to verify the business, but customers do not see it. Bing works the same way: the address can be hidden in search results, but a current address is required for the account.³

That is the whole feature. It is a display change and a verification arrangement. It is not a way to appear in places you are not.

Who should use it

• Anybody working from home, where publishing the address is both unwanted and, in a residential area, sometimes a problem with the neighbours.
• Trades and mobile services that visit customers and never receive them.
• Businesses in a unit or yard that is not set up for visitors and has no signage.

Who should not

• Anywhere customers actually come to. A shop, a clinic, a salon, a restaurant. Hiding the address there is a straightforward loss.
• A hybrid business where some customers visit and some are visited. A hybrid business can show its storefront address and set a service area as well,⁵ and that is the correct setup.

How to set the service area

Set it to the area you genuinely serve and would actually travel to. You define it by listing up to 20 cities, postcodes or other areas, and the overall area should not be more than about two hours' driving time from where the business is based.⁵ The temptation is to draw it as wide as possible on the theory that more coverage means more visibility, and it does not work that way. A service area that stretches sixty miles from a one-van operation is not credible, and it does not produce rankings sixty miles out.

A useful discipline: if a customer called from the edge of the area you have drawn, would you take the job at your normal price? If not, the area is too big.

The mistake that gets profiles suspended

Listing an address the business does not operate from. A virtual office, a mail forwarding service, a rented desk visited once, a friend's shop in the town you want to rank in. In my experience this is the single most common cause of suspension for service area businesses, and it is not a grey area. A rented mailing address the business does not operate from, which Google calls a virtual office, is not eligible for a profile,¹ and Bing Places bars a mailing address the business does not operate from in the same way.³

Suspension is not a fine you pay and move on from. The profile disappears, along with its reviews and its ranking history. A suspended profile cannot be seen by the public or managed by its owners until an appeal succeeds, and the appeal needs evidence such as business registration, a business licence or utility bills.⁶ Reinstatement is a slow process with an uncertain outcome. For a business that gets most of its work through the map, it is close to the worst thing that can happen to it, and it is entirely self-inflicted.

Ranking as a service area business

The three factors behind local results still apply, and I have set out how they fit together separately. Distance is measured from your verified address, so a service area business is at its strongest near home and fades outward, exactly like a shop.

What you can do about that is prominence and relevance. Reviews from across the area you cover, which is the closest thing there is to evidence you genuinely work there. Real pages for the places you most want work from, with something specific on each: the jobs you do there, the travel time, the parking situation, a customer from that area. Not a template with the town name swapped, which fools nobody and looks exactly like what it is.

What I would do

Use the setting if customers do not come to you. Draw the area honestly. Never list an address you do not work from. Then accept that you will be strongest near home and build prominence to widen the reach, because that is the only lever that actually moves the boundary.