How to show up on Google Maps without a storefront

What a service-area business is

Google sorts businesses into three kinds: storefronts that customers visit, service-area businesses that go to the customer, and hybrids that do both. If you work from home or a yard and drive to your customers, you are a service-area business, and Google has a setup made for you.

Google's own help pages say a service-area business should hide its business address from customers, and use a plumber working from home as the example. Hiding the address does not hurt you. It is the setup Google asks for.

Step by step: setting up the profile

You can do all of this yourself, free, at Google Business Profile. The order matters:

• Create or claim the profile with your exact business name, the way it appears on your truck, invoices and website. No extra keywords in the name.
• Enter the address you work from. Google uses it to verify you and to place your service area. It does not have to be shown.
• Turn off the option to show your address to customers, so the profile shows only your service area.
• Add your service areas: the towns, counties or ZIP codes you really travel to.
• Choose the fewest categories that describe your core business, starting with the one that fits best.
• Add your phone number, website address and hours, and complete the verification Google asks for.

Rules worth knowing before you start

Google sets a few limits on service areas. Its help pages say you can list up to 20 service areas, and that the whole area should stay within about two hours of driving from where your business is based. Listing every city in the state does not help and can count against you.

Google's guidelines also say a P.O. box is not allowed as a business address, and that a virtual office is only eligible when it is staffed during business hours. If you rent a mailbox to look like you have an office, you are taking a risk with your whole profile.

Your website has to agree with your profile

Google checks what your profile says against the rest of the web, and your website is the first place it looks. If the profile says you serve four towns and the website says nothing about where you work, Google has less reason to believe either.

On your website, keep your business name, phone number and service area the same as on the profile, word for word. List the towns you serve on a page or in the footer. Give each main service its own page that says what the job involves. And never put your home street address on the website if you have hidden it on the profile: the two should tell the same story.

We build every site this way. Your service area goes where customers and search engines can read it, your home address stays off it, and the business details in the page's code match what you tell us, so they can match your Google profile too.

What helps you show up on Google Maps without a storefront

Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence: how well your profile matches the search, how far you are from the person searching, and how well known your business is. You cannot change the distance, so put your effort into the other two.

Fill in every part of the profile. Add photos of your real work, your van and your team. Post the occasional update. Ask every customer for a review, the honest way, which our guide on reviews covers; Google says the number of reviews and their ratings are part of prominence, along with links to your business from other websites. And keep your website clear, fast and up to date, so the people Google sends you find what they came for.

Be patient and skeptical. Nobody can honestly promise you a spot on the map, and anyone who promises one is guessing or breaking Google's rules.

Common mistakes

These are the ones we see most often when we look at a service business online:

• Showing a home address on the profile or the website when the business does not receive customers there
• A business name stuffed with service words and town names
• A different phone number on the profile, the website and the truck
• A service area much larger than the area the business really covers
• A website with one page that never says what the business does or where