A Google Business Profile for a business with no shopfront

A business that goes to its customers can still have a Google Business Profile. Google's rules say to leave the address off, list the areas you serve, and use the name on your door.

By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 29 October 20262 minute read3 sources

Service-area businesses are allowed one profile

Google's guidelines for representing a business say a business is eligible if it has a physical location customers can visit, or if it travels to customers where they are, and that one with no storefront is allowed one service-area Business Profile. Trades, mobile services and consultants who visit their clients fit that description.

The guidelines tie eligibility to that physical presence. A virtual office is not eligible unless it is staffed during business hours, and the page does not offer a route for a business that only ever deals with customers online.

The same guidelines say a service-area business should hide its address from customers. Google's service-area help page puts it as an instruction: if you do not serve customers at your business address, remove the address and enter only your service area.

Setting the service areas

Google allows up to 20 service areas, set as towns, postcodes or other areas, not as a radius around a point. Its guidance is that the whole area should not stretch more than about two hours' driving from where the business is based.

A business that serves the whole country from one base therefore cannot honestly list all of it as service area under that guidance. List the counties or towns you really cover, and let the website say the rest.

The name, the number and the link

Three rules from the same guidelines are the ones most likely to matter to a small business.

1The name is your business's real-world name. Google's guidelines say adding unnecessary information to it, such as keywords or a town, is not permitted.
2The phone number connects to the business and is under its direct control, and neither the number nor the link redirects through anybody else.
3One profile per business. Google says more than one can cause problems on Maps and Search.

What decides where it appears

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance (how well the profile matches the search), distance (how far the business is from the person searching) and prominence (how well known it is). It also says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

Relevance is the one you control most: a complete profile, the right category, and a website that says the same things. A profile and a site that disagree about what you do, or where, give anyone reading both two answers. How assistants find and cite a business covers the website side.

Check the website it points to

The profile's link sends people to your website, so the site needs to be on Google too. If it is not, six checks find why.

Setting up the profile is a priced extra on our Websites page, at €195, and the larger site includes it.

Sources

Free, and no account needed

Price the website and the profile together

Pick the site and the extras, the Google Business Profile set-up among them, and see the build price and the yearly running cost from our published list.

Run the free check

The profile and the site, saying the same thing

A landing page or a full site that loads fast on a phone and gets every enquiry to you, with your Google Business Profile set up to match it and the code and the domain handed over in your name.

See the Websites page

Who wrote this

Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital

Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the legislation itself before it is published, and each article shows the date it was last checked.

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