SEO for Service-Area Businesses | How-to Guide

How plumbers, cleaners, mobile mechanics and other businesses that travel to customers should set up their Google profile, service areas and website without breaking Google's address rules.

If you go to your customers rather than them coming to you, Google calls you a service-area business. That label changes how your profile should be set up, and getting it wrong is one of the most common reasons local listings get suspended.

What counts as a service-area business

Google's Business Profile Help describes service-area businesses as ones that visit or deliver to customers at their location. Examples are plumbers, cleaners, dog walkers, locksmiths and mobile hairdressers. A hybrid business serves customers at its premises and also travels, like a pizza shop that delivers or a garage with a mobile repair van.

Setting up the profile

  • Hide the address if customers do not visit. Google asks you to remove the address from public view when you do not serve people there, for example when you work from home. You still give it to Google privately for verification.
  • Add service areas. You can list cities, postcodes or regions. Google's help pages ask that the overall area should not extend farther than about two hours' drive from where the business is based.
  • Do not create extra profiles for each town you cover. One business, one profile, unless you have genuinely separate staffed locations.

What service areas do and do not do

Listing a town tells customers where you work. Google's help on service areas does not say that listing a town makes you rank there, and its local ranking help still names distance as a factor. So adding thirty towns will not make you appear in all of them. Expect to show most strongly near your base and to compete further out on relevance and prominence.

The website does the heavy lifting

Because your profile cannot show a pin in every town, your website has to make the case. Useful pages include:

  • one page per main service, explaining the job, typical prices and what to expect
  • a clear "areas we cover" section listing the towns you really serve
  • pages for a few key areas only where you have something specific to say: jobs done there, local rules, travel times, local photos
  • contact details and booking on every page

Avoid a hundred near identical town pages with the name swapped. Google's spam policies call those doorway pages. A page earns its place when it would still be useful with the town name removed.

Reviews that mention places

When customers write reviews in their own words, they often mention the job and the town. You cannot script that, but you can ask for reviews from customers across your whole area rather than only the nearest ones.

Listings beyond Google

Bing Places and Apple Business also let you represent a business without a public storefront. Keep the business name and phone identical everywhere, and if a directory forces an address field, follow its option to hide it where one exists.

Measuring it

Use the Performance section of your Business Profile to see calls and website clicks, and Google Search Console to see which pages appear for which town names. If a town you care about never shows up, a genuinely useful page about work there is a better next step than another listing.

Service pages written from what you actually do are the backbone of this. SEO God Mode picks weekly topics from the services on your We.Inc site, so the pages it drafts stay about real work in real places.

Frequently asked questions

Should I show my home address on Google?

Only if customers come to you there. If you travel to them, Google asks you to hide the address and set service areas.

How many service areas can I list?

Google lets you add a list of areas, and asks that the total region stays within about two hours' drive of your base.

Will listing more towns make me rank in them?

Not by itself. Your real location still affects distance. Useful pages and reviews from those areas help more than a longer list.

More in Guides

Website builders for the businesses in this article

Related guides and tools

Start building

Product

Who It's For

Features

Resources

Company

View Sitemap