SEO for service-area businesses

What Google means by a service-area business

Google’s guidance for service-area businesses describes a business that visits or delivers to customers directly but does not serve them at its own address. Such a business can have a Google Business Profile with the address hidden and a set of areas it serves instead. A business that does both, a showroom customers visit and fitters who travel, keeps the address and adds the areas.

The important point is that hiding the address does not hide the location. Google still knows where the business is based, and distance from the searcher still affects where it appears.

How far can you rank?

This is the question every service-area business asks, and the honest answer is: not as far as the area you have set. Google says distance is one of the three factors in local ranking, alongside relevance and prominence. A plumber based in Acomb will appear more readily for searches in Acomb than in Malton, whatever the profile says about Malton.

What extends the reach is prominence, being known in the places you want to rank, which in practice means reviews from customers there, pages about your work there and mentions from businesses there. The area you set on the profile is a statement of what you serve, not a ranking lever.

Setting up the profile

• Choose the primary category that describes the business most precisely, and add secondary categories only for things you genuinely do.
• Set the address as hidden if customers do not come to you; keep it visible if they do.
• Add the areas you serve, towns, districts or postcodes, honestly. A list that stretches across three counties is not believed, by customers or by Google.
• List your services, with descriptions, in the words customers use.
• State your real hours, including whether you genuinely answer out of hours.
• Add photographs: the van, the team, the work. A service-area business has no premises to show, so the work has to do it.

One profile per business, not one per town. Creating profiles for places where you have no premises breaks Google’s guidelines and risks suspension of the real one.

Pages for the places you serve

Your website can do what the profile cannot: speak to each place. A page for a town works when it is genuinely about your work there, jobs you have done, customers you have served, the kinds of property and problem that are common there, and fails when it is the same paragraph with the town name swapped.

A sensible structure for a service-area business:

• A page for each main service, written for the whole area you cover.
• A page for each place where you do a meaningful amount of work, with real detail from it.
• Reviews and photographs on those pages that mention or show the place.
• No pages for places you have never worked in. They will not rank, and they make the rest look like the same thing.

This is the approach we take with our own area pages: one office in York, and a page only for places we genuinely serve, each saying honestly how far away it is.

Proof without premises

A customer choosing a business that will come to their home wants to know it is real and trustworthy. Without a shop to look at, they rely on:

• Reviews, recent and from their own area, mentioning the job.
• Photographs of the people and the work, not stock images.
• Registrations and insurance, stated where they look for them.
• A real telephone number that is answered, and a real name behind the business.

These are also, not by coincidence, most of what prominence is made of.

Measuring it

Because a service-area business ranks differently in different places, measure it that way. Check your map visibility from two or three points across your area, not only from your base; track which towns your enquiries come from; and ask every new customer how they found you. Our guide to checking your ranking covers the method.