You run a real business. You just don’t have a shop. Maybe you’re a sparkie working out of a van, a mobile groomer, a plumber whose “office” is the garage, or a consultant who meets clients at their place. And every guide you read about Google Maps starts with “add your address”, which is exactly the thing you can’t do.
Good news: Google has a whole category for you. It’s called a service area business, and you can absolutely rank without putting your home address on the internet. It just works differently, and most people get the setup wrong in the first ten minutes and then wonder why they’re invisible.
Here’s how to do it properly.
First, set it up as a service area business
Google splits businesses into three types. A storefront (customers come to you), a service area business or SAB (you go to customers), and a hybrid (both, like a bakery that also does catering call-outs).
If customers never come to your address, you’re an SAB. Google’s guidelines are blunt about it: “If you don’t serve customers at your business address, remove your address from your Business Profile.”
Note the word remove, not hide. There used to be a tick box that hid your address. These days you take it out entirely and set service areas instead. You’ll still enter your address during verification so Google knows where you’re based, but it won’t show publicly.
The rules you need to know
- Up to 20 service areas. You set them by city, suburb or postcode. Not a radius.
- About two hours’ driving, max. Google says the outer boundary of your whole service area shouldn’t be more than roughly two hours’ drive from where you’re based. A Christchurch sparkie can cover Rangiora and Ashburton. Not Nelson.
- You have to actually be reachable during your stated hours. Google’s wording is that the business must be “staffed by your team and able to receive customers during its stated hours.” If your hours say 8 to 5 and nobody answers the phone, that’s a problem.
- Edits take up to 48 hours to show once approved.
The stuff that gets you suspended
This is where people come unstuck, usually because someone told them a clever workaround.
- PO Boxes. Straight out. Google: “P.O. boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations aren’t acceptable.”
- Virtual offices. Not eligible unless the office is genuinely staffed during business hours by your people.
- Co-working spaces. Only allowed if that specific office has clear signage, receives customers during business hours, and is staffed by your staff. A hot desk at a shared space won’t cut it.
- Your mate’s address, or your accountant’s. Don’t. It’s the single most common cause of a suspension, and getting reinstated is a genuinely miserable process.
- Keyword-stuffing your business name. Tempting, and it does work for a while, which is why so many of your competitors are doing it. But Google’s guidelines explicitly ban location and service keywords in the name. “Dave’s Plumbing” is fine. “Dave’s Plumbing Christchurch Hot Water Cylinder Repairs” is a suspension waiting to happen.
Why service area businesses rank differently
Google ranks local results on three things: relevance, distance and prominence.
Distance is measured from the searcher to your business location. Here’s the catch: even though your address is hidden, Google still has a pin on it. So if you’re based in Rolleston, you’ll naturally show up more for people searching in Rolleston than for people searching in Sumner, even though both are inside your stated service area.
You can’t change where you live. What you can change is relevance and prominence, and for SABs those two have to do the heavy lifting. That’s the whole game.
The seven things that actually move the needle
1. Get your primary category exactly right
Your primary category is the biggest single lever on the profile. Not “contractor” when you mean “electrician”. Not “home services” when you mean “plumber”. Look at the top three businesses ranking for your main search term and see what they’ve picked. Then add secondary categories for the rest of what you do, but keep the primary one tight.
2. Reviews, and specifically reviews that mention where you worked
Reviews are the prominence signal that you have the most control over. For an SAB they do double duty, because a review saying “came out to our place in Lincoln, sorted the switchboard same day” is one of the few ways Google gets told you genuinely work in Lincoln.
Don’t script it. Just ask at the right moment: when the job’s done and the customer is happy. “If you’ve got 30 seconds, a quick review really helps us out” works better than a formal email three weeks later. Reply to every one, including the bad ones.
3. Build real location pages, not doorway pages
This is the big one for SABs, and it’s where your website earns its keep. If you want to rank in five towns, you need pages about those five towns.
What doesn’t work: 40 near-identical pages with the town name swapped out. Google has been eating those for breakfast for a decade.
What does work: a page per town you genuinely work in, with actual specifics. Jobs you’ve done there. Local landmarks or suburbs. The housing stock (villas in Merivale have different wiring problems to new builds in Wigram, and saying so proves you’ve been there). Photos from real jobs. A review or two from customers in that area.
Five good ones beat fifty thin ones. Every time.
4. Sort your citations
A citation is any mention of your business name and phone number online. They matter less than they did in 2015, but they still count, and for SABs they’re one of the few consistent signals available.
Worth doing in NZ: Yellow, Localist, Neighbourly, Finda, your regional chamber of commerce, NoCowboys if you’re in trades, and any industry association you belong to. Keep the name and phone number identical everywhere. Leave the address off, same as your profile.
5. Photos, regularly, from actual jobs
Profiles with fresh photos get more engagement, and engagement feeds prominence. Take a photo of the van, the finished job, the team. Upload a few every month rather than 50 in one go and then nothing for a year.
6. Fill in every service
The services section is free real estate that most people ignore. List every job you do as its own service with a real description. This is how you show up for the specific searches, the “emergency hot water cylinder replacement” ones, rather than only the generic “plumber near me”.
7. Post, but don’t overthink it
A Google Post every week or two keeps the profile looking alive. A finished job, a seasonal reminder, a note that you’re booked out until the 20th. It takes two minutes and it’s more than most of your competitors are doing.
You’re verified but still invisible. Now what?
Almost always one of these four:
- You’re searching from your own house. Of course you show up there. Check how you rank from the middle of the town you actually want work in, not from your kitchen.
- Your primary category is wrong. Go and check it again. It’s wrong more often than you’d think.
- You have four reviews and the businesses above you have eighty. That’s not a mystery, that’s just the gap.
- Your website has nothing on it about the places you work. Google has no reason to connect you to a town you’ve never mentioned.
If you’ve been at it for months with none of these problems, it’s worth checking whether you’ve been soft-suspended. A profile can stay live but stop appearing in Maps results entirely. Search your exact business name in an incognito window. If the profile doesn’t come up, that’s your answer, and you’ll need to lodge a reinstatement request.
The honest timeline
Verification takes a few days to a couple of weeks. Setup changes show within 48 hours. Rankings move over two to six months, mostly on the back of reviews and location pages.
Anyone promising you the top of the map pack in three weeks is either lying or about to get your profile suspended.
Common questions
Can I have a Google Business Profile with no address at all?
Yes. Set it up as a service area business. You’ll provide your address during verification so Google knows where you’re based, then remove it from the public profile and set service areas instead. Your address stays private.
Can I use my home address if I hide it?
Yes, and it’s the normal setup for most tradies and mobile businesses in New Zealand. Verify at your home address, then remove it from public display. Nobody sees it. What you can’t do is leave it showing while claiming customers visit you there.
How many service areas can I add?
Up to 20, set by city, suburb or postcode. The outer edge of your total area shouldn’t be more than roughly two hours’ driving time from your base.
Does hiding my address hurt my rankings?
Not directly. Google still knows where you’re based and still uses that for distance calculations. What changes is that you lose the visual credibility of a listed address, so reviews, categories and your website’s location content have to work harder.
Can I rank in a city I don’t live in?
Harder, but yes, as long as it’s genuinely within your service area. You’ll need a proper page on your site about that city, reviews from customers there, and patience. You will almost never beat a business physically located in that city for searches made from its centre.
What’s the difference between a service area business and a hybrid?
A hybrid has premises customers can visit and travels to customers. A workshop that also does mobile call-outs, say. Hybrids show their address and their service areas. Pure service area businesses show only the areas.
The short version
Set it up as a service area business and remove the address properly. Get the primary category right. Ask every happy customer for a review. Build a genuine page for each town you work in. Keep your details consistent across the NZ directories. Add photos and services.
That’s it. It’s not complicated, it’s just slow, and almost nobody does all of it.
More on the basics in our guide to ranking your business on Google Maps, and if you’re in Canterbury specifically, have a read of how Christchurch businesses can rank higher in local listings.
Stuck with a profile that won’t show up? We do this all day. Flick us a message and we’ll take a look at what’s holding it back.