Service area business setup: hiding your address without breaking the rules

If you run your business out of the house and you go to the customer, you do not want your home address sitting on Google Maps. Fair enough.

The good news is that Google agrees with you. Its own rule is that if you do not serve customers at your business address, you should remove that address from your profile.

The catch is that half the tradies in the country have it set up the wrong way round, and it is one of the more common ways a profile gets suspended.

Which type are you

Google sorts businesses into three buckets and everything else follows from this. Get it wrong and nothing below will work properly.

Storefront. Customers come to you at a physical location, during business hours, and you have permanent signage on site. A cafe, a shop, a clinic with a sign on the building.

Service area. You go to the customer or deliver to them, and you do not serve anyone at your business address. Sparkies, plumbers, cleaners, mobile mechanics, mobile dog groomers.

Hybrid. Both. A dine-in restaurant that also delivers. A shop with a fitting service.

Two rules that catch people out.

If your address has no permanent on-site signage, Google says you are not eligible as a storefront and should be listed as a service-area business. A magnetic sign on the ute does not count. Neither does a letterbox sticker.

If you sell anything with an age requirement, like alcohol or weapons, Google requires a storefront. You cannot run those as a service-area business.

You still need a real address

This is the part people misread. Hiding your address is not the same as not having one.

Google still needs a genuine, findable address behind the scenes. It uses it to verify you and to work out where you actually are. What changes is whether the public sees it.

So a PO box will not do. Neither will a parcel locker, a mail forwarding service or a virtual office you have never set foot in. If you use a coworking space you do not actually operate from, expect trouble.

The address you give is the address you will have to prove if you are ever asked. Use the real one.

Hiding the address

Four steps.

1. Go to your Business Profile and select Edit profile, then Location.
2. Next to "Business location", select the pencil icon.
3. Turn off Show business address to customers.
4. Select Save.

Do this before or at the same time as setting your service areas, not weeks apart. If you hide the address and do not enter a service area, Google picks a local area for you. It is usually wrong.

Setting service areas properly

You cannot draw a radius any more. If you set one up years ago that way, you cannot edit it either. Service areas now have to be named places: suburbs, towns, cities, postcodes.

The mechanics.

1. Edit profile, then Location.
2. Next to "Service area", select the pencil icon.
3. Enter the places you serve, or pick from the suggestions.
4. Save.

Google's limits: up to 20 service areas, and the overall boundary should not stretch much beyond about two hours of driving time from your base. Google also asks you to be as specific and accurate as you can.

Approved changes can take up to 48 hours to show.

Two things about doing this in Australia

Use suburbs, not postcodes, in the cities. An Australian postcode often covers several suburbs, and some cover a very large area. Naming the suburbs you actually work in gives Google a more accurate picture than a postcode that sweeps in half a dozen places you never go.

The two hour rule is a city rule. Two hours from Parramatta is most of Sydney. Two hours from Dubbo is a lot of paddock and three towns. If you genuinely service a large regional area, list the towns you genuinely service and leave it at that. Adding twenty entries to look bigger does not make you turn up in searches in those towns, it just makes the profile less specific about where you really work.

The related trap is the operator in Newcastle or Wollongong who lists every Sydney suburb because it is technically inside two hours. If you would not actually drive there on a Tuesday for a two hour job, do not list it.

One profile, not one per suburb

A service-area business gets one profile for the whole area it serves. That is Google's rule, stated plainly.

So no separate listing for "Plumber Maitland" and "Plumber Cessnock" and "Plumber Kurri Kurri". People do this constantly, usually after reading a blog post from 2014. It is a straightforward guideline breach and it is a fast way to lose the original profile along with the copies.

If you have a second genuine premises with its own staff and its own signage, that is a different business location and it can have its own profile. A suburb name is not a premises.

The trade-off nobody mentions

There is a real cost to hiding your address, and you should know about it before you do it.

Local search leans heavily on where you are relative to the person searching. When your address is hidden, your profile has less to work with. Some practitioners have reported visibility dropping after removing an address and recovering when it went back on.

That does not make hiding it optional. Google's guideline is clear, and running as a storefront when you are not one is exactly the sort of thing that gets profiles suspended. But it does mean your profile has to be sharper everywhere else: the right primary category, a complete services list, real photos of your work and your van, accurate hours, and a website that lines up with all of it.

If you have hidden your address and things have gone quiet, that is the reason. The fix is a more complete profile, not putting the address back.

Quick self-check

• Do customers physically come to your address? If no, the address should be hidden.
• Is there permanent signage at that address with your business name on it? If no, you are not a storefront.
• Is your address a real place you operate from, not a mailbox? It has to be.
• Are your service areas named places you would actually drive to?
• Do you have exactly one profile for the whole service area?

Five yeses and you are set up the way Google asks.

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Sources. Business type definitions, the 20 area limit, the two hour guidance and the single profile rule are from Google Business Profile Help: manage your service areas. Hiding the address is from manage your business address. Address guidelines are covered in guidelines for representing your business on Google.

Last checked: 25 July 2026.