New Updates to GMB Guidelines for Service Area Businesses

Recent updates to the Google My Business guidelines bring additional clarity to service area businesses.

The updated policy can be found at the following link:

https://support.google.com/business/answer/9157481

https://support.google.com/business/answer/2853879?hl=en&ref_topic=4854128

The following quotes from these Google support articles relate specifically to field service businesses like appliance repair:

Service-area business: A business that visits or delivers to customers directly, but doesn’t serve customers at its business address. For example, a plumber or cleaning service. Service-area businesses may create only one profile for the metropolitan area that they serve.

If you update your business information from a storefront to a service-area business or hybrid business, keep in mind:

• If you don’t serve customers at your business address: Clear the address field and only enter your service area.
• If you serve customers at your business address and also have a service area: Enter both your address and service area.

If you are still accepting customers at your office/storefront location, you are asked to post the street address.

Address guidelines

To verify your business, you must enter a business address that Google can locate. Make sure your address listing follows the address guidelines so we can accurately display it. Keep in mind:

• Make sure you enter the complete and exact street address for your location (Example: “1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, 94043”). 
• Include suite numbers, floors, building numbers, etc. 
• Only include information that’s part of your official address. Include information like cross-streets and nearby landmarks only in regions where the official street address doesn’t accurately pinpoint your location. For example, avoid adding “Corner of Main St. and Washington Ave.” or “Across from Central Park.”

Summary

Basically, if you are working out of your house, GMB is requesting that you remove your address. Sadly, these changes are not going to limit the number of spam involved or address SEO issues.

There is a potential for not getting access to the full suite of Google Cloud API tools related to your GMB address as well. Something we utilize to help businesses with our Fluid Local platform which normally requires a street address to be publicly listed for certain APIs to work. This could change as Google continues to make updates.

We still encourage businesses to follow the new guidelines from GMB and to update their storefront pages accordingly.