Set your address, or your service area

Which kind of business you are

Google's guidelines distinguish a business that customers visit at its premises from one that goes to its customers. A café, a clinic, a solicitor's office, a shop: storefront, address shown. A plumber, a cleaner, a mobile mechanic, a home tutor: service-area business, address hidden, area set. A business that does both, a showroom with fitters who travel, shows its address and also sets a service area. Choose what is true; a hidden address on a shop, or a shown home address on a tradesperson, both cost visibility and the second costs privacy.

Set the service area

For a service-area business, list the places you actually travel to: named districts, towns or postcodes. Google uses the area to decide where the business can appear in the pack. An area far larger than you serve does not make you appear across it; distance from the searcher still counts, and a business whose area is “all of Ireland” competes from nowhere in particular. Match the area to the baseline.

Why not more profiles

The temptation, for a business that wants to appear in Swords and in Bray, is a profile at an address in each. Google's guidelines allow one profile per physical location where staff are present during stated hours, and prohibit profiles at virtual offices, mailboxes or addresses where the business does not operate. Profiles that break the rule are suspended, often all of them at once, with the reviews. The honest way to cover an area is one profile with a service area, a website with pages for the districts served, and the prominence work in the later chapters.

The address itself

The address on the profile is the reference value for every listing in the NAP chapter. Use the Eircode. Use the same form of the street name everywhere. If the business has moved, update the profile first and the rest second; Google treats the profile as the canonical record of where the business is.

Illustrative example. An electrician working from home in Finglas hides the address, sets the service area as Dublin 11, 9, 7, 15 and Blanchardstown, and later adds a page on the website for each district describing work done there. A rival opens three profiles at three serviced-office addresses; all three are suspended in a routine review. That describes the two paths, not a measured outcome.

Output

The profile showing or hiding the address correctly, a service area that matches where the business works, and the address recorded as the reference value for later chapters. Then complete the rest of the profile.