Changing My Listing from an Actual Address to a SAB

[cestbob]

I own a lawn care company and I currently have it listed with its actual address. I have been reading that service companies with a actual address listing MUST change their listing to hide their address and show a service area.

As you can imagine, the business is extremely seasonal and any negative impacts to my listing would hurt the company. If it makes a difference, the majority of lawn care and landscaping companies are listed with their actual address. So my questions are: (1) Should I change the listing now? And if so, what kind of impact will this have? (2) Should I wait until late autumn to change it so it can recover during the winter. Or, (3) should i just leave the listing how it is now?

Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions, I appreciate it.

[cestbob]

Thanks for the responses, I really appreciate how quickly everyone helps out on the forum.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Cestbob,

Good questions. Here are Google's official guidelines regarding addresses and SABs (service area businesses):

• Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas.  If you wish to display your complete business address while setting your service area(s), your business location should be staffed and able to receive customers during its stated hours. Google will determine how best to display your business address based on your inputs as well as inputs from other sources. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.
• If you don't conduct face-to-face business at your location, you must select "Yes, this business serves customers at their locations" under the "Service Areas and Location Settings" section of your dashboard, and then select the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" option.

So, from your description of your business model, Google would want you to hide your address. This being said, I agree with Richard that they seem very lax about enforcing this and have seemed so for some time. Who knows, though? Tomorrow could be the day they initiate some plan to crack down on businesses that aren't complying with this guideline.

So, whether you choose to comply with the guidelines or not is up to you, but I do think it's important to state that none of this has anything to do with you achieving visibility in neighboring cities where you serve. Only in very niche markets or geographic regions of almost no competition can one typically expect to show up in the local pack of results for any city beyond their city of physical location.

In order to achieve non-physical location visibility the most common practice involves the development of local landing pages on the website with the goal of achieving organic (not local pack) visibility. You can read more about this here:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Remember that such pages must be completely unique and serve the needs of your customers. Hope this helps!

[cestbob]

Thanks for the response Richard.

No we don't serve people at our location. I am wondering if I should change the listing because while the listing does great in the specific city where the address is listed, we are nowhere to be found on the surrounding suburbs - which is a greater part of our market. And also, I am fearful that down the road google will decide to take action against a listing like mine (and the majority of others in my industry), when the actual address is listed.

So, the potential benefit would be to have our business listed in additional service areas, the negatives could be an impact to our current favorable listing if we change it or punishment by google if we don't.

Thanks Again

[TheeDigital]

I have changed a few without any negative impacts.  Think about it, Google still knows where you are.  However, if it's not really mandatory to change it then why do it?  They aren't enforcing the service area, and do you actually service people at your location?  Like can they come in and make an appointment or drop off a payment?  I fear not having a physical address shown may affect CTR.