How a Decision You Make in Setting Up a Profile Limits the Reach of Your Rankings
There is a question that comes up all the time among electricians who are taking their local search game up a notch, and it often leads to more confusion than clarity. Is the Google Business Profile better to be set up as a storefront (with the physical address publicly displayed on the listing), or as a service area business (with the address hidden and the areas of service displayed)? It seems like a minor detail, a tick box on a form. But it’s actually so much more than that: it’s a structural choice that has a direct impact on the way Google factors in proximity for the business, how far down a map pack search can go, and how searchers view the business before they reach out. While not devastatingly destructive, when this is wrong it’s a friction point that adds up over time. The reality of the tradeoff is a classic example of the thinking that defines good seo for electricians strategy.
It all begins with the information Google uses to display the listing. A storefront profile openly displays the address – on the map, in the profile listing, for all to see. A service area business profile doesn’t display the address but does display the list of regions, cities or postcodes served. There are two types of profiles because Google knows that some businesses have publicly accessible business premises and some do not, having “mobile” business locations in the form of job sites, home offices or vehicles. Electricians, being a trade, don’t fall into either category, hence the need to think about it, rather than simply choosing a default option when the business is set up.
What You Get With a Storefront Profile
By making a physical address public, you’re telling Google that the business is located at a physical address. This is important because proximity (how near the business is in relation to the searcher) is one of the three ranking factors used to determine which three stores are featured in the map pack. When a business displays an address, Google has an easy way to calculate proximity. Near the address the proximity score is high. The further the searcher is from the address, the lower the score, and the more ranking leverage the businesses with addresses closer to the searcher gain.
For an electrician who has a real business address at his disposal, and a business that is accessible by customers and visitors, like a tradesman’s shop or a commercial unit or a shopfront in which he does occasionally work, then a storefront profile is the correct profile to choose and most likely the stronger of the two profiles in the immediate area. The address boosts relevance signals in the local vicinity and enables Google to geo-locate the business with certainty. Citations, reviews and location pages all orient to the address and reinforce a local presence at that location.
The limitation is reach. An address-based storefront profile will have a strong presence on the ground and become weaker the further away you get. For a metro-area electrician with many suburbs to service, this can be a limiting factor. It’s common for storefront business setups that service a large geographic area to perform well in the home suburb, and poorly elsewhere.
Using a Service Area Business to Change the Game
The service area business listing uses a service area rather than a specific address. Google no longer measures proximity from a single location, but rather draws a radius around the service area, ranking the relevance of the business within that area. This seems like a major win for a multi-suburban electrician, but in some ways it’s not: especially when the search is coming from a location that is well removed from a physical address of the business, if it has one.
The downside of this approach is that service area profiles tend to have less proximity influence in a given location than a storefront profile with a registered address in that same location. The proximity calculation is spread out over a wider area without the pin of a specific address. For example, a storefront competitor with a verified address in the suburb being targeted might have an advantage in proximity strength over a service area competitor, all other ranking factors being equal. The service area business is exchanging a very strong proximity signal in one location for a weaker proximity signal in a broader location.
This is important because “all other signals being equal” is often not the case. A service area business with a lot more reviews, more complete profile signals, better website authority, better citation consistency is capable of and frequently does outrank a storefront competitor. Proximity is a variable, not a constant. Knowing its relative importance to relevance and prominence means it’s not a showstopper, it’s a factor to be worked around.
What Electricians Have, and How They’re Getting it Wrong
Here’s where the rubber hits the road. Many electricians have profiles that aren’t either one or the other – they’ve entered a home address, or a business address that isn’t publicly visible, or a P.O. box, and they’re displaying it publicly on the profile without knowing that this is in violation of the guidelines. Google’s guidelines say that a public address must be the location where the business is open for business (during the times specified) and where it receives customers. A home address that is publicly displayed on a business profile that isn’t a premises that serves customers in any way doesn’t qualify.
Deciding for Your Business
The answer for any specific electrical business depends on whether or not that business has a premises that customers would be able to visit during hours of operation, and that meets Google’s criteria for a publicly listed address? If so, a storefront or hybrid profile is the right configuration and could have a proximity advantage in the local area. If not (if the business is a customer location-only, home office, or mobile service business) a service area business profile is correct and avoids the guideline violations that result from publicly displaying an invalid address.
Neither is a disability. Both can generate excellent local rankings, when coupled with a complete business profile, consistent citations, reviews from across the service area and an internal location page structure that systematically covers the geography. The configuration is the frame. The content inside it ensures the painting is hung level.
