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Should you hide your address on Google?
If customers do not come to you, you must hide it. That is a rule, not a preference, and a visible home address is one of the most common suspension triggers. Hide the address, define your service area, and nothing else about your visibility suffers.
The rule
Google requires an address to be displayed only where staff are available to serve customers during stated hours. A plumber working out of a garage, a mobile groomer, a contractor with no showroom - all should be set up as service-area businesses with the address hidden.
What you lose, and do not lose
You do not lose the ability to rank. Service-area businesses appear in the map pack normally. What you lose is a pin at your house, which you did not want.
You will not appear for searches deep inside your radius as strongly as a business physically located there. That is proximity working as designed, and it is why area pages exist.
Setting the radius honestly
Set it to where you will actually drive. An inflated radius does not extend your reach; it dilutes relevance and produces calls you will decline, which wastes everyone's time.
If you do have a storefront
Show the address. Add photos of the exterior so a customer recognizes the building, and keep hours accurate including holidays.
The short version
- Hiding is required if customers do not visit you
- A visible home address is a common suspension trigger
- Service-area businesses rank in the map pack normally
- Set the radius to where you will genuinely drive
Related questions
Can I use a virtual office instead?
No. Virtual offices and mailboxes are explicitly disallowed and heavily policed.
Will hiding it hurt my rankings?
No. Being suspended for showing it certainly will.
Can I list several service areas?
Yes, up to twenty. Keep them realistic.
Keep reading
How do you fix a suspended Google Business Profile?
Work out what changed in the 30 days before the suspension, undo it if it broke a rule, then file a...
Do location pages still work?
Yes, when each page contains something genuinely local. No, when it is one template with the suburb name...
How do you rank in the Google map pack?
Google weighs relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot move your customers closer, so the work is...
Want this checked on your own business?
The free visibility check shows what AI assistants say about you today, where you sit on the map grid, and the three fixes worth doing first.
