Are you a service-area business?
| You | Google calls you | Address on profile |
|---|---|---|
| Customers never visit (plumber, mobile groomer, cleaner) | Service-area business | Remove it |
| Customers visit you and you also go to them (pizza place with delivery, locksmith with a shop) | Hybrid | Keep it, add service areas |
| Customers only visit you (dentist, salon) | Storefront | Keep it, no service areas needed |
Google says to remove your address if you do not serve customers at that location (Google Business Profile Help, service areas). A home address you work from should not be shown.
Set your service areas the way Google allows
The rules, from Google's help page:
- Up to 20 service areas. Cities, postal codes or named areas.
- About 2 hours' drive at most. Google says your overall area should not be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based.
- No radius. You cannot set "50 miles around Denver". Pick the actual towns.
- Edits can take up to 48 hours to show once approved.
Where to edit: open your profile, then Edit profile > Location > Service area.
Pick the towns where you want work and can get there, not every town on the map. Twenty towns is a limit, not a target.
Why you rank best near your base
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence (Google). Hiding your address does not remove it from Google's view: your business still has a real location. Listing a town as a service area tells customers you go there. It does not place you in that town's map results.
What this means in practice:
- In the map pack, expect to show most for searches near your base.
- For towns farther out, your website is the stronger tool: an organic result for "water heater repair lakewood" can come from a good page on your site.
- Reviews from customers in those towns, and real projects there, help both.
Town pages: when they help and when they are doorways
A page for each town you serve can rank in normal results. It can also be spam. Google's spam policies list "multiple domain names or pages aimed at specific regions" that funnel users to one place as doorway abuse (Google Search Central, spam policies, updated August 2026).
The test: would the page be useful to someone in that town even if the town name were removed?
| Doorway page | Real town page |
|---|---|
| Same text as every other town, only the name swapped | Jobs you did in that town, with photos |
| No proof of work there | Reviews from customers in that town |
| 40 towns, written in an afternoon | 5 to 10 towns where you really work |
| Generic "we serve [town]" | Local details: housing age, water hardness, permits, travel time |
If you already have 40 thin town pages, merge most into one "Areas we serve" page that lists towns, and keep separate pages only where you can add real proof. Redirect the merged pages to it.
What to put on each town page
For a fictional plumber, Northwind Plumbing, based in Denver:
- H1 and title with the service and town: "Water Heater Repair in Lakewood, CO"
- A plain intro that says what you do there and how fast you arrive.
- 3 to 5 recent jobs in that town: problem, fix, photo. No customer names without consent.
- Reviews from customers in that town.
- Local facts that change the job: older homes, hard water, HOA rules, city permits.
- Your phone as a tap-to-call link and a booking button.
- Links to the related service page and to the "Areas we serve" hub.
No street address needed on a town page if you do not have an office there. Never invent an address.
Reviews that mention the town
When a customer leaves a review that names the job and the town, it helps people from that town trust you. Do not script reviews or ask customers to include keywords: Google's policy bans telling people what to write. Ask every customer the same way and let them write what they want. Our guide on how to get more Google reviews has templates.
Track results by town
- In Search Console, open Performance > Search results and filter Page by each town page. Watch clicks and the queries that bring them.
- Filter Query by town name ("lakewood") to see which towns already bring searches.
- In Business Profile > Performance, watch calls and website clicks month by month.
- Search your main service plus town from a phone in that town, or ask a customer there, and note the map position once a month.
Towns with impressions but few clicks need a better page or title. Towns with no impressions after 3 months may not be worth a page.
How to use this with an AI assistant
Connect SEOmatic at https://seomatic.ai/mcp and ask: "Connect my Search Console with connect_seomatic and run gsc_performance with action top_pages, then action query_pages for the queries that contain each town I serve. Tell me which town pages get impressions but few clicks, and draft better titles for my approval." Nothing on your site changes until you approve it.