If I have a Home-Based Business, can my Address be Listed on my Google My Business Profile?
There is a message that appears on Business Profiles after a run of failed verification attempts, and it reads “No More Ways to Verify“. Google does not publish the exact threshold, but from what we have seen and what other practitioners report, it lands after only a handful of rejected videos, at which point the self-service route closes and you are left waiting in support queues. For a plumber or an electrician relying on the map pack for enquiries, a fortnight of invisibility is not an inconvenience, it can be disastrous.
What we find frustrating about it is that the businesses hitting that wall are almost always entirely legitimate. In the accounts we have worked on, the pattern is usually the same: the wrong business type was chosen during setup, the wrong things were filmed as a consequence, and nobody worked out which of the two mistakes was causing the rejections.
My Business is Located at My Home Address and I Want to Display this on Maps/My Business
You cannot display your home address on a Business Profile, and that part is not new. What has changed is how much harder it now is to get the profile verified at all, and how explicit Google has become about what home-based businesses should do instead.
Google’s guidance on service-area and hybrid businesses is unusually direct on this point: if you do not serve customers at your business location, you should not add the address to the profile in the first place. That means leaving the field out entirely rather than filling it in and hiding it, which is a distinction we still find ourselves explaining to clients most months.
The reassuring part is that none of this stops you ranking. There are two workable routes, and for most home based businesses the first is the right one.
This is because, according to Google “If your business doesn’t have permanent on-site signage, it’s not eligible as a shopfront and should be listed as a service area business.”
This is potentially a big issue for businesses that rely on local searches but may be based from home such as plumbers, builders, accountants, freelancers (including freelance SEOs!) and many, many more.
If you have tried to list your business address as a residential premises, you may find your account has been suspended – a bit of a nightmare if you rely on this regular business enquiries. If you want to appeal this, you’ll need to fill in the local business reinstatement request form.
Unfortunately, even after appealing you may find your profile isn’t reinstated as most home-based businesses will not have business signage on their premises. Here we look at some options if this has happened to you:
Which business type applies to you?
During setup Google asks whether customers come to you, and your answer sorts the profile into one of three types, each with different verification requirements.
A storefront interacts with customers in person, at a physical location, with permanent on-site signage, during stated opening hours. All four conditions need to hold rather than three. A service area business travels to the customer instead, which covers plumbers, electricians, roofers, cleaners, mobile hairdressers, most of the tradesmen we work with, and a fair number of freelancers. A hybrid does both, in the way that a restaurant with a delivery arm does.
Choosing storefront when you are really a service area business sets you an impossible task, because the video will need to show permanent signage that does not exist. We have seen profiles fail three or four times before anyone questioned the original setup choice rather than the footage. Google states the rule plainly in its video verification documentation: a business without permanent on-site signage should be listed as a service area business rather than a storefront.
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Get Listed as a ‘Service-Area Business’
The first is – after setting up/logging in to Google My Business – to select ‘I do not serve customers at my business address’ in the setup phase.
Or, if you have already added your address, you will need to remove you address completely in the Info section of your Google My Business profile listing.
This will lead to your business location being listed as ‘No location; deliveries and home services only’.
Despite not being able to list your address directly, you are able to select a service area on your profile, to help you show for searches in this area.
You are allowed up to 20 service areas on your business, which can be as large or narrow as you require.
This can actually be of benefit for businesses that are not too reliant on local traffic as the service areas can cover much larger swathes of the country – or even international regions – and the business will still be eligible to show on Maps and in the knowledge pack in the SERPs.
However, if you are a business that needs a prominent address on Google, you may want to opt for our other solution….
2. Rent a commercial address with permanent signage
The old advice, which we gave in earlier versions of this article, was to rent a cheap address. A hot desk, a mail handling service or a corner of your accountant’s office, with a plaque fixed to a door to make it a storefront. We would not recommend that now, because the risk has shifted and in most cases it leads to a suspension rather than a ranking.
The bar is genuinely high. Google’s community guidance on coworking addresses sets out what a shared space needs before it qualifies as a storefront:
- Your own suite or unit, rather than a shared desk or a floating membership.
- Permanent fixed signage carrying your business name, which can be a plaque on your office door or your name on the building directory board. A printed sheet taped up, or a slide-in nameplate, will not satisfy this.
- Your own staff present during the hours you publish on the profile.
- Customers able to walk in and deal with your business in person at that address.
All four need to be true. The plaque on its own does not do it, and mail handling arrangements fail on every count.
Qualifying on paper is also only part of the picture. Shared addresses attract additional scrutiny during verification because Google is well aware of what they are typically used for, so a postcode already carrying forty listings starts from a position of suspicion. Verification is not the finish line either, since later edits to your name, address or category can trigger a fresh review, and that is often the moment a marginal address gets pulled.
Our position, then, is that a genuine dedicated office with a real fixed sign is worth listing and filming properly. If you are buying an address and dressing it up to look real, option one will serve you better, and the money is better spent on something that moves rankings.
Whichever route you take, the video decides it
Both storefront and service-area options end at the same gate requiring video evidence, and the requirements differ depending on which type you chose. Before thinking about content, there are mechanical rules that disqualify a surprising number of submissions:
- One continuous take. The recording has to be unedited and unbroken, so anything with cuts, stitched clips or processing applied will be rejected.
- At least thirty seconds long. There is little benefit in going much further, and the accepted ones we have been involved with have all come in under three minutes.
- Filmed and uploaded in the same session. It has to be recorded from a mobile device through the Business Profile itself, which rules out filming something carefully on Tuesday and uploading it on Thursday.
- No other people’s faces. Reporting from practitioners is consistent that voices and background conversation cause problems too, so filming during quiet hours is usually worth the wait.
- Nothing sensitive on screen. Bank details, tax numbers and ID documents all need to stay out of shot.
The same-session rule probably catches out more people than any of the others, largely because it runs against how most people assume the process works. There is no upload button waiting for a file you prepared earlier, and no opportunity to review the footage properly on a larger screen before it goes.
Make sure that you hold continuity from the exterior inward, capturing the street sign and building number, then the directory board or door plaque, then the walk to the entrance, all in the same unbroken take. Starting the recording inside the office with no exterior context is one of the more reliable ways to fail.
Filming from home without filming your home
This is the part Google buries in its documentation, and in our experience it is the reason home based businesses give up earlier than they need to.
If you run a service area business from your house, you are not expected to show your living room. Google explicitly allows you to record landmarks and signs in your immediate neighbourhood in order to confirm the address, which is a meaningful concession that very few articles on this subject mention.
We would plan the sequence before pressing record. Start outside, capturing the street sign, the house number and a couple of recognisable landmarks such as a nearby pub, shop or school, since the aim is to tie the footage to a real place on the map. Empty land or a blank driveway with no markers tends to fail.
From there, move on to proving the business exists, which usually means the van, ideally branded, opened up to show the tools and equipment inside. The workspace counts as well, including the desk where bookings are taken, any stock, branded workwear and business cards carrying the matching name.
Finally you need to prove that you run the business rather than simply live near it. Unlocking the van, opening a locked store, or showing a business permit, invoice or utility bill in the same business name will all serve this purpose. The common thread is access, which is something only an owner or employee would have.
Why GBP verification videos get rejected
The rejection reasons repeat themselves, and nearly all of them are avoidable with a little preparation.
- The business name does not match. This is the most common by some distance, and the mismatch can be as small as a missing “The”, a different punctuation mark, “Ltd” on the sign but not on the profile, or “and” where the profile says “&”. Google’s matching appears to be unforgiving here, so it is the first thing we check, reading the profile name and the signage side by side before anything gets filmed.
- No surrounding area shown. Starting indoors with no exterior context leaves Google nothing to match against the map.
- Footage too dark or too shaky. Anything that cannot be read clearly, particularly text on signage or documents, tends to come back rejected.
- No proof of management. Showing the van without ever unlocking it demonstrates that the van exists rather than that you control it, which is not the same thing.
- Nothing that speaks to the trade. For service area businesses in particular, a street sign and an empty driveway is rarely enough on its own, because none of it establishes what the business actually does.
Given that the self-service option disappears after a small number of failures, we would treat the first attempt as though it were the only one.
What to do if your profile gets suspended
A suspension is usually a checkpoint rather than a punishment, and it is most often triggered by an address change, a name edit, or several rapid changes made close together.
The important thing is to fix the underlying cause before appealing, because appealing an ineligible address without changing anything tends to get you refused twice. If the address should never have been there, remove it, set the service areas properly using the steps in option one, and then appeal through the flow inside the profile with documentation ready, including a business bank statement, utility bill, insurance certificate and recent invoices, all carrying the same business name.
Where suspensions keep recurring, the problem is generally structural rather than procedural, and that is usually where you will require the services of an SEO expert.
I’m Still Having Issues With Getting My Home Address Listed on Google My Business? Can you Help?
Google My Business setup and configuration are part of our local SEO packages, where we help businesses that rely on traffic be more prevalent for search queries in their area.
If you would like specialists to handle your local SEO, get in touched with us today. We are a UK-based SEO specialists handling all aspects of on-site and off-site SEO.
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