What to do if you work from home or have no shopfront

You work from the spare room, or the garage, or out of a van that's parked on your drive. Every piece of advice about being found online assumes you have a shopfront with a door somebody could walk through, and you don't, and the forms keep asking for an address you'd rather not publish.

So a lot of people do one of two things. They put their home address in, and then discover it's on a map permanently with a photograph of their front door attached. Or they leave the whole thing blank, and become very difficult to find at all.

Neither is necessary. There's a proper way to do this and it's been there all along — it's just badly explained.

Set yourself up as a business that travels

Google's guidelines for representing your business allow for businesses that go to the customer rather than the other way round. You list the areas you serve instead of a walk-in address, and your home address stays hidden from the public.

You do have to give Google your address during setup, for verification. That's different from publishing it, and the distinction is the thing most people don't realise exists.

If your listing is already showing your house, this can be changed. Go into the profile, remove the public address, and set your service areas instead. It's not obvious where the setting lives, and it is there.

The same applies anywhere else that asks. Most directories have a "we come to you" option, and where they don't, leave the address blank and fill in the area.

List the places you actually go

There's a strong temptation to list everywhere you'd like to work. Resist it, for two reasons that are both practical rather than moral.

An over-wide service area doesn't help you rank in distant places — distance from the person searching is still the biggest factor and you can't argue with it. And unusually wide areas can get flagged, which risks the listing you depend on.

More immediately, it produces calls you don't want. Somebody rings from forty minutes away, you turn them down, and you've both wasted a morning. Worse, they occasionally leave a review about it.

List where you genuinely go. Three towns you cover properly beats twelve you've claimed.

The trust problem, and how to fix it without an address

Here's the real disadvantage of having no premises, and it isn't being found. It's that an address does a small amount of reassurance work, and without one you have to do that work another way.

A face helps more than anything else. One photograph of you, the actual person turning up, on your listing and your site. People are letting a stranger into their home and a face settles more than a badge does.

Photos of finished work do the rest. Not the van — the work, in houses that look like your customers' houses.

Then whatever your trade has by way of registration, insurance or membership, stated plainly in one line. And reviews, steadily, because for a business without a shopfront they're doing double duty.

Say how you work, since nobody can picture it

If somebody can't see your premises, they're filling in the gaps themselves, and the gaps are where the hesitation sits.

Answer the obvious ones on your site, in plain words. Where you're based, roughly — the town is fine, no street needed. How far you travel. Whether you come out to quote and whether that costs anything. How quickly you normally reply. What happens if they need to reach you and you're on a job.

Four or five lines and the whole uncertainty goes away.

That's also the sort of thing we built hailera for: you write those answers once, check them yourself, and publish them as an agent so your site and the AI apps people now ask can answer directly instead of leaving somebody to guess about a business they can't see. A short page on your own website does a good share of it for nothing, so write that first.

What you can't do, and shouldn't try

Some things get suggested constantly and they're all bad ideas.

Renting a virtual office or a mailbox to get an address in a town you want to rank in breaks the rules, and suspended listings take weeks to sort out. Using a friend's address in another town is the same problem. Creating separate listings for each town you cover is the same problem again, and it's the most commonly attempted of the three.

The honest version works better than people expect, because most of your competitors in the same position have half-filled listings.

Where the work actually is for you

Being on the map for a busy search from the middle of town is hard when you're on the edge of it. That's the one route where having no premises genuinely costs you something.

So lean on the routes where it costs you nothing at all. The name search, when somebody's been recommended you — location doesn't come into that, and it's where most of your best customers arrive. Local groups and neighbourhood pages, where being a person rather than a firm is an advantage. Other trades who pass work on. Past customers, who have your number already.

For most home-based businesses those four are bigger than the map results anyway.

Protect the boundary while you're at it

One practical aside, because it comes up. If you use a mobile as your business number and you'd rather not have people arriving at the door, be clear in your own head about the line and put it in writing somewhere.

Your hours on your listing, an honest line about when you answer, and a note that you visit customers rather than the other way round. People respect a stated boundary far more reliably than an implied one.

Today: check whether your Google listing is showing your home address. If it is, switch it to a service area and list the towns you actually cover. That's a ten-minute job and it doesn't come up again.

Sources

• Guidelines for representing your business on Google — Google Business Profile Help

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.