The Importance of Your Home-Based Business’ Address
So, you run a business out of your home. Maybe you offer a service like electrical work, plumbing, carpentry, or you’re a freelance model or photographer. While your home is your base where you do all the paperwork, you don’t necessarily see clients there but rather at their own home or office space.
As you build your online presence you may come across the importance of your NAP—Name, Address and Phone number.
Ensuring that your NAP is consistent all over the Web helps a lot with your search engine ranking, but when you don’t want to share your personal address with the world, this can seem like an impossible barrier to break through.
Location Based vs. Service Area Based
A location based business is your classic brick and mortar storefront. Business owners will be quick to release all of their information to get clients in and drive up business.
Service area businesses deliver goods or services to customers at their locations and don’t necessarily want to give up their address.
In the past, hiding the address of any sort of business would result in the lowering of your search engine ranking, and sometimes even the removal of your business altogether. But thankfully, things have changed.
To Hide or Not to Hide
Today, the rules for showing or not showing your business’ address go a little like this:
Location based:
It is mandatory to have your accurate NAP on display on all citations. If there is not accuracy across the board you won’t necessarily get removed, but your ranking will go down. If you’ve moved, always remember to update every address listing you’ve got out there!
Service based:
You’re in luck. Showing your address is not only unnecessary, but could result in the removal of your business from search engines. With the addition of the “service area” feature, Google has made it possible for you to set a service area that you will visit, rather than one specific business address.
If you do not offer services from an address listed, your listing can be flagged for removal. While it seemed at one time that service based businesses were less likely to get in the seven (now three) pack of Google results, that is no longer the case.
No Need for Falsification
Since the dawn of the Internet, users and businesses have been doing their best to find workarounds in the system. Because of this, there are a lot of inactive P.O. boxes sitting around listed as businesses that Google is doing its best to weed out.
With the option to choose your service area, it’s unnecessary to fool search engines with a bogus address.
Your NAP is highly important to your search engine ranking, so making sure that it is accurate at all times is your best bet to benefit from the great results proper citations can bring your way.
Citations are in fact responsible for 18.8% of your search engine standing, so don’t let your site fall behind because of a not-so-clever workaround.
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