Local SEO for businesses without a physical location

For those business owners who have no need for a physical location if, for example, the team all work from home or on a client site, then there can be some confusion over how to promote the business with SEO. Google does have guidelines for such situations. However, it is often easy to overlook updates, make mistakes and of course, miss out on some of those all-important opportunities from visitors to your website

Fortunately, for almost every type of business there are local SEO and digital marketing possibilities. You just need to know the best approach, which is based on the type of musines you want to promote and how it operates.

What type of business model do you have?

For local SEO for a company that does not have a bricks-and-mortar presence, there is a good chance your business will fall into one of the four following categories:

Service Area Business (SAB)

This category includes most types of services delivered at a customers own home of business address in a face-to-face capacity.

Home-based Business

Your physical location is your home address and you either serve customers at that address, serve customers who live nearby or a combination of the two. You essentially work out of your own home. This doesn’t include those people who never meet customers face-to-face.

Virtual Business

All your business transactions are conducted virtually, by a range of remote means. You can operate from one or more physical addresses and in a number of cities, but nobody comes to you. You do not have in-person interactions with customers except at their own premises.

Hybrid Business

This covers a range of variations. For example, those premises where the customers can pay in person or online and collect an item or it is delivered to their address. Or, an e-commerce style sales outlet. Hybrid businesses have become increasingly common since the Covid-19 pandemic

What should you never do?

There are some things you should never do, regardless of the type of business you have. You shouldn’t set up a PO box or a virtual office to give yourself a fake location in order to create local business listings.

You should also avoid setting up a string of locations using the home addresses of family, friends or staff in order to give the impression you have several operating locations. You should also not set up any listing linked to properties that are empty or holiday homes. You can list the sales offices for these businesses but not a property being sold or rented.

One thing you should never do as part of a digital marketing strategy is engage in anything that violates the guidelines set out by Google. This risks penalties or suspension of your busness from Google search listings.

How should you do local SEO for SABs?

There are plenty of opportunities for SABs (Service Area Businesses) that do not have a physical location. You need to have an understanding of local sSEO methods, which you can find in this Basic Guide to Basic SEO, and also an understanding of the Google requirements that relate to SAB’s (which exist here and here). It is worth reading them in full.

Hiding your address

You must provide an address to Google to create an SAB listing, even if it’s one you don’t want the public to visit. However, you can tell Google to hide this when creating the listing. There are a number of reasons you may choose to do this but there are some disadvantages. These include the lack of address creating distrust for clients and no location pointer on a Google map.

Setting an area for service allowed

Older listings will have a radius depicting the service area. On new ones this is done via cities or postcodes. There is an ability to add up to 20 points and they shouldn’t be over 2 hours driving distance from your business base.

Some models allow more than one listing

If your SAB has more than one, separately staffed location (around 2 hours apart and where the service areas do not overlap) then you can create more than one listing. It is recommended that each office has a unique phone number. What you cannot do is have 2 listings for the same location offering different services.

Other things to consider

·       It is your choice whether you link your SAB Google Business Profile listing to the homepage of your website or a local landing page. The former can offer you a ranking boost, the later an improved user experience for your customers.

·       Consider creating service menus for your Google Business Profile dashboard with a list of all the different things your business offers.