(00:14) On this episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I’m going to be addressing a question I was asked recently about Google Business Profile. It concerned whether, as a business, you absolutely needed to put your address on your Google Business Profile.
Now, let’s start off with the Google Business Profile first and get the important out of the way that everybody should know, but I’m going to cover it just to be thorough. If you don’t have a Google Business Profile, then stop listening to this podcast right now and go and set one up because it is an absolute essential for every single business to have one. If you don’t have one, you are missing out on loads of free business.
(00:47) With a Google Business Profile, it will help you appear on Google’s Maps, Google’s location services. It will help you appear for geographical searches. It will show you statistics on how many people view your Google Business Profile, how many people call you from it, how many people click through to your website from it, how many people ask directions to your premises from it. And it will allow people to leave you reviews so you get social proof. And it costs you absolutely nothing and takes you about half an hour to set one up.
If you don’t have one, what the hell are you waiting for? Go and get one now.
(01:20) Let’s look at the question I was asked to begin with. Do you have to have your address visible on your Google Business Profile?
Now, why would you not want that? There’s a couple of reasons you might not want that. You might be a trade, for example, a plumber, an electrician, a joiner, and you want to do business within, say, a 20 or 30-mile radius of where you live. So you have set up your Google Business Profile, you put your address in to denote where you are, but you don’t actually want customers rocking up at your house and knocking on your door or banging on your window saying, “Are you in? Can you come and fix my taps?” Because that’s not really how it works, and that’s going to be very irritating. So nobody’s going to want that. So you don’t want your address there for that.
(01:52) You may also deal with sensitive issues where there’s conflict, where there are differences of opinion, for example. So last year, I had a post on Twitter—refuse to call it X; Elon Musk can get knotted. I had a post on Twitter go viral because I had some leaflets come through the door from a local council campaigner who wasn’t a councillor. She was trying to get elected, and she was basically trying to get elected on anti-trans rhetoric. So trans people shouldn’t be allowed anywhere, basically, where she was, because she didn’t like them, she didn’t trust them. And there were a few of them around the UK doing this.
(02:21) I put that on social media, and it got a few hundred thousand views, lots of interaction, including from a former Gladiator, Sharon Davies, and a former Olympic swimmer, who herself is a little bit naughty, but we won’t go into that either. But when you’re doing stuff like that and you’re involved in arguments where there’s going to be differences of opinion, you may not want your address to be online because you don’t want people turning up at your house and chucking things through your window—that sort of thing. So again, you might want to hide your address for that.
(03:20) But is that a problem? Is that going to affect your Google rankings? Is that going to affect the traffic you get, which is going to affect the inquiries and the leads you get, and is ultimately going to affect the business you get, the sales you get?
Well, in a word, yes. That is a problem.
If you hide your address, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, I’m not going to lie to you. It is going to negatively impact your website traffic, your rankings, your sales, your business. It is going to be a problem. It’s going to be a problem. So you have to decide right now: is that problem worth it? Is hiding my address on my Google Business Profile and not displaying it worth it for the lack of business I’m going to get as a direct result? And that’s a question only you can answer.
(04:21) To hide your address is quite simple. You log in, and you put your address to be private so that it’s not visible. And you can put in your service areas. So if you live in Chester, for example, and you want to do business in Chester, Ellesmere Port, Warrington, Runcorn, that kind of thing, you would put those in as service areas, draw a little map, and that’s where Google would theoretically put you up if people in those areas were looking for what you do.
(04:46) Of course, if they’re in Runcorn and you’re in Chester, and they put in “I’m looking for a plumber in Runcorn,” it’s going to show them first. It’s going to show them first. It’s not going to show you because you are not physically there. If you are in Chester and there’s three other plumbers in Chester, and somebody looks for a plumber in Chester, your address isn’t public, theirs is, you’re going to struggle. It’s probably going to show them first. That’s just the way that it is.
(05:14) But there are a few things you can do to mitigate this risk. So, for example, you can talk about the locations and areas that you serve within the description itself when you’re writing your description on your Google Business Profile. You’ve got to be careful; you don’t want to be spammy with this because Google’s going to notice it, it’s going to spot it.
(05:45) But the best thing you can do is actually with the website. This is really common and really effective.
(06:13) If you have loads of business from your Facebook page, fantastic, well done, great for you. But what happens when Facebook changes its algorithm again? What happens if Google Business Profile decides that only people who pay money on ads are going to have their business profile show up? You don’t know what it’s going to do. You cannot control it.
(10:42) So in short, yes, you can hide your address. But if you do, it will affect your rankings. I can’t sugarcoat it. It will. But there are ways that you can mitigate that.
(11:14) I hope this podcast has been useful, and if it hasn’t, then I apologize profusely. But I’ve been Darren, you’ve been listening to The Engaging Marketeer, and I will catch you on the next podcast.
