Address vs Service Area

When you're opening your Google Business Profile, one of the questions that I get asked very often, especially from people that work from home, do I have to put in my address? That is the number one question. I can tell you two answers to this question. The first answer is that you have the ability to go in
and call yourself a service area. In which case, they'll just use your city
as your service area. That is an option for anybody who is working from home that doesn't want to put their address in. I can tell you that I've converted a few of my clients from an address to a no address
and I can tell you that they really fell out of Maps. So even though Google says, yes, you can do that, and they allow you to do it, you're not going to rank well in Maps, unless you put your address in. And I can also share
the last 17 years of having my address online. Twice, have I had somebody
dropped by my house unannounced. It really wasn't a big deal. So it's up to you whether you put your address in or not. I highly recommend that you go ahead and do that.