A homeowner in the next town over types "plumber near me" and gets three businesses with a pin on the map, none of them you. You have done forty jobs in that town. Your shop, if you have one, is twelve miles away, and most days the truck is the shop. Nothing about that is unfair; the map is doing what you told it, and you have not told it much.
Showing up for "near me" when you drive to the customer is a different problem from showing up when customers drive to you, and most of the advice you will read is written for the second kind of business.
Tell Google you are a service-area business
Google Business Profile has a specific category for this. Its own help describes a service-area business as one that visits or delivers to customers directly but doesn't serve customers at their business address, and the instructions are blunt: if you do not serve customers at your address, remove the address from the profile and set service areas instead. You can name up to 20 areas by city or ZIP code, you cannot set a radius, and the same help page says the overall area should not stretch much beyond about two hours of driving from where you are based. Google's guidelines for representing your business add that a business which does not serve customers at its address should hide that address, and that it gets one service-area profile.
Two things follow. First, pick the 20 places where you actually want work, not the 20 nearest. Second, there is one profile for the whole area. A second profile for a second town is against the guidelines unless there is a real second location with its own staff, and it is the kind of thing that gets both profiles suspended.
Name the towns on the website, in words
The profile gets you on the map. The website is what convinces the person who clicked, and it has to say, in text a search engine can read, where you work.
The weak version is a footer line: "Serving the greater metro area." Nobody searches for that. The strong version names towns: "We work in Plainfield, Naperville, Bolingbrook and Romeoville, and we are usually across town in under 40 minutes." Put it on the home page, the contact page and the first paragraph of each service page. Mention towns in the job gallery captions, because "Furnace replacement, Bolingbrook" is both a caption and a sentence about where you work.
Make the facts machine-readable as well. LocalBusiness schema has an area-served field, and the free schema generator will write the block for you to paste in.
One page per town, or not
Here is where contractors get into trouble. Somebody tells you to make a page for every town, you make eighteen, each one is the same 400 words with the town name swapped, and Google treats the lot as junk.
That is not bad luck. Google's spam policies list, as an example of doorway abuse, "multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page." Eighteen interchangeable town pages that all end in the same phone number is a textbook case.
A town page earns its place when it says things that are only true of that town. A reasonable test is three of them:
- Work you have done there. Real jobs, with photos and captions. Not "we serve Naperville homeowners" but "the 1970s split-levels on the east side mostly still have the original cast iron stacks, and we have replaced eleven of them."
- Something local that changes the job. The water hardness, the permit office and its turnaround, the inspector's known preferences, the age of the housing stock, the HOA rules in the big subdivisions.
- Reviews from there. Customers who named the town.
If you can write that page for four towns, write four. If only for one, write one and let the rest live in a sentence on the home page. Four real pages beat eighteen thin ones.
The rest is the same local SEO as everyone else
Consistent name, phone and hours everywhere. Reviews that mention the job and the town, because they are both ranking signal and persuasion; how to get more customer reviews covers the asking. The longer version of all that is in local SEO for a one-location business, and almost all of it applies to a business with no location at all.
A Webkio trade site carries a service area block, LocalBusiness schema and a Google review link out of the box, so the towns you name on the page and the towns in your profile can be the same list from day one.
FAQ
Should a contractor hide their address on Google Business Profile?
If customers never come to it, yes, that is what Google's own guidelines ask for. You set service areas instead, up to 20 by city or ZIP. A real shop or showroom that customers visit is different and can keep the address.
Do I need a page for every town I serve?
No. Make a town page only when you can fill it with things that are true of that town alone: jobs done there, local conditions, local reviews. Thin copies of one page with the town name changed match Google's own description of doorway pages.
How many service areas should I set?
Google allows up to 20 and asks that the whole area stay within roughly two hours of driving. Choose the places you want work from, not simply the nearest 20, and keep the website's list of towns the same.