Yes. Facebook is useful, but your website gives you a professional home base online that you control. It helps customers find your services, service area, contact information, photos, reviews, and business details in one place.  Facebook is important because 71% of US adults are on Facebook; but 29% of US adults are not on Facebook.  A business website can reach nearly all nearby customers and it helps you come across as legitimate.

Your website should clearly show what you do, where you provide service, how to contact you, why customers should trust you, and what makes your business different. Photos, reviews, service descriptions, FAQs, and strong calls to call or request a quote are especially helpful.  So that your content stays seasonally relevant (photos, announcements) you should be certain that your provider will make updates for free when you need them.  

A professional and attractive business profile, especially at Google, is essential.  Avoid showing the front of your house in your business profile, suppress your residential address, and create a service area map instead.  Use a professionally built website with good photos and clear service descriptions. Modern features such as chatbots and customer inquiry forms add credibility.  Developing as many four and five star reviews as possible is essential to establishing a credible online presence. The goal is to make your online presence feel as complete and trustworthy as a storefront.

Start by asking your best customers. After a good service experience, leave the customer with a professional looking review request, ideally with a QR code to make leaving a review for you easy. Make review requests part of your normal follow-up process. After a successful job, send customers a direct link, thank them for choosing your business, and ask them to share their honest experience.

Yes, when possible. A short, professional response shows that you appreciate customers and pay attention to feedback. This matters for both happy customers and people comparing your business to others online.  When you respond to every review, it shows you are engaged with your customers and on top of your service. 

Stay calm, respond professionally, and invite the customer to contact you directly so you can better understand the concern. If the review is fake or violates a platform’s rules, you may be able to report it for removal.

Absolutely.  We’ve helped thousands of home-based or mobile businesses navigate Google’s requirements for an official listing.  As you may have experienced, there’s a process that often involves multi-step verification involving video and other requirements.  We will help you through that complexity, give you specific steps and directions to take, and guide you through what needs to be done.  Google’s aim in establishing this verification process is noble – they want to ensure that customers only find actual local businesses in search results.  In general, if your business makes in-person contact with customers at a customer’s location and you are not a purely online business, then you are usually eligible for a Google Business Profile.  We realize the bar to establishing a listing can feel high or insurmountable without expert help.  But even if your own attempts to verify a home-based business have been rejected, we can often help you establish a business listing on Google. 

Yes — in most cases, we can help.  If you operate a legitimate service-area business from your home and you meet customers at their locations, your residential address generally should not be displayed publicly on your Google Business Profile. Instead, your profile should be set up to show the areas you serve, not the home address where you run the business.

We will review your Google Business Profile, update it as a service-area business where appropriate, and work to remove or suppress your residential address from public-facing business listings where the rules allow.  We can also help you request changes to photos or map imagery that show your home.  There are some limits: Google controls its own map imagery, verification process, and final display decisions, so no company can guarantee that every image or address reference will disappear immediately. But for home-based and mobile businesses, protecting your residential privacy is an important part of setting up your online presence correctly.

Yes. If you travel to customers instead of serving them at a storefront, we can help set up your Google Business Profile to show the areas you serve rather than a public storefront address.  Google refers to this as a “service area.”  Depending on your business, your profile can list the cities, towns, zip codes, or other areas where you provide service. This helps customers understand where you work, especially if you operate from home, use a mobile service model, or do not want customers coming to your business address.

We can help hide your address where appropriate, add or update your service areas, and make sure the information is consistent with the rest of your online presence.  Its important to note that Google controls how service areas appear on Google Search and Maps, and adding a city or zip code does not guarantee that your business will rank in every area you list. Your visibility will still depend on your business category, proximity, competition, reviews, profile quality, website, and other local search factors. But if you are a legitimate service-area business, presenting the areas you travel to is an important part of setting up your online profile correctly.

You definitely do not need to pay commercial rent to show up well in local search results.  If you travel to customers instead of serving them at a storefront location, it makes your online presence even more important, because the “front door” to your business is in fact your online profile.  Without the advantage of prominent signage or a location that customers come to, how you look online is incredibly important. 

At AMP, we work closely with the owners of home-based and mobile businesses to establish attractive, high-ranking business listings at Google, of course, but also at Bing, Yelp, and other important local search sites.  We also help you develop a positive and accurate online reputation, with a focus on building up the volume of your five star reviews from satisfied customers so that when people look at your profile online, they feel confident calling to spend their money with you.  Finally, we provide all of our home-based business with a sophisticated business website, with lead capture, positive review display, and a chatbot for frequently asked questions.  This three part solution of visible listings on the big search platforms, assistance developing and promoting great reviews, and building and hosting an effective local website will often help our clients show up as well as the storefront businesses in their communities.      

Google allows up to 20 service areas, such as cities, postal codes, or other specific areas. Google also says your overall service area generally should not extend more than about two hours of driving time from where the business is based.

For a service-area business, your video should help prove that the business is real, located where you say it is, and operated by you. That may include nearby street signs, tools, equipment, branded materials, work vehicles, business documents, or other proof that you actually provide the services listed.

Usually, no. Google generally requires a real business location and does not allow P.O. boxes or remote mailboxes as business addresses. If you work from home and travel to customers, your profile may need to be set up as a service-area business instead.