RunCabin Blog · Getting found

Should I put my home address on my business website?

September 17, 2026 · 7 min read

Short answer: no, not your literal street address - but you still have to tell Google and your customers where you work. If you run a painting, cleaning, landscaping, handyman, or similar trade out of your house and drive to the job, there is a correct, well-established way to show up in local search without putting your family's front door on the internet. It's called a service area, and most home-based owners have never been told it exists.

Why this question comes up

Most local-service businesses start in a spare bedroom or a garage. There's no storefront, no showroom, no reason for a customer to ever visit "the office" - the work happens at the customer's house, not yours. But every website template and every Google Business Profile setup flow asks for an address, and the honest answer feels wrong to type in public: your actual home.

So owners either publish it anyway and feel uneasy about it, leave the field blank and lose the local-search benefit, or make up a fake commercial-sounding address that gets the listing suspended for mismatched information. None of those are the right move.

The real risk of publishing it

A home address on a public website is permanent and searchable the moment it's live. A few concrete ways that bites you:

• It's tied to your name, not just your business. Anyone who looks up your LLC or contractor license can cross-reference the address to find exactly where you and your family sleep at night.
• Unhappy customers show up in person. A billing dispute or a warranty argument that would have stayed a phone call can turn into someone standing in your driveway.
• It invites the wrong kind of "customer." A published home address is a target for scouting a house that's frequently empty during work hours - the business owner is out on jobs all day.
• It outlives the business. Old directory listings, cached pages, and copies of your site keep the address findable long after you've updated or taken it down.

None of that means you have to hide entirely - customers still need to trust that you're a real, local business. The fix is being specific about where you work, not where you live.

What Google actually wants from you

This is the part most owners get wrong, because the standard address field on every website builder and business-listing form implies a storefront. Google Business Profile has a separate setting for exactly this situation: service-area business.

Here's how it works. When you set up or edit your Business Profile, you still enter your real address - Google needs it to verify you're a legitimate, correctly-located business. Then, under your business information, you mark yourself as a service-area business ("I deliver goods and services to my customers" rather than "customers visit my business at its address") and set the option to hide your street address from public view. From that point on, your profile shows the towns and zip codes you serve instead of a pin on your house. Your real address stays on file with Google for verification; it never appears to the public.

Your website should mirror that same logic. There's no SEO requirement to publish a residential street address - what local search actually rewards is a clear, honest service area (the specific towns and neighborhoods you cover) plus consistent contact info across your site, your Google profile, and any directories you're listed in. A vague or wrong address hurts that consistency more than a well-defined service area ever would.

What to put on your site instead

1. A service area, named specifically. Not "serving the tri-state area" - a real list: "Serving Springfield, Dayton, and surrounding areas within 25 miles." Specific towns read as more trustworthy than a vague radius, and they're what a customer is actually typing into Google.
2. A business phone number. Whether that's your cell or a separate line is its own decision - see our post on putting your personal number on your website - but it belongs front and center either way.
3. A business email address at your own domain (you@yourbusiness.com, not a personal Gmail) - it reads as more established and keeps quote requests out of your personal inbox.
4. A quote or contact form that goes straight to that inbox, so a customer never needs a physical address to reach you.

If a supplier, a bank, or your state's business registration genuinely requires a mailing address on file, a PO box or a low-cost virtual mailbox (commercial mail receiving agency) handles that without exposing your house - and it's a separate, private document, not something that goes on your public website.

One exception: if you actually have a public location

If you run a shop customers walk into - a cleaning supply storefront, a showroom, a retail nursery - none of this applies. Publish that address; it's the whole point of a storefront listing, and Google's local-search results are built around exactly that kind of "customers visit us" business. The service-area setting is specifically for the businesses that go to the customer, not the other way around.

Where RunCabin fits

This is one of those details that's easy to get wrong on a DIY builder, because the address field just sits there expecting an answer and most owners either fill it in with their real one or skip it and lose the local-search benefit. When RunCabin builds your site, it's set up as a service-area business from the start: your service towns and zip codes are listed clearly, your business phone and a domain email are front and center, and every quote request routes straight to your inbox - no street address required anywhere public. It's $39.99/mo, flat, no setup fee, and if your service area changes - you pick up a new county, you drop a town that's too far a drive - you just ask the AI to update it. No page editor, no waiting on a designer.

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Related reading: do I need a separate page for every town I serve? · should I put my personal cell number on my website? · is a Google Business Profile enough?