In this tutorial, I’ll show you precisely how you can choose your preferred service area in Google My Business (GMB) and hide your home or office address using Google Maps.
Constantly we do talk about getting local businesses found by home or office addresses, whereas, most local business owners don’t want their business addresses traced or found online.
If you run a business in a particular service area without a storefront, you likely wouldn’t want Google to show your home address to the business world.
Recently, I wrote a comprehensive training tutorial on how you can successfully affirm, verify and optimize your Google My Business (GMB) listing. After this, a fellow user made it known that he's willing to optimize his national website with the help of Google My Business listings while he would love to learn how to hide a home address on Google Maps alongside.
Here's my answer:
Meeting Your Privacy Concern!
Privacy is turning out into a universal concern as the stripe between the digital world and our real world keeps getting vague.
Google Maps is one of my favorite tools and it's an excellent way to understand a lot of things about the world. But, what if you do have some privacy considerations about the street outlook and wouldn’t want unknown people getting to know the home you rented or bought, or perhaps your own face as automatically snapped by the Google Maps (GM) camera?
I’ll show you an easy way to hide your home address on Google Maps street outlook in this tutorial.
I hope you’ve likely had a look into the photos of the Google Maps car by now! This is the car swaddled in Google stigmatized imagery with a spheroid of cameras scaled to its roof. Such cameras produce up to 360-degree pictures of apparently every significant road in the whole world. However, you can follow some steps to hide your identity or home if they show up in the pictures.
If you’re someone like me, you likely don’t cherish the idea of having your address or identity featured on Google Maps, especially if you’re working from home. There are challenges with a Google Maps house address or identity being evident to anyone, such as customers paying you a visit at your home address when you cannot serve customers at the address (that’s a requisite for my residence occupation permit), thus having it removed from Google Maps becomes important.
So, how do you go about it?
Reply
However, hiding your address doesn't imply you're violating the guidelines, but you're choosing to deliver goods and services at the customer's location. Thanks for stopping by!
Israel Olatunji
Israel Olatunji
Note that you're eligible to have good standing with Google running a Google My Business (GMB) listing even if you have a website added to your listing. It doesn't mean that you aren't eligible. However, you won't be eligible if and only if you don't have a real street address through which people can reach out to you physically.
In the light of that, hiding your physical address using Google Maps won't ever stop you from staying secure with your listing. No penalty for hiding your physical address! You are not removing it from your listing! You're only hiding it by dropping it in the red box as described in the previous training regarding Google My Business listing setups.
Israel Olatunji
