01The address you hide still has to be real
Google's guidelines are specific. A business that serves customers at their own locations should have one profile for its central office or location with a designated service area, and should hide its business address from customers. P.O. boxes or mailboxes at remote locations are not acceptable, and a rented mailing address from which the business does not actually operate, a virtual office, is not eligible for a profile. The service area should not extend farther than about two hours of driving from where the business is based, and you can list up to 20 areas by city or postal code. Google asks for areas to be specific and accurate and for you to remove the ones you do not serve. List only the places you really drive to.
- One profile with the address hidden and a service area set, not a profile per district
- Up to 20 areas, by city or postal code, and only places you really drive to
- No virtual offices or mailboxes: the address behind the profile is where you work from
02Name, hours and category: where electricians lose the profile
The tempting move is a name like Electrician București Non-Stop. Google's rules say that unnecessary information in the business name, such as service descriptors or opening hours, is not permitted and can lead to the profile being suspended. The name is the one you trade under. Hours go in the hours field: Google's own example for a 24-hour business is to enter Open 24 hours there, not in the name. Do that only if somebody really answers at 3 am. Relevance is the first thing Google says it measures, and the category and the services you list carry it. Pick the category that names your trade, then describe the jobs you do in the services, in the words customers use.
- Name: the one you trade under, with no keywords, cities or non-stop
- Hours: 24 hours only if a person really picks up at night
- Category and services: your trade first, then the specific jobs in customers' words
03Pages for areas: where the line to doorway spam sits
A service-area business has no address page to rank, so the temptation is a page per district: Electrician Sector 1, Electrician Sector 2, with the same text and the name swapped. Google's spam policy calls this doorway abuse and gives as an example pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. A page for an area is fine when it says something true about work there: the jobs you do, how quickly you can usually arrive, a number to call. Otherwise one clear page listing the areas you serve is better than thirty copies. Put the weight on a page per type of job: fault finding, a new circuit, a replaced fuse board, lighting. That gives a search something specific to match, which is the relevance Google names first.
- No near-identical page per district: Google names that doorway abuse
- One page listing the areas you really serve, plus a page per type of job
- An area page only when it has something true to say about that area
04Show what you can prove
Prominence, the third factor, is how well known you are, and Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking. Ask every customer after every job, the same way each time, and answer each review. Beyond Google, an electrician has a better trust signal than most trades. ANRE, the energy regulator, has an authorisation regime for electricians, set out in its Order 66/2023 published in May 2023, and its homepage points to information and public lists about electricians at spv.anre.ro. If you hold an authorisation, show it as ANRE issued it, and leave it off if you do not. Add the electrician's own name and photos of real work, with the customer's permission. Schema.org has an Electrician type with an areaServed property, which describes the trade and the area in a form a machine can read.
- A review request after every job and a reply to every review: Google says more reviews and good ratings can help
- Show your ANRE authorisation only if you hold one; Order 66/2023 governs it
- Your name and photos of real work, with permission
05Where PROOF48 is the wrong choice
Our FOUND plan, at 297 EUR a month, includes Google Business Profile management, local SEO for 5 target keywords, 2 AI blog posts a month, schema and a monthly ranking report. For an electrician it fits one service area and a handful of core jobs. It is the wrong choice when you need calls this month, because search builds over months and paid ads are the faster route. It is also wrong when the van is already full from word of mouth, or when the phone is the whole business, because our plans do not answer calls. If you have no website at all, the order is a site first: a business website of up to about five pages costs 500 to 2,500 EUR, is built in 48 hours and is paid for only after you see it.
- FOUND covers 5 target keywords: enough for one trade and one service area
- Need calls this month: ads first, SEO later
- No website yet: the 48-hour site comes first, paid after you see it
A shopfront case, and what carries over
We have not built a site for an electrician or any other trade without a shopfront. Our local SEO build is SCP Shine & Style, a salon with a street address in Sector 3, Bucharest, which is the opposite case. What carries over is the structure: a page per service with its own copy and media, Person schema, and blog posts signed by the owner. The salon's landmarks line, naming the Dristor and Titan area, has a service-area counterpart in a plain list of the areas an electrician serves.
See the build: SCP Shine & StyleQuestions, answered
Should an electrician show a home address on Google?
Google tells service-area businesses to hide their address from customers and show a service area instead. The profile still needs a real place the business is based, because P.O. boxes and virtual offices are not acceptable.
How many areas can I list?
Up to 20, by city or postal code, and Google asks you to remove any you do not serve. Its guidance also says the service area should not extend farther than about two hours of driving from where you are based.
Can PROOF48 promise page-one results for an electrician?
No. Nobody controls Google's positions. We build the profile, pages and schema, report each month what moved, and do not promise a position or a number of calls.
Where PROOF48 fits
For an electrician without a shopfront, local SEO is a hidden address with a real base behind it, a service area of places you really drive to, an honest name and hours, pages per type of job rather than per district, and reviews after every job. PROOF48's FOUND plan, at 297 EUR a month, covers the profile, schema and keyword work, and we say plainly when ads or a first website should come before it.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Cosmin has worked in online marketing and software development since 2018, and has built with AI every day since January 2023. He still writes code from scratch daily, in Python, React, Rust and C#. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, so every opinion on this blog was paid for in real builds, not in theory.