A business with no storefront has its own published rules, and they decide what you can own. What a lead platform sells you, and what accumulates instead.
If you travel to your customers, you are working under a specific set of published rules, and most of them are unknown to the people they govern.
Google’s definition: “Service-area business: A business that visits or delivers to customers directly but doesn’t serve customers at their business address. For example, businesses like cleaning services or plumbers. Service-area businesses can only have one profile for the whole area that they serve.”
That last clause matters. One profile, whatever the size of the territory.
The rules that follow are more restrictive than the folklore, and they decide what you are able to build.
You cannot use a radius. “You can’t set your service area as a radius distance around your business. If you previously set up your service area this way, you can’t edit it. Instead you must specify your service-area by city, postal code, or another type of area.” Any guidance telling you to set a fifty-mile radius is describing a control that no longer exists.
Twenty areas, and a soft ceiling on distance. “You can set up to 20 service areas based on the cities, postal codes, or other areas you serve.” And: “The boundaries of your overall area shouldn’t be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based.” Note the wording. Google writes “shouldn’t”, not “must not”, and adds elsewhere that “for some businesses, larger service areas may be appropriate”. There is no stated consequence for exceeding it.
No signage means no storefront. “If your business doesn’t have permanent on-site signage, it’s not eligible as a storefront and should be listed as a service-area business.”
And hide the address. “Important: If you don’t serve customers at your business address, remove your address from your Business Profile.” Google’s own example is a plumber operating from home.
One more that legitimizes multi-crew operations: “If you have different locations for your service business, with separate service areas and separate staff at each location, you’re allowed one profile for each location.”
The economics of buying leads are not mysterious, but one detail from Google’s own rules makes the asymmetry visible.
Among the categories of business that cannot have a profile at all, Google lists “Lead generation agents or companies.” The platform selling you customers is not, in Google’s terms, the business the customer is looking for. You are. Which means the visibility being sold to you is assembled out of the category, not out of the platform’s own standing as a provider.
That is the structure of the arrangement, and it has three consequences that show up in the numbers rather than in the contract.
The relationship terminates with the job. A lead is a single transaction. Nothing about it accrues to you unless you convert it into something that does: a review under your own name, a repeat customer, a referral.
The price is set by the platform, and it moves. You have no visibility into the auction and no way to accumulate a position in it. Whatever your track record, you begin each lead at the platform’s price.
And your competitors are buying the same lead. In most models the enquiry is sold several times, which means the conversion rate you experience is a property of the platform’s business model rather than of your quality.
None of that makes buying leads a mistake. It makes it a purchase of capacity utilization rather than an investment. The distinction matters when a slow month arrives and the only lever available is to buy more of the same thing.
What advertising actually buys, from the one experiment on businesses this size
There is a randomized field experiment on small local businesses, and it is more useful than any vendor case study.
Free advertising was given to 7,209 businesses randomly selected from 18,294, for three months. The measured effects: plus 19 percent page views, plus 14 percent direction requests, plus 7 percent telephone calls, plus 7 percent clicks to the business’s own site, plus 5 percent reviews.
Three qualifications, all of which point the same way.
Effects disappeared immediately when the advertising stopped. No carryover was measured.
The least known businesses gained the most. Independent operators gained more than national chains with comparable attributes, which is what you would expect if advertising works mainly by informing people who did not know you existed.
And effects on actual orders were not statistically significant. The authors say they were underpowered on that outcome, and describe the return figure that circulates from their study as “a back-of-the-envelope calculation rather than as an accurate or precise estimate of the returns to advertising.”
So: advertising demonstrably moves calls and enquiries, it stops when you stop, and nobody has demonstrated what it does to revenue for a business this size. That is the constraint we buy under, and our page on B2B paid acquisition sets out how the spend is steered week by week on cost per enquiry rather than on a modelled return.
The one asset that compounds, and the rules that govern it
Google’s own definition of the ranking factor everyone wants is a description of reputation, not of a technique: “Prominence means how well-known a business is… This factor’s also based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.”
Which makes reviews the only lever in the list that a small operator can build deliberately. The rules on how are stricter than most trades businesses realize, and three ordinary habits are named as violations:
Asking on site. Merchants “should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises”.
Targets for staff. Prohibited: “Merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews.”
Naming the technician. Prohibited: requesting “reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member.”
And the one that catches the most businesses, because it feels like good sense rather than a rule: you may not “Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers.”
The permitted version is a single sentence: encourage genuine experiences, offer nothing in exchange, and do not try to influence the rating or the content.
The federal position converges from a different direction. The Federal Trade Commission states that its consumer review rule “does not cover ‘review gating,’” but that gating “can nonetheless violate section 5 of the FTC Act”, and its Endorsement Guides make the test the outcome rather than the intent: the practice is deceptive “if it results in the posted reviews being substantially more positive than if the marketer had not engaged in the practice”, while inviting all recent customers is fine “even if it had expressed its hope for positive reviews.”
Ask everyone. Filter nobody. That satisfies both instruments at once.
One free official figure changes the framing of the competitive question.
In reference year 2023, specialty trade contractors in the United States comprised 521,315 establishments with employees and 1,928,748 businesses with none. So 78.7 percent of the field employs nobody. Repair and maintenance runs at 72.6 percent, and personal services at 89.9 percent.
Two implications for a business deciding where to put money.
Most of your competition is invisible and does not advertise. It competes on proximity, availability and word of mouth. A larger advertising budget does not reach that competition at all, it only outbids the handful of operators who are also bidding.
And most of that field is small enough to be unreliable. Average annual receipts for a nonemployer business in personal services were about 34,000 dollars, which points to a large share of part-time activity. Turning up on time with a written quote is a competitive position, and it is not one that a search results page communicates.
This page settles one question: whether to rent demand from a platform or build your own. It does not rank the channels against each other. That comparison, channel by channel and by what each one costs you in time rather than in money, is in ranking your channels as a trades business.
Rent while you are building, and know which is which. Buying leads fills a diary today. It is a cost of capacity, not an investment, and the moment it stops the enquiries stop. Budget it as fuel, not as equipment.
Build the two things that compound. A complete profile under your own name, and reviews attached to that name. Google’s own controlled study found that a complete listing raised the share judging a business reputable from 36 percent to 69 percent, and a listing costs nothing to finish.
Set the service area properly once. By city or postal code, up to twenty, within about two hours, with the address hidden if clients never visit you. Half the operators in your market have this wrong, and it is a ten-minute fix.
Ask every customer, and script nothing. It satisfies Google’s policy and the federal guidance simultaneously, and it is the only method that both permit.
And measure the one thing you can measure. Calls and enquiries per week, with the paid channel switched off for a fortnight. No public institution publishes a cost per lead for any trade, and no platform publishes benchmarks by sector, so every figure you have been shown came from someone describing their own client list. Your own two weeks is worth more than all of them.
Frequently asked questions
Can I set my service area as a radius around my base?
No. Google states you cannot set a service area as a radius distance, that if you previously set it up that way you cannot edit it, and that you must specify the area by city, postal code or another type of area instead.
How large can my service area be?
Up to 20 areas, and the boundaries should not extend more than about two hours of driving time from where the business is based. Google writes should not rather than must not, and adds that for some businesses larger areas may be appropriate.
Should I show my address if I work from home?
No. Google states that if you do not serve customers at your business address you should remove it, and its own worked example is a plumber running the business from a residential address.
Is buying leads worth it?
It buys work now and accumulates nothing. The one large randomized experiment on small business advertising found real gains in calls and direction requests that disappeared the moment the advertising stopped, and the largest gains went to the least known businesses.
How many competitors do I actually have?
In 2023 there were 1,928,748 specialty trade contractors with no employees against 521,315 establishments with employees, so 78.7 percent of the field employs nobody. Most of your competition is invisible in any directory and does not advertise.