Is there any way to obtain Google Business Profile listings for remote workers?

• We have a new client who has an unusually good network of staff operating in towns around the country. They would like to appear on local search for each of these locations.

  The difficulty is, the staff all work from home and there are no local offices.

  However each staff member does have a defined area of coverage, and they could publish their cell phone numbers. Do you know of any way to make this appear on local?

Answer:

As you probably know, Google Business Profiles (formerly, Google My Business), represents brick & mortar, physical locations. As such, creating a traditional commercial office space/business point of presence would be the "best" solution as Google see it.

However, that may not be practical — and to a large degree, defeats the purpose of having a staff that works remotely.

The only workaround that we're aware of is for the agents to list their residential location under the business name and provide a land-line number that is listed in the phone book — then Google would probably create a listing based on that data. The land-line phone could then be redirected to the agent's cell phone so they wouldn't actually be stuck at home just to answer the phone.

Of course it's likely that staff may not want their home address listed as a business.

If that's the case the only "solution" is to have a commercial physical location that satisfies Google's NAP (name, address, phone) requirements.