A service area business, often shortened to SAB, is one where you go to the customer rather than the customer coming to you. Almost every trade is one. You have a yard, a unit or a home office, but no customer is ever going to turn up at it for a roof repair.
Why Google treats it differently
Google Business Profile was built around shops, so it wants an address. For a service area business you can list the areas you serve and hide the address, which is the correct setting if you work from home.
You still have to give Google a real address when you register, because that is how the postcard verification works. It just does not get shown publicly. The rules are set out in Google guidelines on representing your business.
Setting the areas sensibly
List the towns you genuinely take work in, not a radius drawn to look big. Google's own guidance suggests keeping the area to roughly a two hour drive from where you are based. Google on service area businesses, read 15 September 2026, and a patch that sprawls across three counties reads as unreliable to anyone checking.
Picking a virtual office address in a bigger city to rank there is against the rules, gets profiles suspended, and takes the reviews with it when it does.
A worked example
A tree surgeon works from home in Hale and covers Altrincham, Sale, Timperley and Wilmslow. The profile hides his home address and lists those four towns.
The website carries a page for each of the four, naming the roads and the kind of trees common in each, which is what a service area business has instead of a shop front. The profile says where he goes. The site proves he has been.