The sixty-second answer
Replace the address with a service area. A home-based or mobile business publishes named towns, hours, a phone number and a clear description of who turns up — not a street. Nothing on a website requires a public address, and a specific service area is more useful to buyers and search than an address is.
This is the normal case, not the exception
Consultants, cleaners, mobile groomers, bookkeepers, photographers, electricians, virtual assistants, tutors, caterers, dog walkers and most trades operate from a house, a truck or a laptop. They are not an odd fringe of the economy. As of December 2024 there were 1.10 million employer businesses in Canada and 1.08 million of them — 98.2 per cent — were small [1]; in New Brunswick, 20,256 of 20,631 [1]. A very large share of those have no premises a customer would ever visit, and the website advice written for shops does not fit them.
The instinct is to treat this as a weakness to hide. It is not. Buyers hiring a mobile service are not looking for a building. They are looking for confirmation that a real, competent, reachable person covers the place they live. A website is unusually good at supplying that.
What replaces the address
A named service area. The most important line on a home-based business's website is the list of towns. Not "the greater region", not "serving the province". Write the towns out. This is the sentence that lets a search engine match you to somebody standing in one of them, and the sentence an AI assistant reads when a person asks who covers their area. Vagueness here costs more traffic than any design decision.
A stated base and radius, if that fits better. "Based in Sussex, covering roughly 60 km" is fine, and clearer than a town list if you range widely. Say whether travel changes the price rather than surprising people later.
Hours that mean something. For a mobile business, hours describe when you answer the phone and when you can be on site, and those can differ. Say both. "Phone answered 8–6 weekdays, site visits weekday mornings" is more useful than "Mon–Fri 9–5" if the second one is not true.
A reply time you meet. With no door to walk through, the enquiry is the whole front counter. Say how fast you respond and then do it. Which channel to offer is covered in contact form or phone number?
Deciding what to publish about where you live
This deserves a deliberate decision rather than a default. Your website does not need your home address. Other things you might separately choose to do can have their own address expectations — a verified maps listing, certain registrations, some payment or mailing arrangements — and it is worth knowing which of those you are opting into before you opt in. Many home-based owners use a mailbox service or PO box for correspondence and publish a service area on the site.
One line to hold: do not present an address customers cannot actually visit as though they can. Section 74.01(1)(a) of the Competition Act addresses representations to the public that are false or misleading in a material respect [5]. A mailbox listed as "our office" is exactly the sort of small untruth that is easy to avoid and awkward to explain. More on claims in what can I legally claim on my website?
Buying trust without a shopfront
A physical premises does one job: it tells a stranger you are real and will still be there next month. Without one, you supply that in other ways, and specificity is the whole trick.
A real name and a real face. One photograph of the actual person or the actual van, taken on a phone, beats a stock photo of a stranger at a desk. Who turns up matters more to a home-service buyer than any other fact on the site. See do I need professional photos for my website?
Credentials, plainly stated. Licence or certification, trade ticket, insurance status, years in the work, association membership. Write only what you hold — a performance or efficacy claim must rest on an adequate and proper test, and the burden of proof lies on the person making the representation [5].
Specific detail about how the work runs. What happens after you book. Whether you take card on site. Whether there is a call-out fee. How you handle keys or access. Practical specifics do the reassurance work that a shopfront window used to do.
Consistency everywhere you appear. Name, phone number, hours and service area should agree across your site, any listing, your invoices and your van. Disagreement makes buyers hesitate and makes machines uncertain about which version is true. More in how do customers actually find my website?
What the five pages look like without an address
The structure barely changes; only the contact block does. Home leads with what you do and the towns you cover, in that order, with the phone number beside them. Services is a plain list with what each one costs or what determines the cost. Service area becomes a real page rather than a line in the footer — for a mobile business it is the page most likely to be quoted back to a customer, so give it the town names, the travel rules and any minimum job size. About carries the trust load a shopfront would have carried: who you are, how long, what you hold, who arrives. Contact lists phone, email, hours, reply time and how bookings are confirmed, with no street address and no apology for its absence.
Maps listings when there is nothing to map
You do not have to publish a street address to be listed. Google's own guidance is explicit: if you do not serve customers at your business address, remove the address from your Business Profile and set a service area instead, which shows customers where you provide your services [8]. Other map and directory platforms each set their own rules, so check the one you are actually signing up for rather than assuming. A listing is worth having because it and a website answer different questions. A listing tends to catch "near me" searches; the website is what confirms you once someone has your name, and it is the one you own outright. Run both if you can, and keep them agreeing. The comparison is in do I need a website if I have a Google Business Profile?, and the social version in is a Facebook page enough instead of a website?
Letting machines read the service area
Once the towns are in your visible text, structured data can restate them. The Schema.org LocalBusiness type carries properties including address, telephone, email, openingHours, areaServed, geo and priceRange [2], and the Service type describes a service provided by an organization with an areaServed property defined as the geographic area where a service or offered item is provided [3]. Markup never substitutes for the sentence — it removes ambiguity about a fact the page already states. Keep the facts as text, too: the Accessible Canada Act names information and communication technologies among the areas where barriers are to be identified and removed, working toward a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040 [6], and a phone number trapped inside an image serves neither a screen reader nor an answer engine. See how do I get AI assistants to recommend my business?
The quote form is where privacy actually bites
Home-based businesses often collect more personal information than shops do — a customer's address, access instructions, sometimes photos of the inside of their house. PIPEDA's Schedule 1 requires purposes to be identified at or before collection, requires knowledge and consent, provides that information is not used or disclosed for other purposes without consent, and requires policies and practices to be readily available to individuals [4]. Ask for the minimum, say what you do with it in two honest sentences, and delete what you no longer need. See does my small business website need a privacy policy?
One tax note while you are writing: if you travel to customers, the rate follows the place of supply rather than your base. CRA states the rate of tax to charge depends on the place of supply, illustrating a Vancouver store charging 13% HST on a delivery to Toronto [7]. Detail in how do I show prices with GST/HST?
Where we sit
A service-area build is the same build. A maple.website site starts at $50, covering 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work; past that, extra copy is $0.20 per 1,000 characters, extra custom images $2 each and extra hours $40 per hour, always quoted in advance. Hosting is $10 CAD per month including SSL, CDN and daily backups, on a domain you own, and it is live within 48 hours of the brief. All prices CAD; HST extra where applicable. Tell us the towns and we will put them where people and machines can both read them. What else to gather is in what do I need ready before someone builds my website?