Moving a Storefront Business to new location (Service Area Based)

[mattsmith]

Moving a rural Storefront Business (pin location) to new city location (Service Area Based) 25mins away

Can someone confirm I'm on the right track? Trying to help my client show up in the location he serves:
- currently has a storefront business profile in small rural town 25mins from a larger 90,000 population city
- do I create a new SAB profile in the city using one of his current projects (customer address)?
- then request Google to transfer reviews and then I go in and delete the old account?

or am I in violation of Google's Guidelines, I've tried to source the guidelines where this is not allowed but can't narrow anything down.

From my understanding, you can use a customer's address to verify a SAB in the city you serve to prove you serve in that area. You just show you have the trade tools and authority to unlock your truck and trailer in the customer's driveway. I'm pretty sure Joy Hopkins mentioned this was the only way for some service based businesses.

Any clarification would be great.

The other option I thought was to emphasize his service area to the city, build out GBP product/service pages and link directly to the website service-city pages to drive as much signal from the website to the profile that they serve the city.

 

[JS Girard]

Moving a rural Storefront Business (pin location) to new city location (Service Area Based) 25mins away

Can someone confirm I'm on the right track? Trying to help my client show up in the location he serves:
- currently has a storefront business profile in small rural town 25mins from a larger 90,000 population city
- do I create a new SAB profile in the city using one of his current projects (customer address)?
- then request Google to transfer reviews and then I go in and delete the old account?

In theory, that's what you're supposed to do, but how anyone who's not a high-level product expert can ever get reviews transferred is beyond me. We've never managed it, that's for sure. Even before support competence took that massive nosedive two years ago. Articles just say "contact support and ask them to move the reviews", as if it's an easy thing to even talk to a human nowadays.

From my understanding, you can use a customer's address to verify a SAB in the city you serve to prove you serve in that area. You just show you have the trade tools and authority to unlock your truck and trailer in the customer's driveway. I'm pretty sure Joy Hopkins mentioned this was the only way for some service based businesses.

I'm not entirely sure because those who have made posts about this are extremely shy on details (gotta have things only you can do!), but I'm fairly sure that's only for verticals where the business has to have independent access to the client property e.g. realtor or contractor who's been given copies of house keys.

Any clarification would be great.

Honestly, I'd look for an excuse, any excuse to just move the GBP with a visible address. If you're not successful moving the reviews, you'll need to build them all over at the new location, and having an existing one with significant visibility means they are likely to accumulate there instead.