Transitioning to service area business

[burninglights]

Hello. I have a solo practice in healthcare and have decided to give up my office and go 100% virtual. Just curious what the best practices would be to retain as much of my local seo as possible. I currently rank in the top 5 for most of my local search keywords, and am in the GMB 3-pack for most of them as well (this sends way more clients my way than I can see). My website has a domain authority of 30, which is the second highest in my industry for my county, only behind a franchise with locations around the US.

My plan is to delete my office address from my website and GMB and see if/how long I can coast on that as a ghost address. If my rankings drop, or if another business validates a GMB account from that address, then I will add my home address to GMB to verify my location, and then delete it again to hide it (as it seems GMB has stopped offering a 'hide address' feature?).

I have around two dozen highly relevant local citations, and I'm not sure what to do about these. Conventional wisdom would be to attempt to update them, but since I'm becoming a virtual business, what do I update them to? I assume I should not use any sort of PO box or virtual address for citation building. I could ask them to remove the street address but keep the rest of the citation, or I could just do nothing and leave them as they are, since I won't be publishing another address that would compete with them at the moment.

Any thoughts, tips, or words of warning are welcome!

edit: Also, I should mention that I will be adding a very small home visit component to my practice in order to provide services at my clients' locations..

 

[JoyHawkins]

A lot of citations allow you to hide your address. You see the list of them here: Hidden Address Sites

Something to keep in mind is that Google is starting to limit what categories service area businesses can use so it would be a good idea to keep an eye on that list incase it grows.

 

[burninglights]

Thank you for the hidden address sites list. For this specific issue I was thinking more about hyper-local, industry-specific citations, rather than the larger databases.

For these hyper-local citations, is it better to leave the old address when transitioning to SAB, or to ask them to remove the street address?

Thank you

 

[JoyHawkins]

If it's possible to remove it, I would do that.