The short answer
Yes. The address on a Google Business Profile is one of the strongest local ranking signals, because Google weighs how close a business is to the searcher. You cannot move the address for rankings, but you can strengthen everything else that decides how far the business reaches.
Why the address matters so much
When someone searches for a local service, Google tries to show businesses near them. It uses the address on each Business Profile, or the service area for businesses that travel to customers, to judge that distance. Google names distance as one of its three main local ranking factors, alongside relevance and prominence.
So two equally good businesses can see very different results across a town, simply because one is in the center and the other is on the edge. That is not a penalty. It is the distance factor working as designed, and it applies to every business in the area.
What the address affects
The address mainly shapes where a business appears in the map results and the local pack. It has less effect on the ordinary web results below, where the website's content and links do more of the work.
It also affects searches that name a place. A search for a service in a particular town tends to favor businesses with an address in or near that town, even when other businesses serve it.
What you should not do
Because the address carries so much weight, some businesses are tempted to bend it. Each of these breaks Google's guidelines and risks suspension:
- listing an address where the business does not operate, such as a friend's office or a mailbox
- using a virtual office that the business does not staff
- creating extra profiles at other addresses to cover more towns
A suspended profile loses its reviews' visibility and its place in the results, which costs far more than a weak position ever did.
What you can do instead
The address is fixed, but the factors around it are not:
- Choose the most accurate primary category, and add secondary categories that match real services.
- List every service on the profile and on the website, each with a clear page.
- Build a steady flow of genuine reviews, and reply to them.
- Keep the business name, address and phone number the same everywhere it appears online.
- Publish a page on the website for each area you genuinely serve, with something specific to say about it.
Stronger relevance and prominence widen the area where the business can appear. Our answer on why a business appears in one area and not the next explains that edge in more detail.
When a real move makes sense
If a business is choosing new premises anyway, it is worth considering where its customers search from. But moving purely for rankings rarely pays off, because competitors, reviews and the website matter too. Our local SEO work starts from the address you have and makes the most of it, because that is the position every competitor is also working from.