No shopfront is not the same as no local search
Google has a listing type for businesses that travel to customers. Set up right it ranks; set up the common wrong way it gets suspended and you vanish from the map.
A business without a shopfront is not excluded from local search. Google has a separate listing type for it, and used correctly it ranks. Used incorrectly, which is the common case, it gets the listing suspended and takes the business out of the map pack entirely.
Hide the address, keep the listing
A service-area business declares the areas it serves and does not display a street address publicly. Google still verifies a real address privately, which is the part owners miss: the listing is honest about not receiving customers, not about not having a location. Declaring a home address and then also claiming to receive customers there is the combination that gets flagged, and once a profile is suspended, reinstatement is slow and the business is invisible on the map while it waits.
Proximity still decides, so the website carries more
Map results are strongly influenced by how close the searcher is to the business, and a service-area business cannot move. The practical consequence is that the edges of your service area will not come from the map pack, so they have to come from organic results, which means the website is doing work the listing cannot. That is the case where a small number of genuinely local pages earns its keep, and what belongs on them is in which parts of a local page have to be local.
Do not inflate the radius
Declaring a service area twice the size of the one you actually serve does not widen your reach; it dilutes relevance and generates enquiries you turn down, which costs you the time and the conversion rate. The area to declare is the one where you would genuinely take the job tomorrow at your normal price.
