The mechanism is worth understanding because it explains what is and is not achievable. Local ranking weighs relevance, distance, and prominence. Distance is measured from the searcher, or from the place they named, to your location. That is a fact about geography rather than a factor you optimise, and it is why a competitor across town outranks you for searches near them.
Having an address does not automatically produce better rankings than not having one. What it does is establish where you are, which determines the area you can plausibly rank in. A business with no location specified at all has nothing for the system to measure distance from, which is why the service area setup exists rather than leaving it blank.
The service area configuration is the answer for anybody who travels to customers. You specify the areas you serve, the address remains hidden from the public listing, and you appear in results across that area. Google and the other platforms support this explicitly, it does not harm your visibility, and it means somebody working from home does not have to publish where they live.
A commercial address helps in one specific way, which is that it places you closer to the centre of the market you want. A business on the edge of a metropolitan area ranks well nearby and progressively less toward the middle, and that is a real constraint. Whether it justifies the cost of premises is an entirely different calculation and usually the answer is no.
What does not work is inventing an address you have no connection to, or renting a mailbox purely for the listing. Platforms verify addresses, they investigate reports, and listings using a location the business does not occupy are removed. The suspension affects the profile that was producing your customers, which is a considerable cost for a marginal gain.
A registered agent address or a virtual office is a legitimate business address for correspondence and registration and is generally not acceptable as a listing location if nobody is there. That distinction catches people out, because the address is genuine and the presence is not.
Focus effort on the factors you can influence, since distance is fixed. Relevance comes from your categories, your described services, and your content. Prominence comes from reviews, consistent information across the web, and being mentioned by other local sources. Those are where the available gains are.
Then be realistic about the radius. A business ranks strongly near its location and fades with distance, which means a single location cannot dominate a large metropolitan area regardless of how well the profile is optimised. Understanding that prevents chasing rankings in areas where geography has already decided.
Set the service radius honestly rather than as large as permitted, since claiming an implausible area produces a profile that ranks poorly across all of it. A tighter definition matching where you genuinely work performs better than an ambitious one.
Check whether competitors nearer the centre are genuinely outranking you or whether the difference is your profile, since those need different responses. Comparing review counts and profile completeness against businesses appearing above you separates a geography problem from a fixable one.
Keep the address identical across every platform, since a difference of a suite number or an abbreviation between two listings is exactly the disagreement that weakens the corroboration these systems look for.