One template with the town name swapped
The defining failure of multi-location SEO. It is the doorway pattern at scale and Google has been discounting it for a decade.
Guide
Local SEO for multiple locations
Every extra location multiplies the work in a way that is not obvious until the third one. Each branch needs its own Google Business Profile, its own page, its own reviews and its own consistent details everywhere those details appear. Done well it compounds, because each branch reinforces the brand. Done badly it produces a set of near-identical pages that compete with each other and rank for nothing.
By Hamza Rivera
Short answer: Multi-location local SEO needs a claimed Google profile for each branch, each pointing at its own page on the site, and each page must say something only that branch could. Add a store locator that crawlers can follow, reviews collected at each branch, and identical name, address and phone details everywhere.
8 steps
Free to read, in the order it pays to do it. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to download.
The failure is almost always the same: one location page template with the town name swapped. Google has been discounting that pattern for years, and the more branches there are the more obvious it becomes.
The fix is unglamorous and it works: each location page has to contain something only that location could say.
What businesses with several locations are actually competing for
These are the shapes the searches take. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher puts there, which is usually a town, a neighbourhood or a brand.
- [brand] [town]
- [service] near me
- [brand] opening hours [area]
- [service] [neighbourhood]
- [brand] store locator
The work, in the order it pays to do it
- 1
One Google Business Profile per physical location, claimed and verified
Not one profile for the company. Each branch with its own address, its own phone number where possible, and its own hours. A single profile for a multi-branch business is invisible everywhere except one place.
- 2
One page per location on the site, linked from the profile
The profile should point at the branch page, not the home page. It is the most common misconfiguration in multi-location setups and it wastes every click the profile earns.
- 3
Make each location page say something only that branch can
The manager, the parking, what that branch is known for, which services it actually offers, a photograph of that building, directions from a local landmark. Three sentences of genuinely local content is the difference between a page and a duplicate.
- 4
Give each branch its own reviews
Reviews attach to a profile, not to a brand. A branch with none looks new and untrusted next to a sibling with two hundred, so the review request has to happen at each location.
- 5
Build a store locator that search engines can read
If the locator is a map widget that loads addresses from JavaScript with no links, the location pages are effectively orphaned. Plain links to every branch page, on a crawlable list, underneath whatever map you want on top.
- 6
Keep name, address and phone identical everywhere
Across profiles, the site, and every directory, for every branch. At ten locations this is a data problem rather than a marketing one, and it needs a single source of truth somebody owns.
- 7
Do not let branches compete for the same term
Two branches in the same city both optimised for the same city term will split the signal. Differentiate by neighbourhood, by service, or by consolidating the target.
- 8
Use consistent structured data per location
LocalBusiness markup on each branch page with that branch’s own address, hours and phone. Copying one branch’s markup across all of them is worse than having none.
What usually goes wrong
Every profile pointing at the home page
Throws away the most valuable click each profile produces and leaves every branch page unlinked from the thing that should link to it.
A JavaScript-only store locator
The branch pages exist and nothing links to them in a way a crawler can follow.
Reviews pooled at head office
They do not transfer. A branch with no reviews of its own is a branch with no reviews.
How to tell whether it is working
Rankings are not the measure. These are, and all of them come from accounts in your own name rather than from a report you have to take on trust.
- Profile calls and direction requests per branch, compared against each other
- Search Console performance filtered to each location page, not the site total
- Review count and recency per branch, so the weak ones are visible
- Whether any two branches are ranking for the same term, which means they are competing
Protecting what you build
Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether businesses with several locations still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
For a multi-location business the specific risk is one change applied everywhere. A template edit, a bulk listing upload or a store-locator rebuild touches every branch at once, so a mistake is not one branch down, it is all of them. Test on one location before anything goes out to the rest.
What actually breaks a business in search
Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.
A redesign or a platform move
By a distance the most common cause of a real collapse. URLs change and nothing redirects, or the new site ships with the staging robots.txt still in it. Both are entirely preventable and both are usually discovered weeks later.
A plugin or a setting nobody audited
One checkbox marked "discourage search engines", one SEO plugin defaulting to noindex on a template, one caching layer serving a stale page. Small change, total effect.
Losing control of an account
The Business Profile owned by a former agency, Search Console verified to somebody who has left, the domain registered to a developer. None of this hurts until the relationship ends, and then all of it does at once.
A suspended Google Business Profile
For a business that serves an area this is worse than any algorithm update, because it removes you from the map entirely and on the same day.
Letting the work stop
Nothing dramatic happens. Reviews stop, hours drift, a competitor keeps going, and a year later the position has quietly gone. This is the most common ending and the least noticed.
What to refuse, however it is sold to you
Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.
-
Bought links, in any packaging
Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.
-
Reviews you did not earn
Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.
-
Keywords stuffed into the business name
It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.
-
Pages written to have pages
A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.
-
Anybody who guarantees a position
Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.
The monthly discipline
Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.
- Check Search Console coverage once a month and look at the Excluded reasons, not just the errors.
- Watch impressions rather than clicks. Impressions fall first, usually weeks before anybody notices the phone is quieter.
- Open the Business Profile and look for edits the public has suggested and Google has accepted without telling you.
- Reply to every review that arrived since last month, and keep asking, steadily rather than in bursts.
- Before any site change, write down what the URLs are now. After it, check they still resolve.
- Keep one note of what changed and when. Almost every traffic mystery is solved by a change nobody wrote down.
- Re-run the audit checklist once a year, and the first two sections after any redesign, host move or new plugin.
Own your own accounts
The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.
If you would rather not do it yourself
Everything above is work you can do without hiring anybody, and the profile half of it is worth doing whatever else you decide. If you want it done for you, this is the service that covers it, and we scope it on a call before anything starts.
Other guides
Questions about local SEO for businesses with several locations
Should each location have its own website?
Almost never. Separate sites split the authority the brand has earned. One site with a strong page per location, each with its own profile pointing at it, is stronger and far less work to maintain.
How different do location pages need to be?
Enough that somebody reading two of them could tell which branch they were looking at without the address. In practice that is a few paragraphs of genuinely local content, not a rewrite of everything.
Can we use the same phone number for every branch?
You can, but a local number per branch performs better and makes the listings easier to keep consistent. A single central number is workable if the rest of the details are right.
What about service area businesses with several bases?
Same principle, with the addresses hidden and the service areas set so they do not overlap more than they have to. Overlapping areas make your own branches compete.
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