Almost every guide to local search assumes you are a single business with a single address. Claim your Google Places page, get some reviews, keep your details consistent, done. That advice is fine for a corner cafe and falls apart the moment you have twenty branches.
I keep bumping into this because a lot of the businesses listed on the city guide are chains, or franchises, or a small local group with four or five sites. The questions they ask are different, and the plain starting point is that Google’s local tools were built with the corner cafe in mind, so multi-location businesses spend a lot of time working around gaps.
The first mistake I see is one page for the whole company. A single “Locations” page with a long list of addresses, or worse, a shared page that a customer in Leeds and a customer in Bristol both land on. Google has nothing to attach each branch to. Every location needs its own proper page on your website, with its own address, its own phone number, its own opening hours, ideally something genuinely local on it rather than the same boilerplate with the town name swapped in.
Then there is the Places side, which is where it gets fiddly:
- Each branch needs its own claimed Places listing, verified separately. For twenty branches that is twenty postcards and twenty PINs, and there is no shortcut I’ve found. Google does offer a bulk upload for larger operators, which is worth chasing if you have the volume.
- Consistency has to hold across all of them. One branch listed as “Ltd” and another without, one with an old phone number; that inconsistency is bad enough for a single business and multiplies with every extra location.
- Don’t let branches compete with each other. Two listings for what is really one shop, left over from a move or a rebrand, will split your standing and confuse the results. Clean up the duplicates before you do anything else.
The reviews problem also changes shape at scale. A single shop can nurture reviews one happy customer at a time. A twenty-branch chain finds that some locations gather reviews naturally while others sit at zero for years, and head office has very little control over which. That unevenness is just something you manage rather than solve.
Where I’d start, if you’re staring at a business with lots of sites and no local visibility, is the website. Real, individual location pages first, because that is the bit you actually control. The Places listings come next and take patience.
None of this is complicated, exactly. It is mostly the same handful of tasks repeated across every branch until it’s done, which is why so many multi-location businesses never finish it. The postcards alone put people off.
