Local SEO for Multiple Locations: Businesses with 3 to 10 Sites

Local SEO for multiple locations comes down to four decisions. Each location gets its own page. Each staffed site gets its own Google Business Profile, linked to that page. The pages link to each other through one hub. And every call gets counted against the location it was meant for.

With three to ten locations, all four are manageable by hand. Past that, the work starts to need tooling. Below that, most of it doesn’t come up yet.

One page per location or one page total?

One page per location. A single page listing five addresses gives Google one page to rank for five towns, and it usually ranks for none of them. A page that belongs to one address has a reason to show up when someone searches near that address.

The catch is what goes on each page. Take one location page, swap the town name, and publish it five times, and you have five near-copies. Google picks one to show and filters the rest. Worse, the copies compete with each other, so none of them climbs. That is the most common reason location pages sit on the second and third page of results with no clicks.

What each location page needs

Each page needs facts that only that location has. If you can’t fill most of this list for a location, it isn’t ready for its own page.

• The street address, the phone number that rings there, and its own hours
• Who works there, by name and role, with a photo taken in that building
• Which services that location offers, if the list differs from the others
• The towns and roads it serves, and how long it takes to get to them
• How to find it: parking, the entrance, the landmark next door
• Answers to the questions that location’s customers actually call about

If two location pages could swap town names and still read true, one of them is a copy.

When one page is the right answer

If you run from one building and send crews out, you have one location and a service area, not several locations. Don’t invent offices to get more pages. Write one strong page about where you are, and cover the towns you drive to in your service pages, plainly saying where the trucks leave from.

Google Business Profile for each site

Each location that has staff during its posted hours gets its own Google Business Profile. A mailbox, a shared desk you never use, or a storage unit does not qualify. Google’s rules on this are strict, and a suspended profile takes that location’s map listing with it.

Setting up Google Business Profile for multiple locations has a few rules the single-location guides skip:

• Same business name on every profile. Put the town in the address, not the name. “Smith Plumbing – Dayton” breaks Google’s naming rules unless that is how the sign on the building reads.
• Each profile links to its own location page. Not the home page. That ties each profile to the page that proves the location is real.
• Categories can differ. If one location does installs and another only does repairs, their categories should say so.
• One account owns them all. Group every location under one Business Profile account in your company’s name, with at least two people holding owner access. When the person who set it up leaves, the profiles stay with you.
• Reviews go to the right place. Ask each customer to review the location that served them, and reply from that profile.

Google offers bulk verification to businesses with ten or more locations. Under ten, each profile verifies on its own, which can mean a postcard or a video call per site. Allow for that in the schedule.

Once each profile exists, every one still needs the field-by-field pass in our Google Business Profile checklist. Run it once per location. The answers for hours, services and photos should differ from site to site.

Internal linking between locations

Links between your own pages tell Google which page is the main one for each town. Multi location local SEO goes wrong when nobody decides that, and three pages quietly try to rank for the same search.

One hub, many spokes

Build one locations page that lists every site and links to each location page. It works like the map on the wall at the front desk. It is also the page your main navigation and footer point to. Our own locations page works this way for the ten markets we cover from Marietta.

• Every location page links back to the hub
• Each location page links to its nearest one or two sister locations, with the town name as the link text
• Each service page links to the locations that offer that service
• Each location page links to the service pages it offers

Service-plus-city pages

If you also have pages like “roof repair in Columbus,” each one should link up to the Columbus location page, and the location page should link down to it. Then the location page stays the main page for the town, and the service page is the main page for the service in that town. Without those links, the two pages compete, and Google may show the weaker one.

When two pages answer the same search, pick one. Merge the other into it, or give it a different job.

Tracking calls by location

If every location shares one phone number, you can’t tell which location’s search work brings in calls. You also can’t tell which office lets calls ring out. We report search work in phone calls for that reason.

How to set it up

• Give each location a tracking number that forwards to the phone at that location
• Use a separate tracking number on each Google Business Profile, so profile calls are counted apart from website calls
• Keep the location’s real line on the profile as an additional number, so the listing still matches your other directory listings
• Record which ad, page or profile each call came from, and whether anybody picked up

What to read each month

Read calls and form fills per location, split by source: the profile, the location page and any ads. Then read missed calls per location. A location with plenty of calls and a high missed-call count has a staffing problem, not a search problem, and more SEO won’t fix it.

We set up call tracking on every paid search engagement before the first ad runs, and the monthly report counts calls and form fills in plain language. For what that looks like across all four channels, see our digital marketing service.