Multi-location local SEO: pages, profiles, governance

The first decision on a multi-location site is how many location pages should exist, and the honest answer is usually fewer than the number of branches. Where two branches serve the same city and their catchments overlap by more than half, the two pages compete for the same query and Google keeps one of them, generally not the one you would have chosen. We settle page count before anyone writes a template, because URL structure, internal linking, profile-to-page mapping and the whole reporting model are built on that number, and revising it in month five costs more than the original build. Settling the count: Each branch is mapped against the postal codes it actually books work in, taken from your CRM rather than from a radius drawn on a map, and against the queries already sending it traffic. Branches with distinct catchments get pages. Branches sharing one metro get a single page with a service-area section and separate profiles, which is the arrangement the local pack handles cleanly and organic search does not fight. A branch with no independent demand gets a profile and no page at all. The deliverable is a URL map with one line of justification per row, including the rows where the recommendation is to delete a page you already publish. What has to be on the page: A location page earns its position on what only that branch can say. Staff named. Where to park. Which services this branch does not offer, because the customer who drives forty minutes to be told no writes the one-star review. Local proof: jobs completed in named neighbourhoods, each with the constraint it had. The address block, the embedded map and the LocalBusiness schema are hygiene, not differentiation, since every competitor in the pack has them too. The working rule is simple: if a sentence stays true when you swap the city name, it does not go on the page. Applied properly that removes most of what template generators produce. Profiles past twenty branches: Below twenty branches, profile work is one person with a spreadsheet and that is fine. Above it the failure mode changes: a branch manager edits a category on a slow Tuesday, the branch falls out of the pack, and nobody notices for six weeks. So the work becomes governance rather than optimisation. Location groups with edit rights scoped by role. Hours and holiday closures pushed through the Business Profile API instead of typed forty times. A weekly diff on category, hours, name and primary phone across every profile, with an alert when a field changes and no ticket exists to explain it. Duplicate suppression and ownership recovery for listings inherited in an acquisition, which is usually the ugliest part of the estate and runs in weeks rather than days because it moves at Google's pace, not ours. When the finding is unwelcome: This work regularly ends in a recommendation somebody will not enjoy. Consolidate two branches onto one page. Remove a franchisee's editing rights. Accept that the branch opened last year is competing with your own older branch and one of them loses the pack. We put that in writing with the evidence behind it and we do not soften it into a menu of options. If the decision needs to survive a franchise council, we join that call and make the argument ourselves rather than handing you a deck to defend. Outside scope: We do not run paid media, Local Services Ads included, although we will tell you plainly where the map pack cannot reach and paid is the only route left. We do not build the site: we produce the architecture, the content requirements per page type and the internal linking specification, and your developers implement from it. We do not write review responses branch by branch; we set the routing, the escalation rule and the templates. Legal review of location copy stays with you. Not a fit: Fewer than eight locations. You do not need governance yet and the retainer would be waste. A brand whose location pages must read identically for regulatory reasons: that constraint is real in some verticals and it caps what this work can achieve, so we decline rather than take the fee and underdeliver. And any group that intends to keep opening branches without the profile operation growing with them.