Multi-location SEO is the work of getting every real location of one company found in the search results for its own area: one Business Profile, one page on the website and one set of facts for each office, branch or depot, all kept from a single record. With one office, local SEO is a profile, some reviews and a few pages. With twelve, the same work has to be done the same way twelve times, by people who mostly sit somewhere else, and it has to stay inside Google’s rules on who gets a profile at all, what a page for a place may say, and how many locations one business can claim.
The whole job sits inside search and AI visibility for B2B companies, because the facts that put an office in the map results are the facts an AI answer quotes when a buyer asks who is nearby, and the single-location basics still apply at every site. Google’s rules, not a tool, decide the plan, and they bite hardest on the B2B company whose locations are offices, branches and depots rather than shops, which is where the franchise playbooks run out.
What counts as a location
Google’s guidelines open with the test. A business can have a Business Profile if it “either has a physical location that customers can visit, or travels to customers where they are”. Applied one site at a time, that test sorts a B2B company’s locations quickly, and the answers are not always the ones the org chart suggests.
| Kind of location | What Google says | What it gets |
|---|---|---|
| A staffed office that clients visit | Eligible. Google asks for “permanent fixed signage of your business name at the address”, and allows one profile per place: “Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts.” | A profile showing the address, and a page on the site |
| A regional office in a co-working space | Conditional. Google will not list “an office at a co-working space unless that office maintains clear signage, receives customers at the location during business hours, and is staffed during business hours by your business staff”. | A profile if all three hold, otherwise nothing |
| A registered or virtual address | Not eligible. “If your business rents a physical mailing address but doesn’t operate out of that location, also known as a virtual office, that location isn’t eligible for a Business Profile.” | Nothing. Name the city on the contact page |
| A branch that sends engineers or crews out | A service-area profile. A service business with “separate service areas and separate staff at each location” is “allowed one profile for each location”, each with up to 20 service areas within about two hours’ drive of the base. A branch that also receives customers can show its address and set a service area. | One profile per staffed base, the address hidden unless customers come in |
| A depot or warehouse customers never visit | Not eligible on its own: nobody visits it and nobody is served from it. If engineers or crews work out of it, it is a service-area base, as above. | Nothing, or a service-area profile if staff are based there and go out to customers |
| A partner or named adviser at a branded firm | A practitioner profile, for “a public-facing professional, typically with their own customer base” who can be reached at the location during stated hours; Google names lawyers, financial planners and insurance agents. One practitioner fronting a branded office shares a single profile named “[brand/company]: [practitioner name]”. Several at one office means a profile for the firm and one per practitioner, in their own names only. | One per public-facing practitioner, and one for the firm where several share an office |
| A sales representative | Not eligible. “Sales associates or lead generation agents for corporations aren’t individual practitioners and aren’t eligible for a Business Profile.” | Nothing |
| A public-facing department | Its own profile where departments “operate as distinct entities”, with a name and a primary category different from the main business and from each other. | One per distinct department |
Two rules then run across the whole set. Every location in a country must use the same name, and “All locations of a business must share the one category that best represents the business.” Google adds that where a company has different kinds of site, “such as retail, distribution center, and office”, the category rule applies within each kind, so a distributor’s branches can carry one category and its head office another. And where two of your brands share an address, do not combine the names in one profile: Google says to pick one, or to run a separate profile for each brand only if they operate independently.
One record per location, in Google’s own columns
Keep one approved record for each location and push every change out from it. What the record holds, Google has already decided: Business Profile Manager, the dashboard for a business with ten or more locations, adds and updates profiles from a spreadsheet, and its template is the natural master file, because whatever is in it is what Google will show.
| Column | Google’s rule |
|---|---|
| Business code | Required in every upload. A unique code per location, “no longer than 64 characters”, never shown on Google. Adding or changing one on an existing location through the spreadsheet “will create a duplicate location”, so set it once and keep it. |
| Business name | Required, up to 100 characters: the same real-world name at every location in the country. |
| Address, or latitude and longitude | The street address of the location. Coordinates are needed only when the address cannot be verified, and only when the location is first added. |
| Primary phone or website | One of the two is required for each location. The website is that location’s own page, not the home page. |
| Primary category | Required, and “should be the same for all your businesses”; where a company has “retail, distribution centers, and offices”, the rule holds within each group. |
| Additional categories | Up to nine, chosen to “describe what your business is, not what it has”. |
| Hours | The location’s own hours, day by day. |
| Business description | Up to 750 characters, with no deals, prices, sales or web addresses. |
| Labels | Up to ten per location, for your own grouping: region, kind of site, who looks after it. |
A label per region and a label per owner turns the download into a report. Then make the same file the source for the website, the structured data, Apple and Bing, so that an office’s new phone number changes in one place and flows out, instead of being fixed on the profile and forgotten on the page.
Who owns the profiles
Profiles that live in one person’s Google account, or in an agency’s, go wrong at scale because the person leaves or the contract ends and the profiles go with them. Google’s answer is the business group, which its help pages describe as “like a shared folder for your profiles”. Create it in the company’s own account, on an address at the company domain, and move every profile into it. Anyone added to the group as an owner or manager can reach “all current and future profiles placed in the group”, so a new office is covered the day its profile is made.
Google is plain about the trade-off. With one group you “Check all profiles in one dashboard and manage a single spreadsheet”, but owners and managers “may have access to check and edit all profiles within the group that they shouldn’t manage”. With several groups each person sees only their own, but “Each group requires a separate spreadsheet import and you won’t be able to find all profiles in one dashboard.” Google’s advice is one group per business or brand, and for most B2B companies that is right: one group, with the regional contacts added as managers of their own profiles rather than of the group. A profile manager can edit the information, reply to reviews and post, and “can’t add or remove users or remove the profile”, which is the right amount of power for someone running one office.
Verification follows ownership. With ten or more locations a company can verify them all at once, and the conditions are stricter than the headline. The spreadsheet must hold “10 or more profiles from the same business”, and “Duplicate, suspended, or disabled profiles don’t count towards the 10 Business Profile minimum.” It must hold every profile you manage, because Google wants “evidence of the size of your business”. “Agencies with more than one business in one account can’t bulk verify.” And “Your business isn’t a service-area business”, which rules out the contractor or managed service provider whose branches hide their addresses, however many branches it has: those profiles are verified one at a time, and Google may ask for a video with “an authorized representative” at the location. Nor is it permanent, since Google “may de-verify accounts that don’t actively manage their profiles”.
One site, a locations hub, a page per real office
Keep every location on the one website. Separate sites or subdomains for each office split the authority the company has earned, multiply the things that can break, and leave each office to rank on its own. One domain, a hub page that lists every location, and a folder for each one, such as /locations/boston/, does the same job with everything the main site already has behind it, and the folder shape pays off again when you come to measure.
Then link the two halves of the site to each other. Each office page names the services delivered from that office and links to the service pages; each service page lists the offices that deliver it and links back. That is how a search for a service in a city reaches the right page, and it is the “clearly defined, browseable hierarchy” that Google’s spam policy sets against pages that are “closer to search results”. Two offices in one city are told apart on their pages, by neighborhood, street or building, and on their profiles only by address, because Google’s name rules leave no room for location words in the business name.
What a location page needs, and when it becomes a doorway
A real office earns a page because there is something real to say about it. The test is whether a buyer who lands on it learns anything the home page with the city name swapped in could not tell them. For a B2B office, that means:
- The people based there. Names, roles and photographs of the team at that office, not the leadership page again.
- The services delivered from it. Not the whole catalogue: what that office does, with links to the service pages.
- Work done in the region. Clients served and projects completed nearby, named with permission and otherwise described by sector and size.
- The facts. The address, the local number that rings at that office, the hours, and how to get there, including parking and which entrance to use, which a visiting buyer needs and a search engine can check against the profile.
- Photographs of that office. The building, the entrance, the reception, the people. Stock images announce a template.
- That office’s reviews. Quoted from its own profile, so the page and the profile tell one story.
- Questions specific to the office. Whether it covers the neighboring state, which site visits it handles, whether meetings happen there or online.
A service branch passes the same test even when its profile hides the address: engineers or crews are based there and the work is run from there, so the page has people, services and local work to show. A town served from somewhere else does not pass it, because everything true about the town is already said on the page for the office that serves it, and a page made for the town anyway is what Google’s spam policy calls doorway abuse, with “multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page” among its examples. The town belongs in the office page’s list of places served and in the profile’s service areas, which take up to 20 places each.
The 2026 version of the doorway is generated rather than copied. Google’s spam policies, last updated on 28 August 2026, give as the first example of scaled content abuse “Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users”, and the policy is about the result, “no matter how it’s created”. A model that writes fifty office pages from one template is no safer than a person pasting them, and no more dangerous if each page carries the facts above. Draft from a real brief for each office, then have the person who works there correct it. The page is right when they recognize their own workplace in it.
Structured data for every location
Google’s documentation for local business markup, last updated on 8 September 2026, settles how many blocks a multi-location site needs: “Define each local business location as a LocalBusiness type.” One block per location, on that location’s page, using “the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible”, chosen from the list of sub-types at schema.org. Name and address are required. The recommended properties are the ones the master record already holds: the location’s own telephone, its opening hours, its coordinates, and url, which Google defines as “The fully-qualified URL of the specific business location”, so it points at the office page and not the home page. A public-facing department with its own hours or phone goes in the department property of its parent location. Google says there is “no special schema.org structured data” for its AI features, and asks that markup match “the visible text on the page” and that the Business Profile be kept up to date, so the record that fills the profile should fill the markup too.
Reviews, listings and links, office by office
The rules on reviews do not change with the count, but the ways to break them multiply. Google bans incentives for reviews and review quotas for staff, and the FTC’s rule against fake reviews applies to every office, so the way to earn reviews within the rules is the same everywhere: a link or QR code to that office’s own profile, offered after the work to every client rather than the happy ones. What changes is who replies. Reviews of a branch are answered by the person at the branch, as the manager of that one profile, because a reply from head office to a complaint about a site visit two states away reads like what it is. Keep the replies in that person’s own words, to one standard: thank, answer, and take anything contested offline.
Listings elsewhere carry the same record. Bing Places for Business lists a business on Bing free of charge, and Apple Business puts it on Apple Maps; both should be filled from the master file rather than typed again, so that the phone number and hours on every service match Google’s. When an office opens, moves or closes, the spreadsheet changes first and the website, the markup and the listings follow it the same week, because an old address left on one service is what puts the wrong pin on a buyer’s phone.
Local links come from the office, not from head office. A branch belongs to its chamber of commerce, its trade association chapter, the business school it hires from and the charities it supports, and each of those sites can link to the office page rather than the home page, which is what tells Google an office is a real part of its city.
Measure each office without buying a tool
Rank trackers answer a question that matters less than it looks, because positions in the map results change with where the searcher is standing. What a company needs is a report per office of what the search results produced, and the free tools provide it if the site was built in folders.
- A Search Console property per location folder. Search Console takes a URL-prefix property for “A specific subpath of a website (such as example.com/clothing/)”, which “Includes only URLs with the specified prefix, including the protocol”. A property for https://example.com/locations/boston/ reports that office’s pages on their own: queries, impressions, clicks, and impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. Add one per office beside the domain property, and a regional manager can be given access to theirs alone.
- The profile performance download. Performance data exists only for verified profiles, and Google lets you “download performance data for multiple profiles at once in a spreadsheet to compare the performance of different locations”: views, clicks and other interactions per office, for any date range.
- Tagged links and routed enquiries. Put campaign parameters on the website link in each profile, with the business code as the campaign, so analytics shows which profile sent each visit; Google’s guidance is to “always use utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign”. Then give each office page its own form, or a field on the shared one, so every enquiry and call lands with the office that will work it and the CRM records which office each opportunity came through.
Read the three together each month, office by office, beside the pipeline each office created. An office with impressions and no clicks has a profile problem. One with visits and no enquiries has a page problem. One with enquiries and no pipeline has a sales problem, and no amount of SEO fixes the third.
AI answers and your locations
Google’s guide to its generative AI features says those answers can include “information about local businesses”, and that Business Profiles “can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results”. The AI tools read the same profile, the same page and the same markup as the map results, and they are less forgiving of a mismatch, because an answer that gives a buyer the wrong office number is not a lost click but a lost call. For a company with many locations the AI work is therefore the same work: one record, pushed everywhere, with nothing left different by accident. Which engine reads which index, and what removes a site from each, is the layer above it, and matters most for the questions buyers ask before they look for an office at all.
Order of work for a small team
Most of this is done by a marketing team of one or two with a contact at each office, so sequence matters more than effort. Start with the offices nearest the accounts you most want to win, not the largest ones, and finish the whole job there before touching the rest. In the first week, claim every profile the company has into one business group, remove the duplicates, and build the master spreadsheet from what is at each address, which is also the week you find the virtual office that should never have had a profile. In the first month, publish the locations hub and the first office pages with their markup, point each profile at its page, tag the links and add the Search Console properties. Then the monthly habit: the performance download, the review replies checked, and the spreadsheet updated before anything else whenever an office changes. The remaining offices follow in the same order, a few at a time, which is slower than generating the lot and quicker than recovering from a suspension.
● About the author
Hamza Hashim is the marketing strategist at Katama. He owns the channel mix and the order it gets built in: what ships first, what waits for evidence, and what gets stopped when the evidence says stop. Meet the team.