Multi-location SEO for London businesses

A dental group with practices in Clapham, Balham and Tooting is not one business to Google. It is three. Someone searching "dentist near me" from Tooting Broadway will see a map pack built around Tooting, and the Clapham practice, two miles north, is not in the running. Multi-location SEO is the discipline of making sure each site competes in its own market while the brand still reads as one company.

This guide is written for owners and marketing leads of London businesses with two or more sites: dental and clinic groups, estate agents, gyms, restaurant groups, nurseries, solicitors with branch offices, franchises. It covers the website, Google Business Profile, the data behind both, reviews, structured data and reporting. We use a hypothetical four-practice dental group as the running example; it is not a client.

Why London makes this harder than most cities

Google’s own explanation of local ranking names three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. In its words, "Distance refers to how far each business is from the customer who’s searching" (Google Business Profile Help). In a city of 33 boroughs and hundreds of distinct high streets, distance slices London into many small markets. A brand page that says "we have practices across South London" ranks in none of them, because it is not about any one of them.

The second London problem is density. Each branch competes with a different set of neighbours: the Clapham practice against the Clapham High Street dentists, the Tooting one against a different group. The tactics that work for a single-site business, covered in our local SEO guide and the borough ranking guide, still apply. They simply have to be done once per site, consistently, with someone accountable for each.

One page per branch, and what makes it a real page

Every location needs its own URL, for example /dentist-tooting/ or /locations/tooting/. The page exists so Google has one document to rank for that place and so a visitor who lands on it knows exactly where they are going. The test is simple: if you swapped the place name and nothing else would need to change, the page is not finished.

Keep the locations hub at /locations/ (or similar) short: a list of every site with its address and a link, and a map image or static graphic rather than an embedded widget. With ten or more branches, group the hub by compass point or borough so a visitor from Croydon is not scrolling past Enfield.

One Google Business Profile per location

Google’s rules for representing a business are strict and worth reading in full. A business is eligible for a profile if it "has a physical location that customers can visit, or travels to customers where they are", and you must not "create more than one page for each location" (Guidelines for representing your business on Google). The same page sets the rules that trip up multi-site brands most often:

• The profile name must be the "real-world name" on your signage. Adding the area to the name ("Smile Dental near Tooting Broadway") is excluded content and a suspension risk. The place goes in the address, not the name.
• Virtual offices are not eligible. A co-working address qualifies only with clear signage, staff present and customers received in business hours. This is why we never describe our own Tower 42 office as anything more than by appointment.
• Service-area businesses (a cleaning company that travels to clients) get "one profile for the central office or location with a designated service area", not one per borough served.
• Departments can have their own profile only if they are "publicly-facing departments that operate as distinct entities" with a different name and category. A hygienist room inside a practice is not a department.
• Co-located businesses, such as a cafe inside a gym, each get a profile with their own categories.

With ten or more locations, Google offers bulk verification. The requirements are that "Your spreadsheet has 10 or more profiles from the same business", that the business is not a service-area business, and that "Duplicate, suspended, or disabled profiles don’t count towards the 10 Business Profile minimum" (Google Business Profile Help). Below ten, each site is verified individually, usually by postcard, video or phone. Whatever the count, put every profile in a business group so access can be shared with staff and agencies without handing over a personal login; Google recommends a group once you have "2 or more profiles" (About business groups).

Ownership matters more than most owners realise. The brand, not the branch manager and never the agency, should be the primary owner of every profile. Managers and agencies get manager access. Our Google Business Profile guide covers the profile itself: categories, services, photos, posts and the weekly routine.

NAP: the single spreadsheet that runs everything

NAP stands for name, address and phone. For a multi-site business it should be a single source of truth, usually a spreadsheet or a small database, with one row per location and the exact strings used everywhere: the website footer, each branch page, each Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, the directories that matter in your sector, and your structured data. "Flat 2, 14 High St" on one profile and "14 High Street, Flat 2" on another is not a disaster, but ten small inconsistencies across ten sites make the brand look unmanaged, and the staff who maintain them will not know which version is right.

Location ID

A short code (TOO, CLA, BAL) used in URLs, tracking and reporting, never shown to the public.

Legal and trading name

The real-world name used on signage, identical on the profile and the page.

Address lines, postcode, what3words or coordinates

Coordinates to at least five decimal places for structured data.

Primary phone

The number printed at the branch. Call-tracking numbers can be added as additional numbers; the primary stays consistent.

Opening hours, special hours

Including bank holidays and the late nights that differ by site.

Services, categories, attributes

What this site does, in the same vocabulary as the Business Profile.

Owner, manager, reviewer

Who answers reviews for this site and who is accountable for the data.

Review the sheet quarterly and whenever a site moves, changes hours or changes number. The sheet is also the file your agency should be handed on day one and handed back on exit; in our own terms, every account and asset is created in the client’s name (what you own, before you sign).

Structured data per branch

Each branch page should carry LocalBusiness structured data for that branch only, using the most specific type available (Dentist, RealEstateAgent, Restaurant). Google’s documentation asks you to mark up "each local business location as a" LocalBusiness and lists name and address as required, with geo, openingHoursSpecification, telephone and the "fully-qualified URL of the specific business location" recommended (Google Search Central). Coordinates need at least five decimal places. Do not put all twelve branches’ markup on the home page; the home page describes the Organization, and each branch page describes its own place.

One restriction is easy to miss. The same document allows aggregateRating and review only for sites that capture reviews about other businesses. Copying your Google rating into your own LocalBusiness markup is outside the guidance and we do not do it for clients. Our schema markup guide has worked examples.

Reviews, branch by branch

Each profile earns its own reviews, and the map pack for Tooting is influenced by the Tooting profile’s reviews, not the group’s total. Google says plainly that "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking" (Google Business Profile Help). The branch with 12 reviews cannot borrow the 300 from the flagship. So the review process has to run at every site: a review link or QR code per profile, a named person who asks, and a named person who replies.

The rules are the same at every site and they are strict. Offering "payment, discounts, free goods and/or services" for reviews is prohibited, as is any attempt to "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers" (Google’s prohibited and restricted content policy). A branch manager under pressure to hit a review target is the most common way a multi-site brand breaks these rules; set the target as "ask every patient" rather than "get 20 reviews". Our Google reviews guide covers the ask, the link, timing and replies in detail.

Reporting by location

A group-level report hides the problem branch. Report each site on the same four lines, every month, from sources the business can open itself.

Rank-tracking tools can approximate the map pack from a chosen point in each area, which is useful for spotting a branch that has slipped, but the four lines above are the ones that move revenue. We report them by the fifth working day of the month and the client can verify every figure in Search Console and GA4 (what SEO reporting should include).

Opening, moving and closing a site

1. Opening: create the branch page before the doors open, with "opening " in the copy, and create the profile with the opening date set so it is verified in time. Add the row to the master sheet first.
2. Moving: update the master sheet, then the profile address (Google may re-verify), then the page, then every directory. Redirect nothing; the URL stays the same if the place name does.
3. Closing: mark the profile permanently closed rather than deleting it, redirect the branch page to the nearest open branch with a line explaining the move, and remove the row from the hub. Keep the redirect in place indefinitely.
4. Rebranding a site: the real-world signage changes first, then the profile name, with photographs of the new signage ready in case Google asks for proof.

For a group rebuilding its whole site, the website migration checklist covers the redirects every branch URL will need.

Where to start if you have several sites and no system

1. Build the master sheet. Walk every site’s real-world name, address, number and hours into it, and fix the real-world inconsistencies first.
2. Claim or recover every profile into one business group owned by the brand. Remove former staff and former agencies.
3. Give every site a real branch page using the checklist above. Start with the site whose profile has the fewest reviews; it needs the help most.
4. Add LocalBusiness markup per branch page and test each one.
5. Start the review process at every site on the same day, with one link per profile and one named replier.
6. Report the four lines per site monthly. Within a quarter you will know which branches have a visibility problem and which have a service problem.

We deliver this work from the Tower 42 office in the City, by appointment, visiting client sites across London. If you would like us to look at your branch pages and profiles first, the free review covers up to three locations.

Get your free SEO auditA person checks your branch pages and profiles by hand within two working days. No automated score, no call required.