Structuring a website for five locations

Almost everything written about this is written for franchise networks with a head office and a brand governance team. If you have three or five branches and one person doing marketing, most of it does not apply.

So let us dispose of the structure question quickly, because it genuinely is the easy part, and spend the time on the two things that actually go wrong at your size.

The structure, settled

One domain. Subfolders, not subdomains, not separate domains. A page per location at a predictable path. A Google Business Profile for each location, each with its own reviews.

millroadplumbing.com/locations/chermside
millroadplumbing.com/locations/ipswich
millroadplumbing.com/locations/toowoomba

Subdomains split what you have built across several separate things. Separate domains split it further and multiply the work by the number of sites. Neither has an upside at five locations, and both are usually chosen because someone bought the domains before asking.

Problem one: your locations compete with each other

This is the failure nobody warns you about, and it is the one that actually costs you.

You have five location pages, each targeting essentially the same search with a different town attached. Google has to decide which of your pages to show for a given query, and when the pages are near-identical it makes that decision inconsistently, or picks one and ignores the rest.

The symptom is recognisable once you know it: one branch ranks everywhere, including in towns where a different branch is closer, and the others rank nowhere. That is not four weak branches. That is one page absorbing the relevance of five.

1. 01Give each location page a genuinely different job. Not the same page with a town swapped: different services if the mix differs, different jobs, different photographs, different staff.
2. 02Do not repeat your full service list on every location page. Link to the service pages instead, and let the location page be about the location.
3. 03Make sure each location's Business Profile points at its own location page, not at the homepage. This is wrong more often than it is right.
4. 04Check which of your pages ranks for a search in each town. If the same one keeps appearing, you have found it.

Problem two: five thin pages fail like fifty thin pages

The franchise guides all recommend a page per location and none of them says what happens when those pages have nothing on them.

Five pages consisting of a map, an address and a paragraph with the town name in it are five thin pages. Google's spam policies on scaled content do not have a minimum count, and even setting policy aside, pages like that do not rank because there is nothing on them to rank. This is the same problem as thin location pages, and having a real branch there does not exempt you from it.

What makes a real branch page, and none of it is difficult when the branch actually exists:

• The people who work there, named, with a photograph. This alone puts you ahead of most multi-location sites.
• That branch's own reviews, quoted, not a site-wide carousel.
• What is different about the work there. Different housing stock, different customer mix, a service only that branch offers.
• Parking, access, the entrance. Practical, specific, impossible to template.
• That branch's phone number, not a central switchboard, if you want it to rank as a local business.

The thing nobody plans for: closing one

Every guide covers opening. None covers closing, and closing badly damages the branches that remain.

1. 01Mark the Business Profile as permanently closed. Do not delete it. Deleting loses the reviews and leaves customers finding a listing that still says open.
2. 02Redirect the location page to the nearest remaining branch's page, not to the homepage.
3. 03Update every citation for that location. This is the tedious part and it is the part that leaves a wrong address circulating for years.
4. 04Leave the closed profile alone afterwards. A closed listing carrying its reviews is a normal, honest record. A deleted one is a gap that other sources keep filling with stale data.

The proximity constraint that governs all of this applies per branch rather than per business, which is worth understanding before deciding how many locations you need: proximity and local rankings covers it, and grid tracking is how you see which branch is actually covering which area.