One location or many

The rule

A location qualifies for its own profile when it is a real place customers can go to or that staff work from, with a sign, staffed hours and a way of being contacted. A virtual office, a mailbox or a friend's spare room does not qualify, and creating profiles at such addresses is the fastest route to losing the profiles that are legitimate.

What each real location needs

Its own profile, with its own address, its own hours, its own photographs and its own phone number where possible.

Its own page on the website, at a stable URL, naming the address in text, listing that location's hours, and describing what is actually available there if the locations differ.

Its own reviews. Reviews attach to a location, not to a company. A business with a well-reviewed flagship and a new second site will find the second site starts from nothing, and that is normal rather than a failure of the work.

What stays shared

One website, one brand, one set of service pages describing what the business does. The mistake is duplicating the whole site per location, which produces near-identical pages that compete with each other and impress nobody. Locations differ by address, hours, people and photographs. The description of the service does not.

The internal linking question

Each location page should link to the services available there and each service page should link to the locations offering it. This is dull work and it is the part most multi-site businesses skip, which is why their second location underperforms for years.

When a second location is not worth it

Distance is a ranking factor, so a second premises genuinely extends reach in a way nothing else can. But it carries real overhead: another profile to maintain, another review stream to build from zero, another set of listings to keep consistent, and a site structure problem. If the second site exists mainly to rank rather than to trade, the arithmetic rarely works, and the honest version of the ambition is usually to improve the core area instead, as service areas describes.

For trades without premises

A mobile trade with one base serves an area from that base. Listing the area is legitimate; inventing bases across the area is not. The trades table is full of businesses in this position, and the ones that do well are the ones that dominate a realistic radius rather than appearing weakly everywhere.