One profile per location

A dental group opens its third practice. The receptionist creates a Business Profile from her own Gmail account, the marketing manager adds the new town to the original profile's name, and the owner asks why the first practice has slipped in the map pack. All three moves were wrong. Google's Guidelines for representing your business on Google allow exactly one profile for each real location, and branches run well don't compete with each other: each one wins the searches nearest to it.

What the guidelines allow

The rule is one profile per physical location where staff meet customers during stated hours. A second branch with its own door and staff gets its own profile. A town you serve from the first branch does not; neither does a storage unit, a partner's shop or a mailbox address, and the guidelines say not to create more than one profile for a location across any number of accounts.

Service-area businesses follow the same logic. One profile covers the area you travel to, and Google's guidelines suggest that area shouldn't stretch much further than about two hours' driving time from the business's base. Two real depots earn two profiles; one depot covering two regions gets one profile with both set as service areas, as Service-area businesses covers.

Two exceptions are documented: a department the public treats as separate, with its own staff and phone number, and individual practitioners such as dentists or solicitors, who can hold a profile under their own name alongside the practice. Anything else is a duplicate, one of the breaches covered in Profile mistakes that get you suspended.

Why well-run branches don't compete

Google's help page on improving your local ranking names three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is measured from the searcher, or the place named in the search, to each candidate business, so your northern branch is the closer candidate for someone searching from the north of the city. The two profiles aren't fighting for one slot; each is the nearest version of you for a different set of searchers.

The competition owners worry about appears when Google can't tell the branches apart: the same central phone number, website URL and stock photos on two profiles look like one business listed twice, and Google may treat one as a duplicate. Reviews attach to a profile, not a brand, so a new branch starts with none and borrows nothing from the flagship's prominence.

So make each profile unmistakably its own place.

1. Give each branch its own address, hours and photos taken on site.
2. Use a phone number that rings at that branch. Google's guidelines ask for a number that reaches the individual location as directly as possible, not a central call centre.
3. Point each profile's website field at that branch's own page on your site. Google doesn't require this, but matching details between profile and page help confirm the location is real.
4. Ask each branch for its own reviews and reply from the branch, so prominence builds where the customers are.

Keep the brand consistent and the details distinct

The guidelines ask chains to use the same name at every location unless the real-world branding genuinely differs, and the same category where they offer the same service. So the name is "Northfield Dental" at every practice, never "Northfield Dental Leeds"; the town belongs in the address field.

Treat every field as brand-level or branch-level. Name, primary category, description and logo are brand-level and match across all profiles. Address, phone, hours, photos, attributes such as parking or step-free access, and the services actually offered at that site are branch-level and true for that site alone. A branch that doesn't do implants shouldn't list them because head office does.

The same split applies to every directory listing for each branch: identical name everywhere, each branch's own address and phone exactly as on its profile. NAP consistency and citations covers the audit.

Google's Business Profile help documents bulk verification for businesses with ten or more locations, run from a spreadsheet with a unique store code per site; the guidelines say store codes must never appear in the business name.

Run every profile from one account

Ownership goes wrong quietly. Profiles created by branch staff on personal accounts leave with the person. Hold every profile under a company-owned Google account and add branch managers with the manager role, not as owners, so the business can always revoke access.

Then give the set a routine.

1. One person owns the brand-level fields and changes them everywhere at once.
2. Each branch manager owns the branch-level fields, answers that branch's reviews and posts its photos.
3. Once a month, someone opens every profile and looks for edits you didn't make. Google accepts suggested edits from the public and its own data sources, so changed hours or a changed category can go live unnoticed.
4. When a branch moves, update the existing profile's address. When it closes, mark it permanently closed, which Google documents, rather than deleting it, so the reviews stay attached and searchers see the truth.

What to take away

• Google allows one profile per real, staffed location; towns you serve, mailboxes and partner premises don't qualify, and duplicates get profiles suspended.
• Branches don't compete when Google can tell them apart: each is the nearest version of you for a different set of searchers, and reviews and prominence build per profile.
• Brand-level fields stay identical everywhere; branch-level fields such as address, phone, hours, photos and services are true for one site only.
• Keep every profile under a company account, with one owner for brand fields, a manager per branch, and a monthly check for edits you didn't make.

Next

Each profile now points at a page of its own; the next lesson builds those pages at scale without the duplicate-content trap: Scaling location pages.