Franchise and multi-location businesses need a different system than single-location GBP management. Here's how location groups work, why Google My Business and Google Business Profile are the same thing under the hood, and how to manage every listing without one location undercutting another.
Google My Business was renamed Google Business Profile in 2021, but the old name is still how most people search for it, and it's still how a lot of the actual settings and account structure work under the hood. If you're managing more than one location, whether you call it Google My Business or Google Business Profile, the core challenge is the same: a single-location business has one profile to get right. A multi-location business, a franchise, a retail chain, a regional service provider, has to get every location right simultaneously, and the failure modes multiply with each additional site.
One inconsistent phone number, one duplicate listing, one location with three reviews next to another with three hundred, and the whole system underperforms. This is the local SEO problem most multi-location businesses don't realize they have until a competitor with cleaner profiles starts outranking them in markets they've served for years.
Functionally, no. Google Business Profile is Google My Business under a new name, and most of the account structure, the local pack ranking mechanics, and the multi-location tools carried over directly. The rename mainly removed the separate standalone app and folded management more directly into Google Search and Maps. If you set up your listings years ago under Google My Business and haven't touched them since, they're still live under Google Business Profile today, just accessed differently.
What genuinely matters for multi-location management is a specific feature that predates the rename and still exists: location groups, sometimes called business groups. This is the actual mechanism for managing multiple accounts under one login, rather than juggling separate credentials for every single location.
A location group lets one Google account manage dozens or hundreds of individual business profiles from a single dashboard, with bulk editing tools for hours, categories, and basic information, plus individual access control per location for local managers who need to handle their own photos, posts, and review responses without touching every other location in the group.
Setting this up correctly from the start avoids the single most common structural mistake in multi-location management: individual locations each being verified and managed under separate personal Google accounts, with no centralized oversight and no way to bulk-update anything when policy or branding changes.
Single-location local SEO is mostly about depth: optimizing one profile as thoroughly as possible. Multi-location local SEO is about consistency at scale, making sure fifty locations all meet the same bar, none of them conflict with each other in Google's index, and the business doesn't accidentally compete against itself for the same searches.
Google's local algorithm heavily weights proximity, relevance, and prominence. A well-optimized profile in one location does nothing for a poorly maintained profile three miles away, they're evaluated independently. But problems compound across a portfolio in ways that don't happen with a single site: duplicate listings from old address changes, inconsistent business names, and NAP data that drifts out of sync across directories over time.
When a business moves, changes ownership, or a location closes and a new one opens nearby, Google often creates a new listing without fully retiring the old one. The result: two profiles competing for the same searches, splitting reviews and ranking signals between them. Every location should be audited for duplicates at least twice a year.
Name, Address, and Phone number need to match exactly across Google, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, and every industry-specific directory. At ten locations this is tedious. At fifty locations it requires a systematic process, not manual spot-checks.
Locations with strong local management tend to accumulate reviews naturally; locations without a review request process fall behind. A chain where one location has 200 reviews at 4.8 stars and another has 8 reviews at 3.9 stars isn't just an internal performance gap, it's a visible signal to Google and to customers that the brand experience is inconsistent.
Over time, different people managing different locations tend to select different primary categories, write different descriptions, and post inconsistently. A multi-location brand should have a locked template for category selection and description structure that every location follows, with room for genuinely local details.
Before anything else, consolidate every existing location under one location group if they aren't already. This is the single highest-leverage setup step and the one most existing multi-location businesses skipped when they were smaller and added locations one at a time.
One person or team should own the GBP strategy and standards across all locations. Individual locations can and should contribute local specifics: neighborhood names, location-specific promotions, staff photos. The structure is centralized; the personality is local.
Audit every location's Name, Address, and Phone data across Google, the top 20 to 30 directories, and the company website's own location pages. Fix inconsistencies first.
A systematic approach, automated post-service SMS or email, consistent across every location, closes the gap between high-performing and low-performing locations over time.
Leadership needs a rollup view across all locations. Location managers need their own specific data: ranking position, review velocity, profile completeness. Both views should come from the same underlying tracking.
Listings drift. A quarterly audit cadence across the full location portfolio catches problems before they've had two quarters to suppress rankings.
Below five locations, an internal team member with a clear checklist and a properly configured location group can often manage this manually. Past five to ten locations, the coordination overhead usually exceeds what one person can maintain alongside other responsibilities.
FlightdeckLocal manages exactly this kind of multi-location program: a properly structured location group, a fully optimized, individually managed profile for every location, standardized NAP data across every directory, a systematic review generation program, and centralized reporting.
No. A location group lets you manage every location under one primary account with individual access permissions for local managers. Separate personal accounts per location is the most common structural mistake in multi-location setups and makes bulk management effectively impossible.
Google My Business was rebranded to Google Business Profile in 2021 and the standalone app was discontinued, but the underlying account structure, including location groups, carried forward. If your listings were originally set up under Google My Business, they're still active today under the new name.
Google provides a duplicate reporting and merge process directly within Business Profile management. Locations with unresolved duplicates should be flagged and merged as part of the initial location group consolidation, since duplicates actively split ranking signal and reviews between two competing listings for the same address.
If you're managing multiple locations and aren't confident every profile is meeting the same bar, that's exactly what a Local SEO audit is built to surface, and it's a natural extension of the Growth Gap Analysis for any multi-location business ready to see where the gaps actually are.
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