For a brand with multiple locations, customers view each location’s Google Business Profile before visiting the website. That’s where they check photos, hours, ratings, and recent reviews before deciding whether to visit.

This question is usually asked about a single business. For a multi-location brand, it takes on a different meaning: you don’t have one profile—you have forty.

What Happens Before Customers Reach Your Website

Someone searches for your type of business nearby. Google shows them three locations on a map. They open the closest one, check the rating, scroll through two or three recent reviews, check the closing time, and enlarge a photo. By that point, they’ve already made their decision.

If they click through to your website afterward, it’s to confirm their choice. Often, they don’t click at all: they tap Directions or Call.

Your website is still essential. It showcases your full offering, hosts your location pages, and supports your brand’s SEO. It’s simply no longer the first point of contact. Your website and Google Business Profiles therefore play complementary roles in your local marketing strategy.

The Budget Goes to the Website. The Decision Happens on the Profile.

At most multi-location brands, the website has an annual budget, a vendor, a dedicated owner, and a redesign schedule. The Google Business Profile for the Rimouski location has none of those things.

The result is easy to spot: a freshly redesigned website alongside a profile that still displays last year’s holiday hours. The gap isn’t caused by a lack of resources. It exists because no one in the organization owns the profile. Managing Google Business Profiles deserves a dedicated place in your local marketing strategy.

What Changes When You Manage Forty Profiles Instead of One

A single business can manage its profile manually. A multi-location brand can’t, because of the scale involved:

1. Holiday hours need to be updated across all locations in the same week.
2. A new location needs to appear on Google before it opens.
3. Reviews come in across forty profiles at once.
4. The same location can have duplicate listings without anyone noticing.
5. The brand name needs to be written consistently from one city to the next.

None of these tasks is difficult on its own. Keeping up with all of them becomes impossible without one central place to manage them.