How to Add Multiple Locations on Google Maps (and Why Google Shows Only One)

Before you start: what counts as a location for Google

Before you create a single profile, it is worth clearing up a confusion that gets expensive later: a location on Google Maps is not any address that would be convenient for you to show up at, it is a place where your business actually operates. Google's Business Profile guidelines are direct about this: "Don't create more than one page for each location." One storefront, one profile. Open two profiles for the same address "to get more visibility" and what you get instead is competing against yourself, with a real risk that Google suspends one of them as a duplicate.

The second rule almost nobody follows on the first try is the naming rule. Every location your business runs within the same country has to use exactly the same brand name, with no neighborhood, city or keyword added in an attempt to rank better. A pizza chain with locations in three cities is called "Roma Pizzeria" in all three, never "Roma Pizzeria Downtown" or "Roma Pizzeria - Best Pizza in Town." Google flags that pattern as name spam and can penalize the whole profile, not just trim the extra text.

There are three cases where "location" gets less obvious. If you operate out of a coworking or shared space, the profile is only valid when your staff is actually present during the hours you publish and you serve customers right there; a desk you only use to receive mail does not qualify. Virtual offices are not eligible for a Business Profile at all — Google rejects or suspends them once detected. And if your business has no storefront and serves customers at their location — a locksmith, a plumbing service, a caterer — the correct setup is a single service-area profile for your central office, not one profile per area you cover.

One clarification that saves confusion later in this post: moving an existing location to a new address is not the same as adding a new one. The former is editing the profile you already have; the latter, which is what we cover here, is registering an additional storefront. With the definition settled, the outcome you are working toward is easy to name: knowing which cities your brand actually shows up in, with real per-city rankings, multi-city tracking included on the Pro plan, instead of guessing.

How to add multiple locations on Google Maps, step by step (2 to 9 sites)

If your chain has between 2 and 9 storefronts, the path is registering each profile separately and then grouping them. There is no bulk shortcut below 10 locations — it is the price of a simpler verification process.

1. Step 1 · Lock in one brand name

   Before touching Google, decide the exact name every site will carry — identical across all nine. Write it down and share it with whoever sets up each profile, because a single profile with even a slightly different spelling already counts as an inconsistency.

2. Step 2 · Register or claim each profile

   Go to business.google.com/add for each new location and choose "Add your business to Google." If the storefront already shows up on Maps because someone else added it or Google auto-generated it, use "Claim this business" instead, then "Manage now." Mixing these two paths up is the most common mistake: trying to create a new profile over a listing that already exists ends in a duplicate you will have to merge later.

3. Step 3 · Fill in that site's own details

   A real, verifiable address, a primary category (the same across all nine, unless a specific site genuinely offers something different), business hours, that site's local phone number — not a shared national line — and a link to that location's own landing page, not the homepage.

4. Step 4 · Verify each site separately

   Google offers whatever method is available for your business type and country: a call or SMS to the location's phone, mail, a video walkthrough of the site, or in some cases a postcard. There is no joint verification below 10 locations — every profile goes through its own process.

5. Step 5 · Group profiles with "Create group"

   Once you have 2 or more verified profiles, use "Create group" (Business location groups) to manage them from one place. From there you can grant Manager access to a teammate without sharing the password of the Google account that registered the profiles — something a lot of chains still do, and it makes every staff change a headache.

6. Step 6 · Repeat and check for consistency

   Every new site follows the same process. Once you hit the third or fourth location, compare every profile name in the group side by side again — it is usually where a small variation sneaks in that nobody notices until a customer asks why "Roma Pizzeria" and "Roma Pizzería" show up as two different businesses on the map.

With this process you cover most of what people search for at this stage — how to add locations on Google My Business, how to add two locations, or setting up a Google Business location group. If your chain has already passed 9 sites, the path changes completely — that is the next section.

10 locations or more: spreadsheet and bulk verification (Chain)

From 10 locations of the same business onward, Google opens a different path: a spreadsheet upload and chain-level verification, instead of repeating the process one profile at a time. The threshold is strict — "10 or more" only counts active, legitimate profiles: duplicates, suspended and disabled profiles do not count toward the minimum, so if you have 11 profiles but 2 are suspended, you effectively have 9 and do not qualify yet.

The process, in four steps, is faster to run than to explain, but each step has a detail that forces a redo if you skip it:

1. Step 1 · Create the location group

   If you do not have a Business location group yet, create it before uploading anything. The spreadsheet loads inside a group, not on its own.

2. Step 2 · Fill the spreadsheet with EVERY profile

   Google's official spreadsheet has to include every location in the chain, not just the new ones — if you already had 8 sites loaded manually and are adding 4 more, all 12 go in the sheet. Any internal store code you use for your own records goes in its own dedicated column, never in the visible profile name field.

3. Step 3 · Upload it and fix the errors

   Google reviews the spreadsheet and flags rows with errors in the dashboard: incomplete addresses, invalid categories, names that do not match across sites. Fix them right there before moving on — a row with an error does not load itself and does not get fixed automatically later.

4. Step 4 · Request bulk verification separately

   Uploading the spreadsheet does not send a verification request on its own — you have to request it explicitly under Verifications > Chain > Start, fill in the form and submit it. This is the step most people skip, and without it the whole chain sits loaded but unverified, which limits what you can edit and keeps the listings from competing on equal footing in the local pack.

One line, without developing it further: if you need every profile's performance in a single file, Google lets you pull that from Actions > Insights > Download report, which is a topic worth its own post later. The goal here is getting the chain registered and verified; next is understanding why, even with all of this done right, the map still does not always show every site at once.

Why Google shows only one of your locations for the same search

This is the second question almost nobody answers well, and the one behind a lot of unresolved threads in Google's own help communities: how do I get the map to show all my locations instead of just one? First, a necessary clarification: if the issue is that the same address shows up twice, that is not this case — that is duplicate listings at the same address competing with each other, and the fix is merging them, not understanding them. Here we are talking about legitimate locations, with different addresses, each one properly verified.

When someone searches your exact brand name — "Roma Pizzeria" — Google understands they want to find that specific business and will often list several of your sites, especially if they sit relatively close to each other or to the searcher. The behavior changes with a generic category search, like "pizza near me" or just "pizza": there, the local pack usually shows only three results, and your own locations end up competing against each other and against the competition for that limited space. The site closest to the searcher usually wins, or whichever one has more prominence (reviews, rating, relevance signals) when distance is similar.

It is worth being honest about where this explanation comes from: Google does not publish a document saying "we only show one location per brand on generic searches." It is observed behavior, consistent with the three ranking factors Google does publish for local search — relevance, distance and prominence — where distance is usually the deciding one when two of your own listings compete for the same result. If the wrong location keeps showing up, or one of your sites consistently loses to a nearby competitor, comparing reviews and rating against the rest of the local pack usually explains most of the gap, though that prominence analysis is a separate topic on its own.

The practical takeaway that carries the rest of this post: chasing "all my locations showing at once" on a generic search is not worth much effort, because it does not depend on a setting you can flip. What you can control, and what is actually worth measuring, is whether your brand shows up — with whichever location — in every city where you have a presence.

One landing page per location, not the homepage

The "website" field on each profile is one of the least cared-for fields, and probably the one with the biggest impact on how you measure afterward. Pointing all nine "Roma Pizzeria" sites to the same homepage is the fastest option and the least useful one: the customer who searched for the Austin location lands on a page that confirms neither the address nor the hours of that specific site, and you lose any way to tell, inside Search Console, which landing page generated which clicks.

What works better is a dedicated landing page per location — address, hours, an embedded map, and whatever is specific to that site, like the team or particular services — grouped under a common hub, for example /locations/, where a visitor can find the nearest one. The common mistake when building this is cloning the same page nine times and swapping only the city name: to Google that gets dangerously close to duplicate content and does not add authority to either version.

Splitting URLs by location pays off about a month in: it lets you read in Search Console which landing page is getting clicks and impressions, instead of everything blending into the homepage. There is also a way to tell which listing drove each visit using UTM parameters on the profile's website link, but that is a technique that deserves its own write-up and we do not cover it in full here.

How to track which cities your brand shows up in

With locations registered, verified and pointing to their own landing pages, there is one question left — the one that started this whole process: which cities does your brand actually show up in on Google's local pack, and at what position? The method for tracking your local pack position city by city applies here exactly the same way, without repeating it in full: you search from that city, not a generic search, and record the result.

The difference from a single-location business is that now you repeat that measurement once per city where you have a storefront. In Rankiamos, the local pack tracking on Pro recognizes your listing by your website's domain, not by the exact profile name or a location ID — when a city has several of your locations, the system flags the best-placed one, not each one individually. In practice that means what gets measured and promised is "your brand appears in the top 3 in city X," not "the downtown site shows up and the north side one does not." If you need to know for certain which of your two locations in the same city was the one that appeared that day, today that is confirmed manually, by checking the listing itself or following the landing page URL if your profile links to one.

With 52 cities available across 19 countries, every city with a location gets added as its own tracking location, fixed by its Google Ads location code — not GPS, and not a grid of pins around the storefront. And one limitation worth stating directly: if two of your locations sit in the same city, Rankiamos does not split them neighborhood by neighborhood — the city is the smallest unit it measures.

Before deciding how many cities to track, it is worth doing the math slowly, because the most common mistake is assuming each location eats its own slice of quota. It does not: quota is counted by keyword-and-city combination, and two or more locations that sit in the same city share that exact measurement at no extra cost. On Pro you can also track mobile and desktop at once with the "Both" option, though each device consumes its own unit. For the full breakdown of how quota gets split across cities, that topic has its own guide — here is the version applied to a chain with multiple physical locations.

The row worth studying closely is the middle one: 12 locations across 12 different cities, tracking 8 keywords per city, add up to 96 units and exceed Pro's 50-unit quota. If those same 12 locations cluster into only 6 cities — say two storefronts per city on average — usage drops by half, to 48 units, with room to spare.

The Pro plan brings 5 projects, 50 keywords and local pack position by city or country, with no surcharge for adding new locations — what you consume is quota, not a bigger bill. For chains larger than what fits in this table — 40 locations across 30 cities, say — there is no plan above Pro today, and that is a real limitation worth stating before someone builds a project on a wrong assumption.

What this doesn't solve: large chains and same-city locations

This post takes you from zero profiles to a verified chain, tracked by city, with a PDF or CSV to report on. But there are questions the full stack — Google Business Profile plus Rankiamos — does not answer today, and we would rather say so now than have you find out midway through a client project.

If you need to split eight locations within one large city — neighborhood by neighborhood, with its own heat map — or track 40 cities at once for a national chain, both of those needs are covered today by a specialized geo-grid tool, not a general-purpose rank tracker like Rankiamos. That said, for most chains with 2 to 25 locations spread across different cities, what we do cover — brand verification, a landing page per site, and trackable per-city position — is usually exactly what was missing.