TL;DR
A business with six locations gets one report and the aggregate hides everything worth knowing. Total calls up nine per cent. Four branches flat, one growing fast, one quietly collapsing. That is not merely uninformative, it is misleading, because the strongest branch masks the weakest for months.
A business with six locations gets one report, and the aggregate hides everything worth knowing. Total calls are up nine per cent. Four branches are flat, one is growing fast, one is quietly collapsing, and the summary line says none of that.
Why the aggregate is worse than useless
Not just uninformative. Actively misleading, because the strongest branch masks the weakest.
One location doubling can carry a report while another halves. The number goes up, everyone is pleased, and the branch with the actual problem gets nine more months of nobody looking. By the time it surfaces in revenue the cause is a year old and untraceable.
So the first rule is that a multi-location report is six reports. There is no shortcut, and any summary that leads with a total is hiding the finding.
The comparison that actually works
Each location against its own past, never against each other.
Branches are not comparable. One sits in a dense centre with heavy competition, one covers a rural catchment, one opened eight months ago. Ranking them against each other produces a league table that punishes geography, and the branch manager at the bottom is usually not doing anything wrong.
I have seen this run as an internal scorecard and it damages more than it fixes.
The trap in the profile data itself
Two, and both are easy to walk into.
The Search versus Maps split is not organic versus map pack. It records where the profile was viewed: the Maps app on one side, google.com on the other. The local pack renders inside Google Search, so a profile getting most of its views through Search is very often getting them from the pack. As a pack-versus-organic proxy the ratio is close to meaningless, and it is the most confidently misread number in the report.
What the pack actually weighs is published. Google names relevance, distance and prominence and states that there is “no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” Distance is measured from each branch, which is precisely why a group-level number cannot describe six catchments. Two of your six may be competing against completely different sets of businesses.
Click mix varies enormously by vertical and location. Across six profiles I track, phone’s share of profile clicks ranged from 13.1% at one business to 3.1% at another. Direction requests are near-meaningless for some and the primary signal for others. A single cross-branch scorecard using the same weightings misleads for at least half of them.
What I would actually report, per location
- Calls, direction requests and website clicks in absolute numbers, against that location’s own twelve-month baseline. Not percentages, and not against the group.
- Grid position, quarterly. The thing the profile data structurally cannot tell you, because distance is measured from each building separately and one report cannot describe six catchments.
- Review recency per branch. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers found 74% look for reviews written in the last three months. Review collection is almost always uneven across branches, and the gap is invisible in a group total.
- Whether anything changed locally. A competitor opening two streets away explains a branch decline completely and appears nowhere in any dashboard.
The structural question underneath
Before any of the reporting: is this one business with six locations, or six businesses under one brand? It determines whether you need six profiles and six location pages or one of each, and getting it wrong makes every subsequent number ambiguous.
The scale of a group changes the reporting burden and not the diagnosis. the failures are the same ones a single-location business has, multiplied by six and averaged into invisibility.
The short version
- A six-location report is six reports. The total hides the finding.
- The strong branch masks the weak one for months.
- Compare each location to its own past, never to its siblings.
- The Search/Maps split is not pack versus organic. The pack lives inside Search.
- Click mix varies hugely: 13.1% phone share at one business, 3.1% at another.
- Grid position quarterly is the thing the profile data cannot give you.
- Track review recency per branch. 74% of people want reviews under three months old.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Local SEO covers profiles, catchments and multi-location groups. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
