Managing Reviews Across Several Locations
Short answer: one Google Business Profile per location, always; centralise the standards, the templates and the reporting; leave the actual replies with the person who runs that branch. The rating that matters to a customer is the one for the shop they are about to walk into.
Two locations is a slightly bigger version of one. Five is a different job — and the mistakes are consistent enough to list.
Get the Structure Right First
One profile per physical location. Not one for the brand. A customer searching "near me" is matched to a place, and a merged profile cannot rank for two neighbourhoods.
Each profile gets its own local phone number where possible. A central 0800 number weakens the local signal and annoys the customer who wanted the shop.
Each profile links to its own location page, not the homepage. If the site has no location pages, that is the highest-value SEO work available to a multi-location business.
Categories can differ by branch if the offering genuinely differs. Do not copy-paste one configuration across all of them without checking.
Access, properly configured. Owner access held centrally, manager access for the branch. Locations run by a manager's personal Google account is how a chain loses a profile when someone leaves.
What to Centralise, What to Delegate
Centralise:
- The standard: reply to everything, negatives within 24 hours.
- The reply templates and, more importantly, the banned phrases.
- Escalation rules: what a branch must not answer alone (safety, discrimination, legal threats, anything naming a staff member).
- Reporting: a monthly view of rating, volume, recency and response rate per branch.
- The review-request mechanism, so every branch asks the same way.
Delegate:
- The actual replies. The manager knows whether the Thursday shift was short-staffed; head office does not, and it shows.
- The asking. It happens at the counter or it does not happen.
The failure mode is head office writing all replies. Twenty branches with identical wording reads as a call centre, and the specificity that makes a reply persuasive is exactly what a central team cannot supply.
The Reporting That Changes Behaviour
Four columns per branch, monthly:
| Metric | Why it is on the list |
|---|---|
| New reviews this month | The input. Flat means nobody is asking. |
| Average rating | The output, but slow to move. |
| Days since newest review | Catches a branch that quietly stopped. |
| Response rate and speed | The one thing a manager fully controls. |
Rank branches by reviews collected, not by rating. Rating is partly luck and partly catchment; asking is effort, and rewarding effort is what spreads the habit.
The Outlier Branch
Sooner or later one location sits half a star below the rest. Resist the urge to treat it as a marketing problem.
Read thirty of its reviews in one sitting and the cause is usually obvious and operational: one recurring complaint, one shift, one process. A branch with a 3.9 among 4.6s is telling you something the mystery shopper missed.
Where a Shared Page Helps
Each branch needs its own review page — its own reviews, its own address, its own booking link — for its bio, its window and its receipts.
The brand can still have one page linking to all of them, which is what belongs on the main site and in national campaigns. What you should not do is show a blended, brand-wide rating as if it described the branch someone is standing outside.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I move reviews between profiles?
Not by request. Reviews move only when Google merges duplicate profiles for the same place. A review left on the wrong branch generally stays there.
Should branches have their own social accounts?
Usually not — they fragment attention and go stale. A branch-level review page and an accurate Business Profile cover the local need without a content burden.
What if a franchisee refuses to reply to reviews?
Make response rate part of the standard reporting. Most refusal is workload or discomfort, both of which templates and a ten-minute weekly slot fix.
How do we stop head office and a branch replying twice?
Assign ownership per profile and log escalations. Two replies under one review is a small thing that looks disorganised.
Do we need paid software for this?
Below roughly five locations, a spreadsheet and a monthly review of each profile is enough. Beyond that, the value of a tool is in the aggregated reporting, not in the replying.
Give Each Branch Its Own Page
Kudo gives every location a page with its own reviews, address and call-to-action — the link for that branch's bio, receipts and window, instead of one national page that answers nobody's local question.
Start free at getkudo.co.