Multiple locations on one website: pages that get found

The question comes up in almost every relaunch conversation: isn't one contact page with three addresses enough? From the visitor's point of view sometimes yes, from a search point of view rarely. A page can only be the clearest answer to one topic. Put three places on it and they compete for the same headline, the same title and the same internal links. The title is no side detail here: 98.62 percent (Web Almanac 2025) of desktop pages have a title element at all. The difference is therefore not that it exists, but whether the place name appears in it — and a shared page can do that for at most one of the three. The same applies to the meta description, present on 67.7 percent (Web Almanac 2025) of desktop pages and 67.2 percent (Web Almanac 2025) of mobile pages: the tag is standard, its wording is not.

Then there is the shape of the market. 84 percent (Statistisches Bundesamt) of legal units in Germany employ fewer than ten people. A business running two or three locations rarely has a dedicated team for visibility and needs a structure that holds up without weekly maintenance. That is exactly what splitting into a hub page and location pages is for: it decides once where each piece of information lives, and turns adding a fourth location into routine rather than a project. How that order reaches the navigation is covered in our article on website structure and information architecture.

Simply having a website stopped being a differentiator long ago. In the EU, 79.01 percent (Eurostat) of enterprises with ten or more employees had their own website. The spread inside that group is telling, though: among small enterprises with 10 to 49 employees it was 76.66 percent (Eurostat), among large enterprises with 250 or more employees 95.65 percent (Eurostat). For the smaller business the deciding question is no longer whether a site exists, but whether the existing site makes each location findable on its own. The starting point is on our page about local SEO and local visibility.

Above the individual location pages sits an overview: the hub page, usually at an address like /locations/. It has three jobs. First, it is the landing page for every query without a place reference — someone searching only the company name lands here and then chooses. Second, it distributes internal links: every location page is one click away from here, and the hub itself hangs in the main navigation. Third, it is where new locations are attached without rebuilding the navigation.

The numbers behind this are unspectacular and therefore meaningful: the median desktop page carries 43 internal links (Web Almanac 2025). A location page reachable only through the sitemap sits far below what a normal page receives in linking. A breadcrumb navigation belongs alongside it, mapping the path from the home page through the hub to the location — 28 percent (Web Almanac 2025) of desktop inner pages carry BreadcrumbList markup, which makes it one of the most widespread structured data types there is. It costs little and makes the hierarchy visible even when somebody enters directly on the location page.

Creating a page for every town in the catchment area is an obvious idea and quickly leads in the wrong direction. The difference is not the number of pages but their content. A location page represents a place where somebody actually works, with its own address, its own team and its own hours. A doorway page represents a place name where nothing stands, and forwards the visitor. The search engine policy names this pattern explicitly as unwanted.

Businesses without a storefront have a clearly defined route of their own. If you travel to the customer, you describe the service area instead of building individual town pages. The documentation names a concrete ceiling: a service area should not extend beyond about 2 hours of driving time (Google Business Profile Help). That usually settles the question of whether a town 40 kilometres away deserves a page: it gets a paragraph inside the service area, not a location page.

The website is one half, the business profile the other. Every location with its own address gets its own profile, and every profile points at the matching location page — not at the home page. That link is why the effort spent on an individual page pays off: it is the destination the listing points to, and the reason local visibility and the website should not be planned separately. How a profile is maintained is covered in our article on the business profile in local search.

Beyond a certain size the route changes. The documentation draws the line at 10 or more locations (Google Business Profile Help): from that count upwards, importing through a spreadsheet is the intended path rather than editing by hand. The same logic applies to the website — anyone still maintaining ten pages one at a time will eventually stop maintaining them at all. The structure therefore has to be built from the start so that hours, phone numbers and addresses come from a single source.

The day-to-day afterwards is unspectacular, which is precisely why it gets overlooked. Holiday hours, a change of contact person, a new phone number, a rerouted approach because of roadworks: small changes that land on three pages at once and get forgotten in three places. A fixed appointment twice a year, at which all location pages and all profiles are checked side by side, is the simplest answer. How to run such a pass systematically is described in our article on the content audit of ageing website content; and if that pass also touches prices or promotions on the location pages, the legal guardrails are in the article on strike-through prices and the 30-day rule.

If you would rather not run that pass yourself, you can hand it over — ongoing maintenance is part of our website care, building the structure part of our web design work. Which building blocks come together and what they cost is on the pricing overview; the editorial side of it — keywords, structure, copy — sits with search engine optimisation.