The Anatomy of a Scalable Local Search Audit for Multi-Location Brands
Auditing is foundational in SEO. Whether you're managing a handful of locations or hundreds, local search audits help you understand where your brand stands, uncover missed opportunities, and benchmark against competitors.
For multi-location businesses, the complexity only multiplies. You’re not just analyzing one domain, you’re navigating a web of listings, local nuances such as scaling unique content, reputation data, and foundational technical SEO.
Here’s how to approach local audits in a scalable, insightful way, built on strategy, not guesswork.
Why Local Search Audits Matter
Before diving into process and tools, let’s talk about why local audits are such a critical part of a Local SEO strategy. For multi-location businesses, each storefront lives in its own local market with its own SERPs and competitors. A single location’s weak performance can drag down regional metrics or the brand’s overall reputation. A local search audit helps pinpoint what’s working, what’s broken, and what your competitors are doing better.
For multi-location brands, a local search audit isn’t a luxury but a necessity. Traditional SEO audits might focus on content, technical elements, and backlinks. However, with local SEO, we add more layers: listing consistency, review quality, location pages, photos, and competitive presence, all of which can vary by region.
A local audit helps you stay sharp on both brand-wide metrics and hyperlocal realities.
How Often Should You Run Local Audits?
Audits aren’t a one-and-done effort. When onboarding new clients, a major audit is always the starting point. It provides a baseline, a snapshot of their current state.
But it doesn't end there.
The digital landscape is dynamic, with algorithm updates, new features, and evolving competitor strategies. This means auditing should be an ongoing process.
While a full, deep dive might happen annually (perhaps as part of a year-end recap or for six-month planning), smaller, more focused audits should be conducted throughout the year, depending on what goals you’re trying to reach.
The key is to be proactive.
If you notice a particular location or cluster of locations underperforming compared to the average, that's your cue to investigate. Is a location struggling with map pack rankings? Time to audit their Google Business Profile (GBP) and reviews. This enables you to identify issues promptly and address them before they have a significant impact on performance.
The Listings Audit: Accuracy Above All
One of the most common issues across large networks is the presence of inaccurate or inconsistent business listings. Even minor mismatches in NAP (Name, Address, Phone) can hurt credibility with users.
I often find:
Missing information: Incomplete profiles leave potential customers in the dark.
Mismatched information: Inconsistencies in name, address, and phone number (NAP) across different platforms confuse both users and search engines. Even subtle differences in business names (e.g., adding or omitting a modifier) can cause issues.
Category mismatch: Businesses often select broad categories when more specific, relevant options are available. This can limit their visibility for niche searches.
These inaccuracies often stem from rushed initial setups or failing to keep up with platform updates and evolving category options. It's a clear reminder that local listings are not a "set it and forget it" task.
We heavily rely on local listing management tools like Rio SEO, Moz, or BrightLocal to manage listings at scale across platforms (Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp, etc.). Still, even with automation, audits are essential to spot platform mismatches or recent category changes that could affect visibility.
GBP Optimization: Details Drive Results
Google Business Profile (GBP) optimization can often be overlooked. Categories are especially critical. Too many businesses stop at the generic “insurance agency” when they could use something more specific, like “health insurance agency.” These subtleties matter.
Other common oversights:
Incomplete profiles: It may sound basic, but many businesses fail to fill out every available field in their GBP. This is a missed opportunity to provide comprehensive information to potential customers.
Outdated or generic photos: While some franchises may use generic stock images, it's crucial to have unique, high-quality photos for each location. Train your on-site staff to capture photos of the interior, exterior, team members, and local events. Repurpose social media content. User-generated content from customers can also be incredibly valuable. These authentic visuals help potential customers visualize the business and build trust.
Reviews: Beyond just having reviews, it's about actively managing them. We'll delve deeper into this, but a lack of recent reviews or a low average rating can be a significant red flag.
Auditing Location Pages: Technical and Content Deep Dive
Location pages are the backbone of multi-location SEO. When auditing, I look at both technical hygiene and content quality:
Technical Considerations:
Structured Data (Schema Markup): Are you implementing local business schema? More importantly, are you using the most specific schema available for your industry (e.g., "LocalBusiness" vs. "Restaurant")? Beyond the basics, consider what other on-page elements can be marked up with schema, such as videos, FAQs, or reviews.
Review Integration: Is there a mechanism to pull in reviews, either via the Google API or another platform? Displaying reviews prominently on location pages not only builds trust but also adds unique content to the page, enhancing its overall value.
General Technical Best Practices: This includes proper heading usage, content segmentation, and internal linking to and from the location page.
Metadata Comparison: Analyze your metadata against that of your competitors. Are they using more compelling title tags and meta descriptions?
Content Considerations:
Unique Content: This is arguably the biggest challenge for multi-location brands due to the inherent duplication of brand messaging and services. The goal isn't to eliminate all duplicate content (which is often unavoidable for brand consistency) but to inject unique, localized content.
Community Partnerships: Highlight local initiatives or collaborations.
Team Members: Showcase managers, franchisees, or key staff. This personalizes the experience and builds connection.
Events and Success Stories: Share what's happening at that specific location.
Local Descriptions: Include a paragraph or two that describes the unique aspects of the location itself, including its surroundings, parking availability, proximity to landmarks (such as universities or shopping centers), and the overall customer experience.
Location-specific FAQs: Incorporate answers to common questions about the location.
Call to Actions (CTAs): Are your CTAs clear and compelling?
Competitor Analysis: Compare your location pages side by side with those of your major competitors and the smaller local players who may be outranking you in the blue links. Identify their strengths and your gaps. Do they have more unique content, better photos, or more effective CTAs?
Scaling Localized Content Creation
Creating unique, localized content that avoids sounding generic is a significant challenge. But scaling doesn’t necessarily mean sacrificing quality. You can streamline localized content by leveraging the existing structure of multi-location businesses:
Engage Regional Marketing Teams: Larger franchises often have regional marketing personnel who are connected to individual franchisees and branch owners.
Gather Input Directly: We use methods such as questionnaires or interviews with regional managers or individual location managers to gather unique details about each specific branch. This input is invaluable for creating authentic content.
Collaborate with Content Writers: Once the localized information is gathered, hand the raw data to a content writer for further development. You’d be surprised how many unique angles emerge from just a 10-minute call with a branch manager.
Prioritization: When scaling, prioritize content creation based on client goals. This could involve focusing on priority markets (where significant growth is aimed for), struggling locations (where immediate improvement is needed), or even using specific locations as test cases to demonstrate the impact of localized content.
This systematic approach ensures that content is not only unique but also strategically aligned with business objectives.
Auditing Your Brand's Review Strategy
Reviews are a cornerstone of local SEO, influencing both rankings and customer conversions. Auditing a brand's review presence across multiple locations requires a systematic approach, especially when dealing with hundreds of locations.
The strategy here is to establish averages and identify outliers. If your average star rating across all locations is 4.1, which locations fall significantly below that? Which locations have a low number of reviews, or none at all (excluding very new openings)?
These outliers indicate where you need to lean in. This might involve:
Implementing a review generation plan: QR codes, email campaigns, and direct requests for feedback from staff can encourage customers to share their experiences.
Leveraging review summaries: Google's review summaries, AI Mode, and other AI-powered tools can quickly highlight common themes, strengths, and weaknesses across your reviews, giving you actionable insights into customer sentiment or location-level challenges.
Paying close attention to your brand's overall reputation, both on Google and other platforms, is crucial. Reviews offer an unbiased view of your business from the customer's perspective, revealing both successes and areas that need improvement.
What a Good Local Competitor Audit Looks Like
Most brands focus on a few large national competitors. But in local search, hyperlocal businesses with strong community presence shouldn’t be ignored. In this section, we’ll look at how to audit your competitors’ local strategies (big and small) and identify ways to gain ground in the local market.
A comprehensive local competitor audit goes beyond simply looking at your biggest rivals. Too often, brands focus only on their “main” competitors or other national chains. However, local markets are filled with scrappy small businesses that win SERPs through authenticity, customer loyalty, and community engagement.
A strong local competitor audit includes:
Location Pages: Analyze their content strategy, unique selling propositions, and how they present their local presence.
Google Business Profiles: What categories are they using? How complete are their profiles? What kind of photos and updates are they posting?
Reviews: Not just their average rating, but how many reviews they have, how frequently they receive them, and how they respond to both positive and negative feedback.
Local Presence and Citations: Where are your competitors listed that you are not? This might include industry-specific directories (such as Nextdoor for home improvement), local business associations, or community event listings.
Community Engagement: Are competitors involved in local events? This not only builds brand awareness but can also open opportunities for local backlinks and increased relevance in the area.
Local presence isn’t just digital, it’s about embedded trust and visibility in each city.
Measuring Performance and Prioritizing Action
After conducting an audit, the crucial next step is to translate insights into action and measure their impact.
Measuring Performance:
UTM Codes for GBP: Always use UTM codes for your Google Business Profile links to track traffic originating from GBP separately from organic blue link traffic. This helps identify where improvements have the most impact.
GBP Metrics: Track visibility (views), engagement (clicks on calls, website, directions), and conversions directly from GBP.
Website Traffic & Engagement: Monitor overall traffic to location pages and user engagement metrics. Are improvements in reputation leading to more conversions?
Keyword Rankings: Utilize local rank tracking tools to monitor keyword performance at a granular, local level. Even if overall rankings don't change drastically, an improved star rating may lead to more clicks within the local pack.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
Visibility: Keyword rankings at the local level, GBP views, and impressions.
Engagement: Clicks on calls, website, and directions from GBP.
Conversions: On-site conversions directly attributed to local search efforts.
Reputation: Average star rating and the number of reviews.
Presenting Results:
When managing hundreds of locations, slicing data effectively is an essential part of the process. Provide a big-picture summary showing averages across all locations to manage expectations. Then, break it down by:
Top vs. Least Top Performers: Highlight successes and identify struggling locations (understanding reasons like newness or market limitations).
Geographic Markets: Compare performance across different metro areas or regions (e.g., Chicago vs. Dallas locations) to identify regional trends or challenges.
Prioritizing Actions:
The prioritization of fixes post-audit is directly tied to the client's goals and the opportunities identified.
Scalable fixes: Simple changes, such as category updates, can often be rolled out across all locations using listing management platforms.
Content creation: This is a longer-term effort and requires setting clear expectations. Prioritize based on market importance, growth potential, or even testing on underperforming locations to demonstrate success and gain buy-in.
Gaining Buy-In: For many initiatives, especially those requiring local team involvement (like review generation or photo collection), you'll need buy-in from both the brand and individual locations. Running a small-scale test campaign (like an SMS review generation campaign) can provide compelling data to show impact and secure broader support.
Final Advice for SEOs Scaling Local Audits
If you're handling multi-location SEO audits for the first time or looking to scale your process, remember this: You can audit everything, but not all at once.
Begin by understanding what you want to solve: Is it poor rankings? Conversion gaps? Low engagement?
From there, focus. Layer your audits based on your end goal. Be clear about priorities and realistic about timelines. Local SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.
Article by
Dayna Lucio
Dayna is a Senior Strategist, SEO at Amsive and has almost a decade of experience executing and developing comprehensive strategies for multi-location and franchise brands. Her experience in local SEO has spanned a variety of industries, including health, beauty and spa, fitness, home improvement, and more.
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