The second shed opens on a Monday in Ferntree Gully. By Wednesday the office has taken four calls from people who drove to Bayswater, because that is the only address on the website. The new site has a hoist running and two empty bays. As far as anyone looking online can tell, it is not open.
A second location is a second business as far as Google is concerned. Each staffed site that customers visit needs its own Business Profile, its own local phone number and its own page on your website. Run both sites off one profile and one contact page and the new site has no address on the map. It also gives a customer nothing to check before driving over.
Three decisions follow, usually made in a hurry. One profile or two. One page or two. One phone number or two. Each is awkward to undo six months later.
Google’s rule is one Business Profile for each business location, and a second staffed workshop counts as a second location. Its guidelines say not to create more than one page for the same location, in one account or several. The rule runs the other way too. One profile carries one address, so the site you leave off does not appear on the map.
A staffed site that customers visit gets its own profile. Google expects any business showing an address to keep permanent fixed signage with the business name there.
A mobile-only operation does not get one per suburb. A service-area business goes to the customer rather than the other way round. It gets one profile for its central location, with a service area set around it.
A workshop that also does roadside work is a hybrid. Google names auto repair shops with a garage and a roadside service as its own example. You can show the street address and set a service area from the same profile.
Service areas have an outer limit. Google’s guidance is that the overall service area should not stretch further than about two hours of driving time from where the business is based.
Moving is not the same as adding. If the business relocates, update the existing profile with the new address. Building a fresh one throws away years of review history.
One website with a page for each location suits almost every workshop running two or three sites. Automotive websites are usually built for one address, with the suburb in the footer and the phone number fixed into the header. The second location is where that structure gets tested.
Google asks each profile for a website that represents that individual location. Point both at the same page and the customer who taps through from the map lands somewhere without the address, the hours or the number they came for.
| Setup | When it suits | What it costs | What it risks |
|---|---|---|---|
| One site, one page per location | Two to five sites under the same name | One build, one hosting bill, one place to update | Location pages that repeat each other and tell the reader nothing new |
| A separate website for each location | Sites trading under genuinely different names, or a site being set up to sell later | Two builds, two hosting bills, two update routines | Splitting your standing across two thin sites |
| One site, no location split | A single public site, or a second site that is workshop only, with nobody coming through the door | Nothing extra | The new address appears nowhere, and its profile has nothing to point at |
A location page earns its place when it carries information that applies only to that site. Google’s spam policies name doorway abuse. The description covers pages aimed at particular regions or cities that funnel people onward to one page, and pages that are substantially similar to each other. A second policy, scaled content abuse, covers the version spun out across dozens of suburbs.
A location page that could be published for any suburb by changing one word is the pattern Google’s spam policies describe.
What genuinely differs between two sites is what belongs on the page.
The address, the driveway and the parking. Which street the entrance is on, and where a customer leaves the car.
The hours. One site opens Saturday morning and the other does not.
The people. Who runs that workshop and what they are qualified to work on.
The equipment and the services. Only one site has the alignment rack, the dyno or the tech licensed for high-voltage work.
Photos of that building. The roller door a customer will be looking for, not a stock image.
Its own phone number and booking link. Both should match the profile for that address.
One honest limit sits under all of this. A location page does not move your workshop closer to the customer. Google describes its local results as resting on relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is fixed by geography. The page convinces someone once the profile has put you in front of them.
Two staffed sites need two numbers. Google asks for a phone number that connects to the individual location. It prefers a local number over a central call centre line, and the number has to be under the direct control of the business.
The operational reason matters more than the policy one. A single number ringing at the old site sends the new site’s customers to someone who cannot see that diary or that car, and takes a message instead. Four of those in a week is how a new location gets a reputation before it has taken a booking.
You can still answer both lines from one desk while the team is small. Each profile just needs the number that belongs to its own location.
Reviews sit on the profile, not on the business name, so location two starts on zero. The old site keeps everything it has earned. The new one opens next to competitors with a decade of reviews.
Google counts reviews and links towards prominence, one of the three things it names behind local results. The first few months at a new site are the slow ones. The review routine there is a job for the second week, not the second year.
Ask the customers of that site, at that site, about the work done there. Sending Bayswater customers to review Ferntree Gully puts reviews on the wrong profile.
Before the new address goes live (correct as at 2026)
Every detail you keep current now lives in two places, and a wrong one does more damage than a missing one. The failure is rarely dramatic. Hours drift, a public holiday goes on one profile and not the other, and someone drives to a closed workshop.
Hours, including public holidays and the Christmas shutdown. Two profiles and two pages means four places to change.
The phone number on the page and the number on the profile. These come apart when a line changes and nobody tells whoever edits the site.
The services list. Adding a service at one site does not add it at the other. A shared page saying otherwise is what creates the complaint.
Staff names and qualifications on the location page. Out of date within a year at most workshops.
The address written the same way everywhere. One street address in three formats across the profile, the page and the invoices is easy to avoid at setup and tedious to unpick later.
A website where changing Saturday hours means emailing a developer will be out of date within months. That is a build decision, not a discipline problem. The front desk should be able to change hours, a number and a staff name without waiting on anyone.
The structure you put in for the second site is the one you will still be using at the fifth. That means a location page built as a repeatable type rather than a one-off, one services list feeding every location page, and hours held in one place.
There is a second reason to give each site its own page now. AI assistants and AI answers describe a business from what they can read about it. For a specific address, that is the Business Profile and the location page. A workshop with three addresses and one page leaves nothing on the record about two of them, and nothing about them to cite.
If you are opening a second site this year, CJ Digital can set the website and the profiles up so the third one is a form to fill in. Best done before the doors open, while the address, the number and the signage are still decisions.
Google Business Profile Help, Guidelines for representing your business on Google, and Tips to improve your local ranking on Google. Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search. Service NSW and NSW Fair Trading on notified premises under the Motor Dealers and Repairers Act 2013. Government of Western Australia on the motor vehicle repair business licence. All checked in August 2026. Platform rules and licensing requirements change, so check the current version before acting on any of it.
Nothing useful. A Business Profile carries one address, so the second one will not show. Google’s naming rules also rule out putting location details into the business name field as a workaround. The second site needs its own profile to appear on the map at all.
Usually not. Google’s guidance is that all locations of a business in the same country use the same name, unless the real-world name genuinely varies from site to site. The name should match the signage. A suburb attached to the name is fine when that is the name on the building. Adding one as a descriptor to tell the two profiles apart is not.
It helps, but it is not the part doing the heavy work. The Business Profile for that address is what puts you into map results for that area, and how far you are from the person searching is fixed. The location page is what a customer reads once they have found you, and it gives the profile somewhere useful to send them.
Yes. Each profile asks for a website that represents that individual location, so the page should be live and working before you verify the new profile. Publishing first also gives search engines time to find the page before the profile starts sending people to it.
A storage shed or a workshop closed to the public is not a location in the sense Google means. A profile showing an address is expected to have signage, staff and customers during the hours it lists. Leave that site off, and keep the address on your profile the one people can visit.
