A group with three workshops has three websites, three phone numbers and three Google Business Profiles. A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts a business in Google’s map results. What changes with a group is which of those things stays separate and which gets shared. The parts a customer searches for near them belong to each shop. The parts that cost money to produce are built once and used everywhere.
Each shop keeps its own profile, its own phone number, its own hours and its own page. The service content, the enquiry path, the photography and the reporting are shared across the group. Advertising sits between the two. One account, a campaign for each area, and a budget that follows the shop with room to take the work.
This is written for the owner or director of a group that grew. You bought or opened the second shop, then the third. You know how a workshop runs, so nothing here explains why a booking matters. What has changed is that every obvious decision now has two answers that could both be right.
One website with a page for each shop is the usual answer for a group trading under one name.
One shared site keeps everything the group builds in one place. It is cheaper to keep current, because a change to a service is made once and appears on every location page.
Separate sites earn their place in three cases. The shops trade under different names. They do genuinely different work, such as a panel shop beside a general workshop. Or one was bought with its own customers and its own name worth keeping.
Separate sites carry more work than one does. Every change has to be made again on each site. They also split what the group has built, because each site has to earn its own audience from scratch. One shared site has the opposite drawback. A shop that wants its own look does not get one.
The decision rule is about the customer, not the buildings. If a customer would not notice which of your shops they booked at, one website is enough. If they chose that shop rather than your group, look harder before you fold it in. Put the question to whoever runs your marketing, in the office or at an automotive digital marketing agency.
Group is a loose word. It covers workshops, tyre retailers and panel shops under one name. It also covers a franchise network where each site has its own operator. What differs between them is how much each site trades on its own name.
Four things belong to the shop rather than to the group, and Google’s own guidelines set them.
Each location needs its own Google Business Profile. Google asks a business to give a phone number that connects to that individual location, or a website that represents it.
The phone number is the part groups get wrong. Google’s guidelines ask for a local number rather than a central call centre line wherever possible. They also say a number or web address must not send people somewhere other than the business itself. The number has to be under the direct control of the business. One central number published on five profiles fails that test.
Opening hours belong to the shop as well. One shop opening on Saturday morning and another closing at noon is normal. Publish one set of hours for all of them and customers arrive at a closed roller door.
Each shop needs a page on the website that its profile can point to. The page answers what a customer needs before they leave a car at that address. Where to park. What the street is like. Who is there on a Saturday, and what that shop does that the others do not.
Reviews follow the profile, so they stay with the shop that earned them. No group can pool them into one score.
Setting each profile up is already written down, in Google Business Profile tips that get mechanics more calls. Claiming, categories, photos, hours and asking for reviews all sit in that post, and they apply to each shop in turn.
Matching details matter more across five shops than one. The name, the address and the phone number have to agree everywhere they appear. That ground belongs to why a competitor keeps winning Google’s near me searches.
Sharing is cheapest where the content describes the work rather than the place.
The name and the brand are shared by rule, not by choice. Google’s guidelines say every location in one country carries the same name. The exception is a business whose real presentation varies from shop to shop. Locations providing the same service also carry the same category. A franchisee, meaning an authorised seller of a brand’s product or service, may use that brand name when the profile is created.
Service content is where a group saves the most. A clutch job is a clutch job at every shop, so write it once. Photographs are the second saving. One properly taken set of workshop pictures beats three sets taken on a phone.
The enquiry path should be the same at every shop. A customer who moves between them should not have to learn the site twice.
Reporting is the thing groups forget to share. Three unconnected reports do not say which shop is short of work. One view that compares them does.
One line is worth holding on to across a group. Content that describes the work is the same at every site. Content that describes the place is not. A group’s site is built on that split, with shared content and local overrides for the parts that differ.
One distinction catches groups out when they plan location pages. A page for a suburb the business travels to is a marketing decision, and the case either way is in local SEO for plumbers, electricians and builders. A page for a place the business really works from is a fact about the business. It has an address, a profile and a phone number attached to it.
Two campaigns for two of your own shops do not compete in the auction the way it feels like they should.
Google’s advertising policy bars using its network to gain an unfair advantage over other bidders. The example it gives is trying to show more than one ad for your business, app or site in a single ad location. So two of your shops will not sit side by side in one ad slot. The risk is breaking that rule, not paying twice for the same click. That holds whatever way your accounts are set up. Google says a warning comes at least seven days before any suspension.
Geo-targeting is the tool that keeps the shops apart. Geo-targeting means choosing the areas where an ad is allowed to show. Google’s targeting can cover a country, areas inside it, a radius around a place, or a group of locations. The broader setting also reaches people who have shown an interest in an area.
Location targeting comes with a caveat, and it is Google’s own. Targeting reads a mix of signals, and Google calls it a best effort rather than a promise, without guaranteeing complete accuracy. Two shops a few suburbs apart cannot be fenced off from each other. Expect some overlap and stop paying for the fear of it.
Two of your own shops can turn up in the same near me search. Picture a customer searching from a street that sits halfway between two of them. Both shops are close, and one of them gets the call. A group spread across the metropolitan area competes with itself as well as with everyone else. That is a consequence of having shops close together, not a fault to fix.
The budget split is the real decision, and owners put it off. One budget spread evenly across three shops is a decision not to back the shop with room to take more work. Split it by capacity, then move it again when a shop fills up. Splitting a budget between channels is a different question.
Three things give way at the fourth shop, and none of them is the website.
Capacity is the first pressure point. Marketing that filled three workshops fills four only if the fourth can take the work. A group that lifts its advertising before the fourth shop is staffed pays for work it cannot book in.
Consistency is the second. Hours, services and photos drift apart across a group once nobody owns them. The drift is invisible from the office and obvious to a customer comparing two of your shops on a phone.
Ownership is the third, and it decides the other two. At three shops in one group the marketing is somebody’s second job. At four it stops being one. Somebody has to own the calendar, the profiles and the reporting across the group.
Access is worth setting up before you need it. Logins, the domain names and the ability to change the site should sit with the group from the start. What happens when the person who ran the site leaves is worth reading before it happens.
Here is the check worth running this week. Write out your locations. Open each profile and confirm it carries a phone number that connects to that shop. A single number across several sites is easy to get wrong and quick to fix. If one site with a page per shop is the answer, CJ Digital’s web design and development page sets out what that build covers.
One website is usually enough where every shop trades under the same name and does the same work. Separate sites are worth the extra work where the shops carry different names, or where one of them does work the others do not.
Yes. Google looks for a profile that represents each location, with a number that connects to it. Hours and reviews sit on the profile, which is why they belong to the shop rather than the group.
Yes, and that is the tidier way to do it. One account can hold a campaign for each shop, aimed at the area that shop serves, with its own slice of the monthly budget.
With the shop it names. A review stays on the profile it was left on, and no group can move it or spread it across the other sites.
