Ask a multi-location brand who owns their Google Business Profiles and you usually get a pause, because head office assumes the branches handle it while the branches assume head office does. What follows from that is a set of listings photographed once in 2019, with opening hours nobody has checked since, and a review from last March that never got a reply.
No paid channel spending comparable money would be left in that state for a fortnight.
"Near me" is a decision, not research
By the time someone types "near me", the research is over and they're choosing which door to walk through or which number to call, usually within the hour. That makes local SEO about as close to bottom of funnel as anything gets, and organic map-pack presence is the cheapest lead most location businesses will ever receive. It's also one of the few places a well-run small operator reliably beats a lazy national one.
We've done this work in one of the harder local categories going - funeral services, where trust and sensitivity aren't optional extras - across a national multi-brand group, and we've written before about what marketing looks like in that category.
Reviews are a velocity problem, not a rating problem
The common mistake is treating the star rating as the finish line.
Rankings read velocity, recency, and whether you reply, not just the average. A branch sitting on 4.8 stars from reviews that dried up two years ago will lose to the 4.5 down the road collecting three a week and answering all of them. Which makes reviews an operational task rather than a marketing one, and the hard part has never been knowing they matter - it's building a process branch staff will follow every week without being chased, which is a management problem that happens to be wearing an SEO costume.
Give every location its own numbers
This is where treating it as a channel stops being a figure of speech.
A channel gets measured, per location: calls, direction requests, website clicks, and where you can close the loop, what those turned into. Not a single blended national figure, which lets the strong branches carry the weak ones indefinitely and hides exactly the information you need.
Getting those numbers is mostly a plumbing job, and it's the step people skip. Put UTMs on the website link in every profile so map-pack traffic stops disappearing into Direct or Organic. Point each profile at a dedicated location page rather than the homepage - /locations/newcastle instead of everyone landing in the same place - which gives you per-branch analytics for free and a more relevant page for the visitor. Then track visibility with something built for it: a tool like Local Viking will show you actual rankings at points across the radius around each branch, rather than the single averaged position Google reports.
That last one changes the conversation, because "we rank third" turns out to mean first near the shop and eighth four miles out, which is a coverage problem you can do something about.
Once every branch has its own numbers, the useful things surface on their own. The branch that never asks for reviews becomes visible. The profile with the wrong Christmas hours gets found in November rather than January. The location quietly outperforming everyone gets studied instead of ignored.
It also changes the conversation upstairs, because "we do local SEO" reads as a cost line, whereas a per-location report showing calls and direction requests by branch, with the underperformers named and explained, reads as a channel.
The instrumentation behind it is unremarkable - profiles managed centrally, location pages with genuine local substance rather than postcode-swapped duplicates, consistent name, address and phone data everywhere it appears. None of it is difficult. It does have to be owned by someone.
The channel nobody budgets for
The map pack's real weakness inside an organisation is that appearing in it is free, so it never gets an owner, a target, or a line in the budget. Paid search gets weekly attention because the spend is visible on an invoice; the map pack loses the meeting-time argument while quietly out-converting it on the searches that matter most.
Give it what any revenue-producing channel gets. An owner, per-branch targets, and someone who notices when a location drops out of the pack.
