One network of forty locations means forty local fights.

It runs search for a network the way search actually treats a network: as many separate local contests, not one big one. We build and maintain a local presence for every site you operate, one Google Business Profile per physical location under Google's chain rules, one local page per location that survives Google's doorway-page policy, review management in each location's own voice, and a site architecture that stops your locations competing with each other. Around that sits the network layer: brand standards, shared learnings, rollout systems and reporting that shows head office every location's pack position, calls and enquiries side by side.

Because in each suburb's map pack, your location is not competing against other networks; it is competing against a real local, and real locals are hard to beat with head-office marketing. The independent operator has an owner answering reviews by name, photos taken on real jobs last week, a website page soaked in suburb detail, and years of accumulated local reviews. Your location, run centrally, often has a templated page, a profile nobody local touches, and reviews answered by a brand voice from another city, if at all. Google's local algorithm rewards exactly the signals the independent produces naturally. The fix is to run each location the way its local rival runs their whole business, then add the network's advantages on top.

Yes, and it needs to be a real page, not a template with the suburb swapped. Each location page is what its Google Business Profile links to, what local searches land on, and a large share of what Google reads to decide local relevance. Done properly it carries the location's actual address, team, photos, opening hours, service nuances, local reviews and directions, the things a customer of that specific branch cares about. Done lazily, as one master page find-and-replaced across forty suburbs, it walks straight into Google's doorway-page policy. The more locations you have, the more different your pages must be.

Google's spam policies describe doorway abuse as creating pages or domains targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one destination, and its 2015 doorway update asked site owners a blunt self-assessment question: do these pages exist for search engines, or are they a real destination a user would want? The danger signs on location pages: dozens of near-identical pages differing only by suburb name, no real address or team on the page, content that could describe any location because it was written to describe every location, and a conversion path that routes everyone to the same central funnel anyway. The legitimate version inverts each signal: real local detail, real people, real photos, location-specific proof and a direct path to that branch. At scale, template-driven franchise SEO packages become a policy risk.

Usually not. Separate franchisee sites split your brand's authority into fragments, create forty versions of your message that drift apart, and frequently end in cannibalisation, with two sites from the same network fighting each other for the same suburb while a competitor takes the pack. The architecture that usually wins is one strong domain carrying a locations hierarchy, each location with its own local page, profile and reviews, so every location inherits the network's authority while competing locally on its own signals. The exceptions are real: legacy franchisee sites with years of local equity, or networks whose brands really differ by market. Make those calls on data, location by location, and give legacy migrations proper redirects or years of local value burns off in a weekend.

Strictly, because listing violations at network scale get networks suspended. Each physical location gets exactly one profile. Chains must use the same name across locations unless the real-world branding varies, and the same category for the same service; departments qualify for their own profiles only when they are publicly distinct, with their own entrance and category. Public-facing practitioners, such as doctors or agents, can hold individual profiles alongside the office profile under specific naming rules. Service-area businesses hide their address and serve a realistic area, not a profile per town.

Not if you have ten or more locations of the same business. Google's bulk verification lets you upload the locations in a spreadsheet through the Business Profile Manager and request verification for the group. A few conditions apply: the spreadsheet needs at least ten profiles of the same business, duplicate, suspended or disabled profiles don't count towards the ten, and agencies holding several different businesses in one account can't bulk verify them. Uploading the sheet doesn't send the request on its own; you still have to submit it.

Both, with the split agreed up front. Franchisor-side work covers what must be centralised: site architecture, brand standards, the technical platform, network-level content and the reporting that compares locations. Location-side work covers what must be local: the profile, the reviews, the photos, the local page detail and community links. Networks that centralise everything produce polished sameness that loses to real locals; networks that devolve everything produce brand chaos and forty different logos in the search results. We put the split in writing at the start: who owns what, who pays for what, and what every location gets regardless.

Yes. The new Franchising Code of Conduct took effect on 1 April 2025, with further obligations from 1 November 2025, including the specific purpose funds regime, which broadens the old marketing-fund rules: money franchisors collect from franchisees for common purposes, marketing levies included, now carries wider disclosure and administration obligations, and the Code carries civil penalties for breaches. For SEO this cuts two ways. Money spent from a levy needs to be accountable, which favours providers who report real, location-level outcomes rather than vague brand metrics. And franchisees are entitled to ask what the fund bought them, which is a question our per-location reporting is designed to answer on one page. This is general information, not legal advice; the ACCC publishes the current guidance.

With local voices and a network system, because consumers can smell centralisation. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found generic or templated replies put off 50% of consumers, and that is what a network tends to produce when head office answers everything. Our review system runs the machinery centrally, invitation flow after every job, monitoring, escalation for problems, reporting by location, while the words stay local: responses reference the actual branch, the actual service and, where appropriate, the actual staff member. Recency matters too: the same survey found 74% of consumers only care about reviews from the last three months, so the invitation flow never gets to hibernate. All of it inside Google's rules and Australian Consumer Law: no gating, no incentives, no fakes.

Cannibalisation is the quiet tax of multi-location SEO, and it is mostly self-inflicted. It happens when two of your pages target the same suburb, when service areas overlap so heavily Google cannot tell which location should win, or when old microsites and duplicate profiles linger from past campaigns. Prevention is unglamorous: one geographic target per URL, a clean locations hierarchy so Google understands the structure, realistic service areas drawn per profile without greedy overlap, duplicate and legacy assets found and retired properly, and internal links that reinforce which page owns which suburb. It's common for an audit to find a pair of locations quietly splitting each other's rankings, and fixing it is some of the cheapest visibility the network will ever buy, because the demand was already yours.

Ours is published: $500 a month on Starter to run a single flagship location properly, often the right way to prove the model before a rollout; $900 a month on Growth for small networks, covering the network layer plus a handful of locations; and $1,500 a month on Performance for larger networks, with the per-location scope agreed openly once we have seen your footprint. No setup fees, no lock-in, and if a levy funds the work, our location-level reporting is built to satisfy the accountability the 2025 Code now expects. Full detail is on our pricing page, and we'll tell you if your network needs less than you think.

Ask three questions that separate network specialists from local SEO providers doing multiplication. First: how will our pages differ from each other, and can we see examples? If the answer is a template with suburbs swapped, Google's doorway policy is waiting, and so is mediocrity in every pack. Second: what is your position on the franchisor-franchisee split? A real specialist has an explicit model for what centralises and what stays local, and can talk fluently about profile rules for chains, practitioners and service areas. Third: show us location-level reporting. A network report that only shows brand totals hides failing locations inside healthy averages, and under the 2025 Code's fund-accountability rules, that opacity is a liability.