Your franchise ranks nationally. Your locations are invisible in their own towns.

The brand site ranks for what the business does, and the locations are missing where their customers actually search, which is in their own towns. The map box goes to independents, some of them with a handful of reviews, and in several cases the franchise was paying Google for ads on the exact searches its own locations should have owned for nothing. The short version went on LinkedIn with one anonymised example. This is the long version, with the method, what I found, why I think it happens and what I’d do about it.

I’m not naming the networks. The audits were unsolicited, and the point isn’t to embarrass anyone, it’s that the pattern is so consistent that if you run a network you should probably assume it applies to you until you’ve checked.

What I did

The method is simple enough that you can run it yourself, and I’d rather you did than took my word for it.

First, I took the phrase from the brand’s own site, because the phrase decides whether Google shows a map box at all. One kitchen brand describes itself as doing kitchen makeovers, and “kitchen makeover” in a town name brings up the map box while “replacement kitchen doors” doesn’t, so searching the wrong phrase would have told me nothing. I never guessed the phrase.

Second, I confirmed the brand actually had a location in each town I was going to check, from its own site, because claiming a town without proof is the quickest way to be wrong.

Third, I searched Google UK, from a real browser in the UK, for the phrase plus the town, for three or four towns per brand, and recorded one of three things for each: in the map box, ranking organically but not in the box, or absent. I noted which rival franchises were in the box, and whether the brand was running paid ads on that search. Paying for a search while missing the free spots is the strongest single piece of evidence, because it means the money’s already being spent and the cheaper result isn’t being collected.

Fourth, I watched for localisation. Google will quietly show you results for where you are rather than where you typed, especially for things like children’s classes, and I only counted a town’s map box when the businesses in it were actually in that town.

Fifth, I screenshotted the strongest single result with the search bar visible, so there was no arguing about what was searched.

What I found

Of the first four networks I looked at, three were paying for ads on searches where their own locations weren’t in the map box. Across the sixteen, every network I’d have called weak on local search showed the same gap, and the shape of it was the same each time. The brand’s national page ranked, sometimes in the first organic position, and the map box above it was full of independents and rival franchises.

The part I’d stress is that not every network has this problem. Three brands I looked at were doing it well, with their locations in the box in every town I checked, and I dropped them from the list and said so, because emailing someone to tell them they’re invisible when they aren’t is a good way to be ignored for the right reasons. One brand ranked first in the town I checked but was in the middle of renaming itself, which is a different risk, because renaming fifty or more Google Business Profiles at once is how rankings, reviews and listings get scrambled, and I wrote to them about that instead.

So the honest version is that the problem is common, not universal, and the way to know which side you’re on is to run the searches.

Why it happens

The map box doesn’t rank brands, it ranks businesses, and a business in Google’s eyes is a Google Business Profile with an address, a category, some reviews and a page it points at. A franchise network is one brand and fifty businesses, and the marketing is usually run by the one, for the one. The head office builds a national site that ranks nationally, buys ads nationally, and measures nationally, and the fifty profiles are left to whoever set them up, which is often the franchisee, a previous franchisee, or nobody.

What that looks like on the ground is a profile with the wrong primary category, or a name that’s the brand plus a town in a format Google doesn’t recognise, or a profile that points at the national home page rather than a page about that location, or no profile at all because the location opened after the last time anyone looked. Reviews land on whichever profile the customer found, which is sometimes a duplicate. None of these things is hard to fix individually, and none of them is anyone’s job, and so they stay broken while the national campaign does well enough that nobody notices what the towns are missing.

The paid ads make it worse rather than better, because a campaign that’s buying the phrase plus a town at the network level looks like it’s covering that town, and the report says the town converted, and the fact that the location there could have had that customer for free never shows up anywhere.

What I’d do about it

I’d treat the locations as the product and the brand as the wrapper, which is the opposite of how most networks are set up.

That means one Google Business Profile per location, claimed by the network rather than left with the franchisee, with the primary category set to the thing the brand actually sells and the name in the format Google expects. It means a page on the brand’s own site for every location, saying where it is and what it does in that town, with the profile pointing at it rather than at the home page. It means one process for reviews, so they land on the right profile and the location with three reviews starts catching up with the independent that has forty. It means the address, phone and name matching everywhere they appear, because Google notices when they don’t. And it means measuring the towns rather than the country, which is a monthly check of who’s in the map box for the brand’s phrase in every town it has a location, so a gap shows up as a gap rather than as a slightly lower national number.

Only after that would I look at the ads, because once the locations are in the box the network can stop paying for the searches it now owns and put the money on the ones it doesn’t.

Check yours in five minutes

Take the phrase from your own home page. Pick three towns where you’ve got a location. Search the phrase plus the town in a normal browser, not logged in, and look at the map box before you look at anything else. If your location isn’t in it, that’s the finding, and if there’s an ad with your name on it above that map box, that’s the cost.

What I’m doing about it

I’m building something for this, a way of getting a network’s individual locations ranking in their own towns without the head office having to run fifty profiles by hand, and it’s early. Before it goes further I want to hear from people who live with the problem, which is why the emails I sent those sixteen networks asked for twenty minutes rather than a sale. If you run marketing for a franchise network, the same offer stands. Tell me how you manage local rankings today, what works, what doesn’t and what you wish existed, and if what I’m building looks useful I’d rather build it with you than at you.