Displaying multiple branch locations on the map that appears in Google Search results

Question

About six months ago, a friend opened her second store (in a village adjacent to that of her first store). Both stores have their own Google+ profiles, with appropriate address/contact information. Consequently:

1. a Google Search for her brand name + the desired village name yields (on the right of Google's search results) a map, photo and contact details of the correct store;

2. a Google Search for her brand name + "near foo" (where "foo" is pretty much anything local) yields a local map showing the locations of both stores;

3. a Google Maps Search for only her brand name yields a local map showing the locations of both stores; but

4. a Google Search for only her brand name yields a map, photo and contact details of only the first store.

The first three are the desired behaviour; however the fourth is obviously undesirable—a local map showing the locations of both stores (à la the second example above) would be preferable.

Can she do anything to fix this?

Answer 1

I found that using Google+ Pages to manage business listings caused this to happen for a client as well. Switching them over to Google My Business Locations fixed the problem. Also, verifying the locations with Google helps a great deal, either via phone or post.

Answer 2

I had the same problem for 8 months. I created a thread here since it seemed like the only place that had a valuable community and data.

The main takeaways in my scenario were:

1. "...this will be resolved soon on its own. Google normally puts GMB listings on a filter for 1 - 1.5 years. Not that they don't rank, they do, just not as well as they could."
2. "It can be sped up with SEO theoretically, business listings, online reviews, etc."

I hope this helps

Answer 3

In this case I think it would be best if she used Google My Business Locations to manage her locations instead of individual pages.

Scenario #1

You are getting the desired result because you are actually including the brand name plus the village name where it is located in the query.

Scenario #2 & #3

In both cases it returns the desired results because you are not actually giving a specific location.

Scenario #4

Here is my reasoning into why it does not display both locations. I am assuming the business name is the same on both Google pages...if that is the case in scenario Google sees it as a duplicate listing and only returns one. Using Google My Business Locations you give each location a store number that indicates to Google they should appear as two separate results search results. How Google makes that distinction on which location to serve I can only speculate.

I ran into a similar problem with a client who had locations in multiple states.