How to add your business website to Google Places with multiple addresses but less than 10

Question

1. I know how to add a business website to Google Places with one address.
2. I know how to add a business website to Google Places with more than 10 addresses.

What I don't know how to do is add a business with more than one address but less than 10, so lets pretend this number is 3 addresses. Each of them with exact same website, exact same services but 3 serving locations.

Logging into Google Places, I can see the business has been added and has one address attached. Google has somewhat changed Google Places in the past 6 months and I can't see an option to add another address, never mind 3 of them. The reason it's important to attach all valid addresses is that it's important for Local SEO.

When searching on the Help, I'm informed with this information:

The bulk upload tool is recommended for users who want to manage more than 10 locations. If you already have locations in Google Places for Business, we recommend you delete them before using the bulk upload tool. Why? Changes made to locations in the bulk upload tool will not be reflected in Google Places for Business. Changes made to locations in Google Places for Business will not be reflected in the bulk upload tool. Locations added using the bulk upload tool can only be used in Google AdWords Location Extensions if there are no locations in Google Places for Business.

CHECKBOX [ ] I have 10 or more locations, and do not plan to use Google AdWords Location Extensions.

I've found no help information indicating how to add businesses with more than 1 address but less than 10. So how do you add more than 1 business website with multiple addresses to Google Places?

Answer 1

Here is a forum that discusses this question. User "adriver38" asked this question to Google and got the following response: (emphasis addid)

You can create a new Places Page for your new restaurant location by selecting "add another business" within your Google Places dashboard. The new page will take a couple of weeks to show up in search.

Google requires the the second location to have a second listing. Creating a second listing for the business uses the same procedure that you used to create the original listing for the business. You may have expected to be able to add a second address to an existing listing when you actually have to create an entirely new listing.

I have never personally added a business to Google places. In my Google places interface I have an "Add a listing" link in the gear drop down. This would presumably change to "Add another business" after I added my first business.

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This advice should apply for businesses that have multiple physical addresses. For example a restaurant with three franchise locations. Google Places quality guidelines limit the number of listings that can be created for a single business:

Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.

• Individual practitioners may be listed individually as long as those practitioners are public-facing within their parent organization. Common examples of such practitioners are doctors, dentists, lawyers, and real estate agents. The practitioner should be directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours. A practitioner should not have multiple listings to cover all of his or her specializations.
• Departments within businesses, universities, hospitals, and government buildings may be listed separately. These departments must be publicly distinct as entities or groups within their parent organization, and ideally will have separate phone numbers and/or customer entrances.

It appears to help if each physical location has a unique URL. Here is a forum where they discuss creating multiple Google places listings. User "vzPRO" says:

I also direct each Google Local listing to an associated page on the website that talks about that location. For example, the main Location will point to example.com/mainlocation, the second location is linked to example.com/location-2, etc.

Matt Cutts repeats this advice on his blog:

...it’s best to have a unique, easily crawlable url for each store. Ideally, you would also create an HTML sitemap that points to the web pages for your stores (and each web page should have a unique url). If you have a relatively small number of stores, you could have a single page that links to all your stores

To wrap it all up, here is an article that walks through adding multiple business locations to Google Places. It has screenshots (included below) and discusses the process for both individual additions as well as the bulk upload.

_{(source: seomaverick.com.au)}