Local SEO
From a single site in Lancashire to 1,300 branches - I've run local SEO at both ends.
Local SEO looks simple until you're doing it across more than one location, and it looks a lot harder once you're doing it across more than a thousand. At Domino's, as contract Head of Digital Marketing, I introduced branch-level local rank tracking across all 1,300 franchises. It was the first clear picture anyone had of which branches were actually underperforming - the strongest city was tracking at nearly double the blended share of search of the weakest.
At National Tyres I ran local SEO across 230-plus branches. Between the two, I've implemented the big enterprise listings platforms at national scale, and I'll tell you plainly when you don't need one - much of what those platforms do can be handled directly through the Google Business Profile API, or by hand, at smaller scale. You don't need Domino's infrastructure to get Domino's discipline.
You can't fix what you can't see, branch by branch
Blended national numbers hide the branches that are actually losing. Branch-level rank tracking is what surfaces them. At Domino's, that tracking was the first time anyone had a clear picture of which of the 1,300 franchises were underperforming on local visibility - not a guess, a number, city by city. Without it, a struggling branch just looks like average national performance diluted across everyone else. With it, you can see exactly where the gap is and start asking why that city, specifically, is tracking at half the share of search of the strongest one.
The listings platform question
Enterprise listings platforms are built to manage citations and location data at scale, and at 1,300 or 230-plus branches, they earn their cost. At smaller scale, they often don't. I've run the enterprise version and I'll say honestly when a business doesn't need one - the Google Business Profile API, or manual management, does the job for far less. Most local businesses get sold the platform before anyone's worked out whether they actually need the scale it's built for. I'd rather tell you the truth and lose the upsell than have you paying enterprise fees for a five-location business.
A pipeline of pages, not a template
At Domino's I ran the listings-platform review process and drove a pipeline of city and local landing page improvements, and piloted FAQ schema at city-page level. The trap in local content is the same at 5 locations or 1,300: a template with the town name swapped in. It reads like what it is, and Google increasingly treats it that way too. Local pages need real local substance, genuine coverage, genuine detail, or they're not worth building. That's true whether you're running a pipeline across a national franchise network or writing the one page a small business needs for its own town - the discipline doesn't change, only the scale.
GBP, citations and reviews - the basics still decide it
Underneath the scale question, local SEO comes down to the same fundamentals everywhere: an optimised Google Business Profile, consistent citations, and a review strategy that's actually managed rather than left to chance. Get those right and most of the visibility follows. It's not glamorous work, and it's the same work whether it's one profile or thirteen hundred - the difference is only in how much of it can be templated and how much still needs a human decision.
The Lancashire and North West angle
I'm based in Blackburn, and I work with local businesses across the North West who need exactly the fundamentals above done properly - not the enterprise version, the right version for their size.
Local SEO fails in two directions: businesses too small for the platform they've bought, and businesses too big for the manual approach they're still using. Knowing which one you are is most of the job. As a local SEO consultant I've run it at 1,300 branches and I've run it at one, so let's work out which end of that you're actually at.