Tracking is the starting point, not the finish line
Tracking each location as its own project — its own heatmap, its own ARP/ATRP/SoLV, matched by exact CID/Place-ID rather than name — solves the immediate problem: a blended average can’t hide a struggling location anymore. But for a brand with real scale, five locations or fifty, that’s the easy part. The harder part is keeping that tracking consistent enough, across enough locations and often enough people managing them, that the numbers stay comparable to each other and not just internally consistent within one location.
Same methodology, different service areas
The moment a multi-location brand starts comparing locations against each other — which one is strongest, which one needs attention — the comparison is only fair if the underlying measurement is the same. Two locations scanned with different grid sizes or point spacing produce SoLV and ARP numbers that differ for reasons that have nothing to do with actual visibility, purely because they measured different things. The fix isn’t forcing identical grids everywhere regardless of geography — a dense urban location and a sprawling suburban one legitimately need different grid footprints — it’s making that difference a deliberate, documented choice rather than an accident, and keeping each location’s own configuration identical scan over scan so before/after comparisons stay valid.
A simple leaderboard, if the inputs are honest
Once configuration is consistent within reason, SoLV becomes a workable way to rank locations against each other — “location 12 covers 61% of its grid’s top-3 spots, location 4 covers 22%” is a specific, actionable comparison a marketing director can act on. That comparison is only as honest as the setup behind it, though: it assumes each location was scanned with a configuration that fairly represents its own service area, not a one-size-fits-all default applied without thought. Skipping that step turns a useful leaderboard into a misleading one.
Where duplicate listings quietly break the picture
Chains are especially prone to a specific failure mode: a location with more than one Google Business Profile in existence — an old listing that was never merged, a duplicate created by a franchisee, a listing at a previous address. Tracking by business name has no way to catch this; tracking by exact CID/Place-ID does, because it forces a deliberate choice of which listing is the one being measured. Getting this wrong at setup means tracking the wrong listing for months without any indication something’s off — the heatmap will look internally consistent, just consistently about the wrong Business Profile.
Scaling the operational side
At real scale, the constraint stops being “can I track more than one location” and becomes “can I keep doing this without it becoming a full-time job.” Three things do most of the work here: unlimited projects (Pro and Agency plans) so growth past a handful of locations doesn’t hit a project cap, Search Console import so a new location’s keyword list is seeded from real search data instead of manual research every time a location opens, and bulk overnight scans — importing a full list of locations and waking up to a fresh heatmap for each — marked as coming soon on the Agency plan. Together, they’re what keeps location-by-location tracking honest at five locations and still workable at fifty.