One website. When you open a second location, it gets its own page on the site you already have and its own Google Business Profile. It does not get its own domain, its own hosting bill or its own copy of your homepage with the city name changed.
A second site divides the search history you have built up, doubles everything you have to keep current, and does nothing for the customer, who only wants to know which of your locations is closer and whether it is open right now. Here is when that rule bends, what a location page has to contain, and how to wire it to Google so both places show up for the right searches.
Why not a second website?
Three reasons, and the first one is the expensive one.
Your existing domain has a history. Every year it has been live, every page that has been linked to, every search it has earned a click from, belongs to that domain. A new domain starts from nothing, and it starts from nothing in the city where you have the least reputation. A location page on the site you own inherits what the site has already earned. That is the same reason a redesign has to keep its URLs, which redesigning without losing rankings covers.
Two sites is two of everything. Two hosting renewals, two domain renewals, two sets of hours to update when the long weekend comes, two contact forms to test, two places to fix when the booking tool changes its embed code. What a website costs per year is a number you would be paying twice, and the second site is usually the one that quietly stops being updated.
Google names the pattern. Its spam policies have a section called "Doorway abuse", defined as "when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries". One of the examples listed is "Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page". A second site that is your first site with the city swapped, pointing people to the same phone number and the same booking form, is the thing that sentence describes. It will not get you two results. It can cost you the one you have.
When does a second site make sense?
When the second location is a different business, not a second copy of this one.
A different name on the sign. A different service, so that a customer of one would not recognise the other. A separate owner or a separate legal entity that could one day be sold on its own. A franchise whose brand rules require a site per franchisee. In those cases the second site is honest, because it is about something else.
Two things that feel like exceptions are not. A location in a French-speaking town does not need a second site, it needs the French version of this one, and a bilingual site is how that is done. And a business that works out of one office but serves a second town has not opened a second location. That is a service area, and showing up in local search covers how to handle it without pretending to have an address there.
What does a location page need?
Everything a customer standing outside that specific door would need, written for that door.
- The address, written out, with the nearest intersection or landmark if the building is hard to find. Not just a map embed.
- The hours for that location, including the day they differ from the other one.
- The phone number that rings at that location, not the one that rings at the original.
- How to get in. Parking, transit, which entrance, whether there are stairs.
- What is offered there, if it differs. If the second clinic does not do the treatment the first one does, say so on the page, or the customer books, drives, and finds out at the desk.
- The people. Who works there, with a real photo taken in that room.
- A booking or contact path that lands at that location. A "Book now" that books the original location by default is the most common way the page fails.
- Photos of that place, not the other one.
What the page must not be is the original location's page with the city name changed. Two pages that say the same thing in different cities are the doorway pattern again, one domain instead of two. If you cannot write a paragraph that is true only of the new location, the page is not ready. The list of local specifics worth writing is in the local search post, and the same rule applies here: neighbourhoods, the building, what the work looks like there.
Give the page an address a person can type: yoursite.ca/barrie or yoursite.ca/locations/barrie. Keep the homepage as the business, and put the location pages one level under it.
How does Google Business Profile fit in?
One profile per location, each pointing at its own page.
Google's guidelines for representing your business are specific on both halves. On the number of profiles: "Do not create more than one page for each location of your business, either in a single account or multiple accounts." On what each profile links to: "provide a website that represents your individual business location". So the new location gets its own profile, with its own hours and its own phone number, and the website field on that profile points to the location page, not to the homepage.
The name stays the name. The guidelines say it "should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery", and adding the city to it, unless the city is on the sign, is the kind of unnecessary information the same page says can get a profile suspended. The location relevance is earned by the page, which is allowed to say the city as often as it is true.
Then keep the three in agreement: the address, hours and phone on the profile, on the location page and in the site footer should match character for character. A customer who finds seven o'clock on Google and eight o'clock on your site now trusts neither.
What changes on the homepage?
Less than owners expect.
The homepage stays about the business. What it gains is a way to choose a location that does not get in the way: two short cards near the top, each with the city, today's hours, the phone number and a button that books there. The footer lists both addresses. The contact page asks which location the message is for, so that a Barrie enquiry does not land on the Orillia desk and sit there.
What the homepage should not do is stop the visitor at the door. A "Choose your location" screen that appears before any content is a wall in front of the person who came from a search that already told them which location they wanted. Show the business, offer the choice, and let the location pages do the local work.
The booking tool is the piece to check with care. Most booking software supports several locations, but the default location is usually the first one you set up, and a link that does not say otherwise books there. Each location page needs a link that lands on its own calendar. How to embed that without breaking the page is in online booking on your website.
What goes wrong most often?
A short list, and all of it is fixable this week.
- The new profile links to the homepage. The customer clicks through from the map and has to find the location again.
- Hours copied from the first location. Nobody remembered the second one closes early on Saturdays.
- One contact form, no location field. Enquiries for one location are answered by the other, late.
- A city-named domain bought on a whim.
brand-barrie.casitting on a separate site. If it is already bought, point it at the location page with a redirect and let it expire when it comes up. Do not build on it. - A location page written in an afternoon. "We are proud to serve the Barrie community" and a map. It says nothing a customer could use, and nothing a search engine could tell apart from the other page.
- Nobody can add the third location. The site was built so that a new page needs a designer, so the third location gets a paragraph on the contact page instead. Can you update your website yourself is the question to ask before the second location, not after.
What does this cost?
If your site can already take a new page, a location page is hours of work: writing it properly, wiring the booking link, matching it to the new profile. That is the kind of work the developer hours in our care plan cover, from $129 a month for a small site.
If the site cannot take a new page without a designer, or was built as one long homepage, the second location is the moment to fix that. Our website scopes run from $1,200 to $8,000 depending on what is in them, and a multi-location build sits toward the high end because each location is a real page and the booking and contact paths have to know which one is which. What sits inside each scope is on web design, and the ranges are on pricing.
The number that moves the cost is not the number of locations. It is whether each location has something true to say, and whether your staff can add the next one without calling anybody.
If you would rather have someone else check, send us your URL and the address of the new location for a free teardown. We will tell you what a customer searching from the new town finds, whether your booking link sends them to the right door, and what we would fix first, whether or not you work with us.