Google My Business Tutorial: Managing Multiple Business Locations

For companies with a physical office or store it is a must to be present on Google My Business. We already explained how to create a Google My Business account. If your business has ten or more locations, you should create a business account and use the bulk location management functionality.

Business Account

With a business account you can share the management of your locations with multiple users and assign individual rights for each location. We will show you below how to create a business account.

1. Create a Google Account

First of all it is advisable to create a new Google account. Do not use your personal login for the business account, but create a general company login instead. The email address you are using for this account should contain the business domain.

2. Create the Business Account

Go to the Google My Business Locations and click in the menu on the top left side on “Create business account”. Choose a name (you can change it later) and click on “Finished”.

Google My Business: Create a business account

3. Transfer the Ownership of Locations

The next step is to transfer the ownership of your existing Google Plus Local pages to the business account. Only the current account owners can do this. Go to each location by clicking on it and then click on “Adding managers” on the right. First you need to add the business account as manager. Now you can transfer the ownership in the dropdown menu next to the name of your business account. The previous owner will automatically become a manager.

Google My Business: Transfer the ownership

4. Assign Managers

Now you can assign the managers for every location. To do so, go to each individual location and click on “Adding managers” on the right.

Bulk Location Management

You can manually add additional locations, but if you have ten or more locations we recommend using the bulk location management. This works as follows:

1. Create Table with Locations

Go to the menu on the top left side and click on “Import locations”. Then click on “Download the template”. Open the CSV file and fill out the required fields for every business location.

Google My Business: Create a table with locations

2. Upload Table with Locations

Save the table in one of the following formats: XLS, XLSX, ODS, CSV, TXT or TSV. Now upload the file by clicking on “Select file to import”. Duplicate locations will automatically be merged after the import.

3. Verification of Business Information

You can verify all locations in your account at once with the bulk verification (for ten or more locations). To do so, click on the confirmation icon on the top right side and fill out the verification form. Enter an email address that contains your website domain.

The verification process can take up to a week. Google will use the entered email address to ask additional questions if necessary and to send you status updates.

4. Change Location Information

If you need to adjust your location information, you can also do this with the bulk location management. Just download your locations via the menu, make the changes and upload the file again. Review the changes in the import preview and click on “Apply”.

Do you have questions about Google My Business? Feel free to send me an email.