1 company, 2 shop locations, 3 Google+ pages - help!

[Bee159]

Hello, I work for a furniture retailer and I'm doing an audit of our digital presence and need a hand with our G+ pages. Thanks for reading!

• We are one company but with two shops, located about 10 miles apart.
• One shop has been established over 10 years, the other is roughly a year old.
• The shops are called: 'Our Company' and 'Our Company, Second Location'
• Each shop has its own website (which is confusing and we'll hopefully shortly revert back to just one)
• We currently have three Google+ profiles: the first G+ was set up a number of years ago and was set up as a personal page, not a business and it links to both shop's websites. The other two G+ pages appear to have been created when we created a Google Local listing for each shop.

My questions are:

• What is the best tool to handle all this info across the web? Bright Local looks good.

• Should I junk the original G+ profile? If I do, how will I know I won't remove any important stuff from Google?

• Should I keep 2 G+ profiles, one for each store or have 1 G+ profile and put both store's details in there. Or should I have 3 G+ profiles: 1 for our company name, and 1 for each of our 2 locations?

• When I search for 'Our Company', I only ever get our original company to show in the Google Local listing on the right hand side of search results. Our second shop is shown in 'People also search for'. Is this the best I can hope for? Is there any way to control this?

• Both of the G+ profiles that are linked to our Google Local listings have the original G+ URL. Should I customise this and if so, are there any naming conventions I should follow?

• What should we do with the (2?) G+ profiles for each shop? Both have currently got no content on them.

Thanks in advance for any tips and advice.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Ben,

What you want here is:

1. Ideally, 1 website with a landing page on it for each of the 2 locations.

2. A unique Google My Business Page for each of the 2 locations, linking to their respective landing pages

3. Google Plus, as a local product, is dead. Read: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/11/25/google-plus-upgrade-faq-for-the-smb/ The only reason to maintain a social presence on Google Plus is if your business has somehow earned a major following there. Otherwise, you may be better off devoting social efforts to Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, and what have you. For a couple of years, the advice for local businesses was to post on Google+ but it never really took off and then Google divorced it from Local, so, remaining pages are kind of useless and if you don't log into them every 6 months, Google will un-validate them. Whether it's necessary to close them, I can't really say. That's a good question, but not one I've seen raised before and am not sure how the millions of local businesses who have recently gone through the +/local divorce are handling that.

Hope this helps!