A field guide for multi-location brands
How to turn business profiles from a consistency chore into a traffic, conversion and revenue channel, in fifteen steps with the numbers we have seen at Synup
of consumers rate product review information as critical in their search journey
of consumers rely on reviews before making a purchase decision
Profiles carry up to five additional external links, most of them to third-party booking or reservation services
Sending profile visitors to a location page instead of the homepage lifts conversions by 20% on average
Up to 15% of user-uploaded media on a brand's profiles is not brand-approved or correct
Do this: record where you stand before you change anything.
Check accuracy of name, address, website link, phone and hours on the major profile sites.
Record your average rating and compare it with competitors.
Use this as the baseline you report progress against.
Do this: fill every attribute Google and Facebook offer.
Accuracy matters less than depth for high-traffic sources, and missing attributes mean missing long-tail searches.
Add online booking, payment options and accessibility.
Add cover images and other rich media where the profile allows.
Do this: route every review into one inbox and answer each one individually.
Aggregate reviews from the major sites with a tool or a shared inbox.
Export reviews on a regular cadence and look at common phrases by sentiment.
Write responses that reference the specific experience and change tone by rating, treating 3 stars or below as a complaint.
Do this: connect your CRM or point of sale so review invites go out automatically.
Automated invites after a transaction are the highest-volume source.
If you cannot automate, schedule a weekly export and send personalized invites by email and text with mail merge.
Do this: get listed everywhere your category's customers already search.
Citation quality and quantity feed rankings.
List on industry-specific sites, for example Healthgrades for healthcare.
Add any source that appears often for your brand and category keywords.
Do this: check each profile is in Google's index and submit the ones that are not.
Search the profile URL to see if it is indexed and use the search engine's submission tools for the rest.
Build three to five links to each profile over two months.
Link every published profile from the matching location page on your site.
Do this: review every photo on your profiles and report the wrong ones.
Audit existing media first.
Set a cadence for branch managers to report bad media and post their own.
Reward customers who add a photo or video to a review.
Do this: add schema markup and publish FAQs.
Structured data lets assistants answer with your data.
Voice queries are long-tail and conversational, so FAQs that answer the most common customer questions capture them.
Do this: put UTMs on the website link and every other link in the profile.
After adding UTM tracking, a financial services client's profiles moved from their fifth to their first conversion channel.
Swap third-party booking links for pages you control.
Use short links on posts so clicks are attributed without relying on platform reporting.
Add call tracking in call-heavy categories such as beauty services.
Do this: never send a profile click to the homepage.
Location pages also rank well organically.
Do this: at least five posts a week across all profiles, personalized by market.
Mirror the brand content calendar.
Use information posts, offer and event posts, and product and service posts, which show above the fold on desktop and mobile.
Do this: build audiences from profile clicks and calls.
Retarget non-converters with offers.
Cross-sell existing customers.
Expand with look-alike audiences.
Do this: plan posts around what customers in each market want at that time of year.
A home builder's calendar built around regional interest in retirement communities drove 20% more conversions from posts.
Seasonal offers such as Black Friday.
Markets do not want the same thing at the same time, so vary the calendar by region.
Weather-triggered posts where conditions change demand, restaurants for example.
Do this: pull the keyword data from your profiles and post to match it.
A grocery brand saw most customers searching for offers and circulars on weekends, and posting a direct link to the circular cut steps from the journey and raised engaged shoppers.
Pull historical search terms from profile analytics.
Look for spikes by location and time.
Write posts that carry those keywords and link to the matching page.
Do this: connect your inventory feed to Google, Bing and Facebook so products show in the profile.
Feeds surface products matched to the search term and need one click to your site rather than two.
Connect the feed once to the profile.
Keep local search insights and product insights in one view.
Synup keeps listings accurate, gets them indexed, and routes every review to one inbox.
See how Synup manages listings →Each copy includes the source line: Synup, Driving ROI from Digital Profiles, 2020 data, synup.com/research/roi-from-digital-profiles
94% of consumers rate product review information as critical in their search journey.
46% of consumers rely on reviews before making a purchase decision.
Business profiles carry up to five additional external links, most of them to third-party booking services.
Sending profile visitors to a location page instead of the homepage lifts conversions by 20% on average.
Up to 15% of user-uploaded media on a brand's business profiles is not brand-approved or correct.
A financial services client's profiles moved from fifth to first conversion channel after adding UTM tracking.
A home builder's seasonal posting calendar drove 20% more conversions from profile posts.
The figures come from Synup's 2020 consumer survey and internal client data.
Client cases are anonymized.
The guide was first published as an ebook and rebuilt as this page in September 2026.
Synup, "Driving ROI from Digital Profiles", 2020, synup.com/research/roi-from-digital-profiles