One website or one per branch
Separate domains split your authority into fragments that each start from nothing. The structure is the easy part; what actually breaks is keeping the location data true.
Every multi-location business eventually asks the same question: one website or several. The answer is almost always one website with a location directory, and the businesses that get it wrong usually do so by copying a structure that suited a franchise with independent owners.
One domain, one subfolder per location
Separate domains split your authority into fragments, each of which has to earn trust from nothing. Subdomains are better and still worse than subfolders. The structure that works is one domain with a locations index and a page per location underneath it, each with its own address, hours, staff, phone number and local work. The index page matters more than people expect: it is the page that ranks for the brand plus a region, and it is the internal link that keeps every location page out of orphan status.
One profile per location, always
Each physical location gets its own Google Business Profile, and each profile should point at its own location page rather than the homepage. That single link choice is one of the most common misconfigurations we find, and it costs the location page the relevance signal it most needs. Each profile also needs its own category decision, which is the lever covered in the four-second change that moves map rankings.
The thing that actually breaks
The failure mode of multi-location sites is not structure, it is maintenance. Hours change for one branch and the website does not. A manager leaves and the staff photo stays for a year. A location closes and its page keeps ranking. Whatever structure you choose, the location data has to live in one place that the pages, the schema and the footer all read from, because the moment it lives in three places it disagrees with itself.
