How do I add a service-area Location?

At BrightLocal we call business(s) added to the platform Locations.

A Location is any physical place that a business owns, be it an office, store, restaurant, outlet, or anything else in between. So if you’re a business owner with only one shop or office, you’ll have just one Location in BrightLocal. 

If you’re a business with multiple locations or an agency juggling multiple clients then you’ll probably have several Locations set up, one for each store, office, branch, or business that you’re working on.

To add a new service-area Location, follow the steps below:

1. Go to the 'Locations' tab within the 'All Locations' section.

2. Click on the green 'Add Location(s)' button — shown below within the red box.

3. From here, a popup will give you these three options:

As service-area locations do not display a physical address on their Google Business Profile, we cannot use the Import GBP Locations method, instead you will need to select the option to Add Single Location.

Add a single Location:

1. Click the green 'Add Location' button (shown above within the red box).

2. As Google only returns businesses with a visible street address. You will need to add your service-area business details manually by clicking the 'Manually Enter Location' button.

4. You will then be taken to the Location Manager, where you can add the business information.

Address Line 1: Although a service-area business will not have a physical address, this field is required to create an initial ‘anchor point’ for our reporting tools. Please rest assured that the business details input here are not public facing. A home address, or simply the town/city name will suffice.

Unique Location Reference: This is an internal reference that you can find under the 'Location Extras' heading. Use this to quickly identify Locations in the search function. We'll autocomplete the field for you in the format << BUSINESSNAME-ZIPCODE >>, but you can replace our suggestion with your own reference, as long as it's unique to this Location.  

Assign to Client: Here, you can select a client if you have multiple Locations for one business.

5. After clicking the 'Next' button, you'll be taken to a page to add further business details.

Please note: This information is purely for Citation Builder, and you can skip this step if it's not needed by clicking the 'Add This Location' button in the bottom right corner. 

Success! Now your Location is set up, however you will have no reports for it. To set up reports you can select the green 'Monitor this Location' button.

You'll need to set the Location to either Active or Ad-hoc, depending on what you want to do next.

Active Locations are a must for the ongoing management and reporting for clients and locations. With Active Locations, you can schedule recurring reports. Active Locations come out of your plan's Active Location Allowance.

Ad-hoc Locations, on the other hand, are perfect for one-off business audits and prospecting potential clients.

With Ad-hoc Locations you:

✅ Can only run manual reports

❌ Can’t schedule recurring reports

❌ Can’t use Get Reviews, Showcase Reviews, Active Sync, and GBP Post Scheduler

✅ Can run Citation Builder campaigns

✅ Can change to Active status at any time

Each manual report run uses an Ad-hoc Report Run.

To set a Location to Active, click on the 'All Locations' option in the main menu. Find the Location that you want to set to Active and click the arrow to reveal the dropdown menu, then click 'Active'. 

Discover more about how service-area business can use BrightLocal here.