Franchise owners and small business owners who search the name of their brand on Google may be discouraged by the results. A client emailed me a couple of weeks ago in a panic because when he searched with the brand name of his franchise, his business did not appear as a local result within the first few organic listings nor on Google’s mapped image. In fact, quite the opposite occurred – the other business under the same franchise appeared as the only result. How could this be?

LOCAL SEO | Evidence that Google Results are Not Including all Local Business Locations

There are multiple reasons why your business may not be showing up as a result when entering a single branded keyword. The location and device that your search originated from is the most likely culprit. In my client’s case, he was performing a single branded keyword search from his home computer, which just so happened to be located within a mile of his competitor’s business. To prove that the location of your device can affect search results, I replicated this scenario from my home computer. As you will see below, if I search with the branded keywords, “Better Bodies,” which is the brand name of local gyms in my area, only one out of three Better Bodies’ gyms shows up as a result.