Running one store in local search is mostly a matter of being accurate. Running four is a different exercise, because the mistakes stop being omissions and start being conflicts. Your own pages begin competing with each other, and the things you got right for store one quietly become wrong for store three.
Four failure modes account for most of it. Each is described here as it actually appears, followed by what resolves it.
Failure one: one page carrying every location
What it looks like. A single locations page listing four addresses, four sets of hours, and four phone numbers in a stack. Every store is represented and no store has a page.
Why it fails. Search behaviour is local and singular. Somebody looking for a store in one suburb is not looking for a directory of four suburbs, and a page that answers four questions at once answers none of them particularly well. There is also nowhere to send a link about one specific store, and nowhere to point that store’s Google Business Profile except the homepage.
What resolves it. One page per store, each at its own address, each treated as a destination rather than an entry in a list. The combined page can stay as a directory that links to them.
Failure two: location pages that are the same page four times
What it looks like. Four separate pages, correctly addressed, with identical body copy where only the city name has been swapped. The paragraph about your knowledgeable staff appears four times, word for word.
Why it fails. This is the trap operators fall into immediately after fixing failure one. Four near-identical documents give a search engine no basis to prefer any of them, and they give a shopper nothing they could not have learned from the homepage. Templated pages are not automatically thin, but templated pages with nothing store-specific in them are.
What resolves it. Genuine per-store substance. Not more adjectives about the same store, but facts only true of that one: what is on its shelves, how parking and access work there, which fulfilment options that location supports, what is nearby, what its hours actually are on a holiday.
Failure three: details that disagree with each other
What it looks like. The website says one suite number, the Business Profile says another. One store uses a tracking phone number on the site and the real line everywhere else. A location moved and three of five references were updated.
Why it fails. Name, address and phone are how a business is matched to a place across sources. When sources disagree, the match weakens, and it weakens for every store rather than just the one with the error, because the discrepancies compound across a brand.
What resolves it. One authoritative record per store, held in one place, with the site rendering from it rather than repeating it. Then an audit: every location page, every Business Profile, the footer, the contact page, and the locator, checked against the record. This is dull and it is the single highest-return hour a multi-store operator can spend.
Failure four: your stores competing with each other
What it looks like. Two locations twenty minutes apart, and searches in either area return the wrong one, or return both and neither convincingly.
Why it fails. Usually because nothing on either page establishes which area it serves. If both pages describe the same metro in the same words, they are two candidates for one query, and they split the signals that would have made either of them the obvious answer.
What resolves it. Give each store a defined and non-overlapping identity: its own neighbourhood language, its own landmarks, its own service area described honestly. Then make the locator do the disambiguating work, so a shopper who lands on the wrong page is one click from the right one instead of bouncing.
What a location page has to carry
Every store page should include the legal business name, the full street address, the direct phone line, the current hours including exceptions, the fulfilment methods available at that store, an embedded map, driving and parking guidance, whether it serves recreational customers, medical patients or both, and a route into that store’s live menu rather than a shared one.
On Buddy this is not assembled by hand. Each location gets its own page and its own search treatment, and the locator is geocoded so it orders stores by actual proximity rather than by a list order somebody set once. It handles pickup, curbside and delivery as distinct options, and filters recreational and medical, so a shopper arriving from anywhere is routed to a store that can actually serve them in the way they need.
The order to work in is the order above. Split the pages, make them genuinely different, reconcile the details, then separate the territories. Doing the fourth before the third produces four differentiated pages full of inconsistent phone numbers.
More on the retail side is on the retailer page, the search mechanics on the SEO page, and the per-market rules that shape what a location page may say on the compliance page.