Branch Builder and Store Locator: every location in one place

Build the branch directory from Google Places

An administrator searches Google Places for the brand, reviews the matching locations and selects the branches to import. Existing locations are recognised by their Google Place ID, which prevents the same listing being added twice.

For each selected location, the importer can bring across the store name, formatted address, address parts, coordinates, phone, website, business status, opening hours and available Google imagery. The branch remains editable, so the website team can add its own descriptions, services, parking information and approved photographs.

• Wide South African search can look across major cities for a branch network
• Selected results can be imported together in a controlled batch
• Imported opening hours are normalised into one weekly structure
• A Place ID keeps each website record connected to the correct listing

Manage every branch from one administration screen

The central branch list can be searched and sorted by the information a team uses every day. Administrators can add a branch manually, edit its public content, change its active state, upload branch images and export the branch list.

A Google-linked branch can be refreshed individually, and authorised teams can trigger a refresh across linked branches. Those are explicit administration actions in the current implementation, not a promise that Google phone numbers or opening hours synchronise automatically in the background.

Give customers four practical ways to find a store

A visitor can share their current location, enter a suburb or street address, search directly by store name, or browse all locations grouped by province. Known suburbs, cities and branch names are matched against stored branch data first, while full address searches use Google Places when needed.

Once a location is known, active stores are sorted by straight-line distance from their saved coordinates. The nearest choices show the distance and provide direct links to the store page and Google directions, reducing the work between a visitor's search and an in-person visit.

Turn each location into a useful local page

Each branch can have its own indexable page with a header image, address, map, today's hours, weekly opening hours, phone and email actions, directions, descriptions, services, parking details, a gallery and nearby-store links. Store and LocalBusiness structured data is generated from the same branch record.

Province pages group the relevant branches into crawlable regional lists with their own titles, descriptions, canonical addresses, CollectionPage structured data and links to each store. This gives customers a useful regional route and gives search engines a clean path from the national locator to each local branch.