This question comes up almost every time a business I'm working with opens a second site, and in nearly every case the answer is one website, not several. It's worth explaining why, because the instinct to give each location its own domain is understandable even when it's usually the wrong call, and it connects directly to what I've written about how digital operations for multi-location businesses work in practice.
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Why splitting usually backfires
Multiple domains split link equity that would otherwise compound on one site, since every backlink, every piece of coverage and every bit of authority a location earns stays trapped on its own separate domain instead of lifting the group as a whole. It multiplies maintenance, because now there are several sites to update, several sets of technical SEO foundations to keep current and several places for something to fall apart instead of one. And it creates duplicate content problems that are entirely self-inflicted, since near-identical service pages across separate domains give search engines every reason to treat them as competing, not complementary.
This instinct usually comes from a reasonable place: wanting each site to feel local and distinct, not like a satellite of somewhere else. That's a legitimate ambition, but it's solved through content and structure on one well-organised site and individual location pages that genuinely represent each place, rather than the far more costly route of maintaining several separate domains that all compete with each other for the same authority.
None of that is obvious from inside the decision, which is why the instinct to split persists even though the outcome usually disappoints. Two sites feel like twice the presence. In practice they're two half-strength versions of the presence one well-built site would have had on its own.
The genuine exceptions
There are real exceptions which are worth covering. Genuinely distinct brands that happen to be under common ownership are a legitimate reason to keep separate sites, since the businesses are truly different propositions to different audiences. Separate ownership is another, where a franchise agreement or a joint venture means the site isn't fully within one party's control. And an acquisition bringing its own existing domain equity is a real case too, since a domain with years of earned authority behind it isn't something to throw away lightly.
Even the exceptions usually end the same way
Even in those genuine cases, the default I'd recommend is a migration plan - not permanent separation - moving toward one consolidated site over time as the reasons for separation stop applying. I went through exactly this kind of decision when I migrated a twelve-location group from one domain to another in 2025, and while that was a rebrand, not a consolidation, the same principle held: a domain migration on an established site is disruptive and worth avoiding wherever possible, which is precisely why it should only happen when the underlying business reason genuinely leaves no alternative, not as a routine tidy-up.
What migrating to one site involves
Consolidating separate sites into one is a considerable project, not a quick technical tidy-up. Every old URL needs mapping to its equivalent new one with a permanent redirect, internal links need updating instead of left relying on those redirects indefinitely, and the timing matters, since doing it while a business is already stretched by other change tends to go worse than doing it deliberately, on a timeline chosen for that reason alone.
Content needs the same care as the technical side. Two sites that grew independently often end up with genuinely different tones, structures and levels of detail, and simply merging the pages without reconciling that leaves the combined site reading like two different businesses stitched together, which undoes much of the point of consolidating in the first place.
What this means in practice
If a new location is opening under the same brand, serving the same kind of customer and staying under the same ownership, it belongs on the same website as everything else, structured properly so that each location gets its own page with a genuine reason to rank instead of competing with its siblings. Splitting into separate sites solves a problem that mostly doesn't exist while creating several that definitely do.
