Franchise SEO

What is Franchise SEO?

Franchise SEO is a set of tips and practices for local SEOto improve the online visibility of franchise websites on search engines. The motive is to promote the overall brand but also boost the visibility of individual websites for improving local visibility and attracting geographically closer traffic to the physical store.

Some strategies for franchise SEO include creating localised landing pages, avoiding duplicate content, scaling keyword research, and adopting scalable approaches to avoid technical issues that are common on these types of sites and ensuring that each website is built for driving revenue from local traffic.

Franchise SEO Best Practices

1. List your Franchise Locations on Google Maps

Even to do specialised local SEO, you start with the basics. And that means listing your franchises on Google Business Profile. As these profiles integrate directly with Google Maps, you can add physical addresses for all your franchise locations.

This ensures that all your franchise locations are visible on Google Maps and users can quickly skim through the nearest locations. However, ensure that you get verification from Google when you register your business on Google Business Profile.

To register your business, simply head over to GBP’s website and add the following details:

• The primary category of your business
• Secondary category
• Name
• Address
• Phone number
• Hours of operations

Adding your primary and secondary categories is of utmost importance since that is how Google determines the type of queries that are relevant to your business. List the locations of all your franchise so that Google Maps can let users get GPS directions to their desired store or destination. Updating your location and opening and closing hours is important especially if there’s a change of address or if there’s a holiday or a festive season coming up.

2. Integrate Location-based Keywords

While doing keyword research for franchise SEO, you have to narrow down your focus from national search terms to location-based keywords. Without straying too much from your current location, use SEO tools like Google’s keyword planner and Semrush to source volume for your relevant keywords for your current and distinct location.

For example, you can expand your search terms from “top financial services companies in Brisbane” to “best banks in Queensland” too. You can then have a national website that automatically redirects people to your nearest bank location. If you go by just one long-tail keyword, chances are, there won’t be a high search volume. Including the radius and playing with keywords ensures that there is a reasonable amount of traffic with high purchase intent.

You can also do a competitive analysis to know what keywords and locations your competitors are targeting to rank for local searches. Since local SEO means competing with fellow stores at nearby locations, this analysis helps you rank for more competitive and generic queries with local intent. It improves the chances of landing on the local 3-pack which are the top 3 local search results on a particular keyword. To find and integrate location-based keywords and build an SEO strategy around it, you can take help from a franchise SEO company. It is your best bet to beat the competition and find new opportunities for keyword integration.

3. Review Priority Geographic Areas

There is a fair chance that not all your franchises are performing at the same level. There may be some that outperform the others and bring in more revenue than the rest. There can be varying reasons for this. Maybe the content isn’t as strong in a low-performing area or maybe the landscape in the said area is itself competitive.

Determine which franchises are to better analyse your high-priority geographical areas. One way you can do that is through Google Ads. Leverage its location targeting feature and check where the ads have the highest conversion rate and have the most potential customers. The results give you a direction on how to move forward with your SEO efforts in low-performing areas and if you should run PPC campaigns to improve your SEO performance.

4. Optimise your Google Business Account and other Listings

Google Business Profile is just one of the ways you can improve your franchise SEO. You also need to list your franchises on other platforms like Yelp and other industry-based listing websites. Ensure that you optimise your local page listing and that there’s NAP (name, address, and phone number) consistency across all your listings and physical locations.

Only accurate information will lead to your franchises appearing on map results. This may sound easy but if you’re operating a few hundred locations, it becomes difficult to continuously update information everywhere. Doing it manually is challenging since franchises cannot scale at the rate of regular stores. You can opt for local SEO tools like Moz that help you automate this process by improving NAP consistency across all locations.

5. Practise Consistent Branding

Every individual store is different in terms of its target audience or revenue, there is one thing that is similar across all the chains and that is the user experience. The same goes for all your individual WordPresswebsites if you want to enhance your franchise SEO. While you focus on intense branding efforts for your franchise in all your stores, your online presence should be no different.

Consistency for franchise SEO begins by having a certain level of uniformity across all the individual franchise websites. Visitors need to feel a sense of familiarity with your tone of writing, colour pallets, brand messaging, and site layouts.

A lack of consistency can turn away users in a second. Because they may visit your site expecting some familiarity with your overall brand. If they don’t get that, they’ll leave, thinking they have landed on the wrong website. Consistent branding will also help search engines identify that you’re a legitimate business. Regardless of the number of locations, it is this consistency that binds all the websites together and helps customers recognise your franchise.

6. Optimise E-E-A-T for your Local Pages

Earlier known as just E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness), E-E-A-T is an extension of the term where the extra E also considers the experience. It is a part of Google’s search quality rater guidelines where it uses these parameters to assess the content of a website.

Once you’ve set up your location pages, optimise them for E-E-A-T. You can do that by adding customer reviews, valid contact details, FAQs, product descriptions, etc. — basically any form of content can build trust and credibility with Google and its customers. For example, suppose you’re marketing a healthcare or financial institution in a particular area. In that case, you can also include biographies of the founder or senior executives that includes the number of experience and success stories that they might have.

The reason why E-E-A-T is important for multi-location pages is that there are informational elements that need to be accurate when you list your franchise on Google. Most franchise websites fall into the categories of restaurants, fitness, financial institutions, wellness, etc, also known as (Your Money or Your Life) sites. This means they can have an immense impact on a person’s financial, physical, and mental well-being. The higher the impact, the higher the need for E-E-A-T. Having E-E-A-T parameters in place can help demonstrate the extent of your business knowledge and the local market overall.

7. Have an Impactful Content Marketing Strategy

A strong content marketing strategy helps you connect with your target audience long before you even strike a transactional deal with them. Focus on both local and national topics related to your posts such as blog posts, podcasts, and infographics. As a franchise, you can pick up topics from the most common queries that the users pose in their reviews and feedback.

For example, if you’re a hair salon owner, look for the most common problems that your customers have such as post-hair colour tips or dry scalp, curl maintenance, etc. Curate topics around these issues and write content surrounding them. Similarly, if you’re a dessert shop, you can blog about the local traditions during a holiday and even promote a special holiday offer at the end of the content piece.

Apart from written content, also have multimedia content like videos and podcasts to engage potential customers. Replicate these strategies across your different franchise websites. However, ensure that there are no duplication issues. You can check the same on Google Search Console’s ‘coverage report.’ You find the pages that are not indexed due to duplicate or thin content issues and work on bringing originality to them.

8. Practise Local Link-Building

Franchise SEO services for link-building is slightly different from your regular link-building activities. You cannot link from and to just anyone. Find local businesses with who you can secure links to improve your local visibility. It goes without saying you have to avoid linking to or from competitors.

For example, if you’re a hardware franchise, you can link to local hardware events, or if you’re a local restaurant chain, you can sponsor a lunch at a local school in exchange for a blog by the school. This way, secure links for your individual franchise pages and if a particular franchise needs more visibility, build authentic local backlinks for that specifically.

9. Encourage Customer Reviews

For local businesses, reviews are a gold mine. Most people who search for local brands on search engines are those that are looking to buy a product or service on the go. At this point, they wouldn’t conduct full-fledged research on where to go. They’ll solely rely on reviews.

But how do you get customer reviews?

For starters, at any point in the buying journey, don’t forget to ask customers for their feedback. They help franchises individually build credibility and trust amongst users and search engines alike. Once the users leave a review, respond to them — be it good or bad. Even the fact that you can own up to a bad review and assure customers that it won’t be repeated again can work in your favour.