Franchise SEO

Our search, content and technology professionals will conduct a thorough review of your franchise website, analytics and competitors in order to identify how your organization performs in search results for key industry terms and phrases. We will identify where your website traffic comes from, where it enters your site and where you are losing people. We will also review your technical infrastructure and content in order to assess the crawlability of your website.

Based on our in-depth review, we will outline specific opportunities for your franchise system to improve rankings for important search terms. We will document all of our findings and recommendations and walk you through everything in detail to ensure you have a solid action plan for improvement.

Improving and maintaining your search rankings is an ongoing exercise. The search landscape is constantly changing as technology improves, Google and Bing make updates to their search algorithms, competitors modify their strategy and your customers change their search behaviors.

Our team will ensure you remain a step ahead of your competitors by conducting ongoing reviews of your search performance, staying abreast of your competitors’ actions, and remaining on top of the latest SEO trends. We will compile a monthly or quarterly report that covers areas such as goal achievements, traffic sources, site stickiness, user pathing, site entrances/exits, page depth, time spent and a variety of other metrics to identify areas of SEO strength and weakness. We will use this information, coupled with industry analysis and your business objectives, to draw conclusions and make recommendations for ongoing SEO improvement.

When someone conducts a Google or Bing search that includes “near me” or the name of their neighbourhood, town or city, they are performing a “local search.” These types of searches are different than “non-local” searches because the search engine uses a different algorithm to identify which products, services and businesses to display to the searcher. When someone includes a local term in their search, it is usually because they are looking for the nearest place to buy a product or service, which makes these types of searches very valuable.  

We have extensive experience helping franchise organizations achieve incredible local search results. Where many website design firms see local webpages as an issue to manage, we see them as an opportunity to create a competitive advantage that other firms cannot replicate. We will work with you to create a scalable approach that allows your franchisees to beat their competitors at search in the markets where they operate to find new customers and grow their business.

Our SEO strategy for franchise websites starts from the “ground up,” meaning that we structure your website to create maximum search authority at the local level. Through this approach, we ensure your individual locations out-rank competitors in their local markets to generate new business, which, in turn, creates immense search authority for the entire franchise organization.

Because we create strong SEO authority for every location, in aggregate your website earns a significant amount of highly relevant search traffic, which results in very strong search rankings for your brand overall. This company-wide search authority can be extended to new locations to provide a “boost” in their search rankings, which can make a massive difference in their search traffic and growth during their important launch period. As you grow your franchise network, your SEO authority will continue to grow, creating a tremendous competitive advantage for your brand.

Even the best-built website requires high-quality, relevant content to rank well for pertinent searches. Content creation and population are particularly complex for franchise organizations due to the nature of their business model. The strength of franchise systems is their ability to develop an approach and repeat it over a large number of locations to gain efficiencies of scale. However, in the case of content creation, this strategy is not effective. If the same (or similar) content is repeated across all of your franchise locations, Google and Bing will view it as duplicate content, which will be largely ignored by their algorithms, suppressing the visibility of your franchisee locations.

Creating unique content for each of your locations to the greatest extent possible is a much more effective approach. Although this may seem like a daunting task, through our work with hundreds of franchise companies we have developed a localized content process that allows us to create targeted content for each of your locations that is optimized for their specific market. Through this approach, your company will out-rank competitors and generate high-quality traffic at the local level, which translates into more customers for your franchisees and overall system growth.

Structured data (also called “schema markup”) is information added to the back end of your website that makes it easier for Google and Bing to crawl and properly index your content. By adding structured data, search engines can better “understand” the content of your website, including the nature of your business, products and services available, pricing, and locations. 

Structured data is particularly crucial for franchise companies because it allows you to greatly improve your ability to rank well for local searches. There is a specific structure (called a “schema”) for local businesses that allows you to specifically tell Google and Bing critical details about each of your franchise locations, including address, phone number, hours of operation, services/products and many other factors. This provides a major advantage over competitors because it significantly improves the likelihood that your locations will show up when people in your operating areas are searching for your types of products or services.

Whether you know it or not, Google and Bing have likely created individual listing pages for each of your locations. These listing pages (called “Google Business Profile” and “Bing Places”) can have a significant impact on your local search ranking. These listings include important location details such as address, phone number, hours of operation and reviews. This information surfaces in the search results and on maps when users are looking for local businesses. 

For franchise organizations, it can be very difficult to gain ownership of these listings and keep them updated on an ongoing basis to ensure they are accurate. Our search team will work with you to develop a course of action to aggregate all of your listings, enhance their effectiveness, and keep them updated.

Many franchise systems struggle with online fragmentation, whereby individual franchisees or regional groups deploy their own websites separate from the main brand. From a franchisor perspective, this is problematic from a both in terms of brand consistency and SEO. When your company has multiple domains in Google’s index it creates unnecessary competition for your brand and important keywords.

In our experience, this type of fragmentation typically occurs when the brand website restricts franchisees from successfully competing in their local markets. This can take the form of poor local search indexing, lack of content flexibility, and/or a poor local user experience.

We avoid this issue by recognizing that a franchise website needs to meet the needs of both the franchisor and franchisees for everyone to be successful. We will work with you to create a search engine optimization strategy that enables your local franchisees to rank well in local search while also maintaining brand integrity.