Having a strong online presence is indispensable for any business who want to stand out in this competitive market. But it’s not easy, as franchises might have to face huge competition and challenges in reaching potential customers and achieving SERP rankings. This is where SEO for franchises can help in improving business’s visibility in the Google search results.
Businesses nowadays, irrespective of their size, industry, and potential, are relying on specialized digital marketing strategies like SEO to improve their online visibility. This SEO tactic also seems suitable for franchise businesses with multiple local-based locations.
Want to dive deep into knowing what SEO for franchises is and some effective SEO strategies to optimize your site? Go through this post till the end. This post will justify why search engine optimization practices are best for optimizing your franchise website for search engines.
What is SEO for Franchises?
SEO for franchises refers to a process of optimizing your franchise site’s visibility and ranking in the search engine results pages by following effective strategies.
These search engine optimization strategies help businesses improve their search engine positioning in the web results. It also helps improve your business listing’s visibility in front of customers who are catching sight of their products in their area.
Franchise SEO focuses on optimizing franchise websites for specific locations depending upon the search of their service offerings in that location. While optimization, it considers search queries placed by potential customers. This typically involves activities like:
- Optimizing your Google Business Profile
- Creating content that is relevant location- wise
- Updating or removing duplicate content
- Prioritizing geo-specific keywords
Optimizing your franchise website will result in more website visits, calls, conversions, bookings, and sales. Thus, SEO for franchises is helpful for any franchise business who are delivering its offerings in a particular area or vicinity.
What Are the Benefits of SEO for Franchises?
SEO for franchises is extremely significant for those franchise businesses that want to improve their brand awareness among their qualified prospects in the specific area. These franchises are usually quite well-known brands so it becomes easier for people to put their trust in, especially when they will find that you have a nearby store.
Take a look at some other benefits of franchise SEO agency:
- Boost Online Visibility
By implementing a SEO strategy to your site, you can ensure to increase business’s online visibility on search engines. So, people who are looking out for your business or products in your location will be easily able to find you.
In fact, franchise business will gain more prominence in the search engine results pages for some specific queries.
- Increases Brand Awareness
With your franchise getting more visibility in the online search, more and more people get to know about your brand and business. Thus, these effective SEO strategies seamlessly increase your brand awareness among targeted customers.
So, whenever people need your service or product, they will remember your brand.
- Target More Audience
When you implement SEO for franchises, it undoubtedly brings in more prospects to your business. As your business gains more online visibility in the search results, it becomes easier for search engines to rank your business for the relevant search query.
Moreover, this franchise SEO strategy targets those audiences who are actively looking for your business in specific areas.
- Build Online Reputation
If your franchise business is positively reviewed by some previous customers, it will surely attract more customers to your site. Thus, by availing of franchise SEO from a professional seo company, you can build the online reputation of your franchise.
Top 10 Franchise SEO Strategies to Get in Front of your Potential Customers
Now that you have an understanding of the importance of franchise SEO, you might also want to reap its benefits and reach your target audience more effectively in their respective location.
Based on your business’s goals and objectives, you need to create a custom franchise business SEO campaign that will help you achieve your potential goals.
Take a look at some effective franchise SEO strategies to get the most value out of your business in the search engines.
- Localize your Website
When you are optimizing your website for franchise SEO, this includes localizing your website and optimizing its content so that it ranks higher in the organic search results.
If you want to localize your franchise website, then a quick way to do this is by adding some business information to it. This includes:
- Address and proper location of your franchise
- Embedded Google Maps, suggesting accurate directions
- Business’s email address
- Contact phone number
- Images of your team members
- Total hours of operation
- Local testimonials from genuine clients
List all your business locations in Google Maps
One of the very obligatory steps that you cannot miss out on while optimizing the search engine visibility of your franchise website is to create a Google Business Profile.
The process of registering your business on Google Business is simple; it just requires following a set of step-by-step instructions.
You need to add some information on your GBP like your franchise’s address, working hours, images, location images, etc. So, whenever the user places a query related to your business search term, it will get triggered in the search result.
Once you have successfully created your GBP, your franchise will be visible on Google Maps. This will make it easier for search engines and users to discover multiple locations of your franchise. The users will also be able to get directions effortlessly.
List all your franchise locations on Yelp
According to a report in 2023 there were 60.28 million mobile web visitors, and over 36 million desktop visitors on a monthly basis, Yelp has become one of the most followed review sites for businesses and brands.
Therefore, if your franchise location is not listed on Yelp, you might be leaving out a large number of potential customers who are actively looking for your products in your area.
You need to have Yelp pages for each specific franchise location with a user review on it. This will also benefit local audiences. If the users find good reviews about any specific location of the franchise, they will be more influenced to visit that location.
Adding these localization factors will make your website feel more relevant and personal to those who are searching for any business in their local area.
- Incorporate Location-based Keywords in the Website Content
Another fantastic franchise SEO strategy that works really well is integrating location-based keywords in your website content. Conducting strategic keyword research and incorporating those in your content will boost the visibility of your franchise site on the search results.
You can incorporate these geo-targeted keywords in some important elements of your web pages like its headings, title tags, meta descriptions, and body. Accompanied by this, you can also include regional names, nearby tourist destinations, or landmarks as target keywords on your web page.
Make sure not to cram these keywords wherever you like on your content. Always incorporate these location-specific keywords in a way that sounds sensible and natural. So that when someone looks for your business in their specified locations, your business pops up in the search engine results.
These search engine optimization tactics also seem beneficial for those who don’t use Yelp and Google Maps.
- Ensure to Maintain Consistent Branding Across all Locations
While conducting successful franchise SEO, it is essential to maintain consistency throughout all franchise locations. But it has been noticed that franchise owners often deviate from their established branding, and this practice negatively affects your site’s SEO.
If the customers find variations in your branding across different franchise websites, then they might get confused. In fact, this might discourage them from visiting your site and finally relying on them.
Therefore, it is important to maintain consistent branding of your franchise on all platforms, be it your Google Business Profile, website, social media accounts, or Yelp page. If your business maintains cohesiveness in branding, search engines will consider your business as a legitimate one.
Maintaining consistent branding throughout is also an important aspect when it comes to SEO for franchise. It provides your customers with an enhanced experience while they are looking out for your franchise location.
Also, if there is a single cohesive brand voice, look, theme, and style, it will become easier for your customers to recognize your franchise business.
- Enable NAP Consistency
One of the most unavoidable factors that is responsible for bringing SEO success to your franchise business is to ensure keeping its NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) consistent across all platforms.
Nowadays, most people use Google for searching information regarding any businesses, brands, products, or services. This makes it essential for businesses to maintain NAP consistency across Google and other search engines.
If Google finds that the name, address, and phone number of your franchise are correct and consistent throughout all platforms, it will determine your business as a legitimate one. Thus, your franchise’s online visibility will be maximized.
However, if the NAP information is incorrect, it will be difficult for your customers to find your business. Thus, your franchise will lose most of its potential customers.
- Develop an Excellent Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is an excellent strategy that involves creating and sharing informative, valuable, and relevant content with your audience. This strategy is crucially important for SEO success.
By developing podcasts, blog posts and infographics related to your franchise business, you can target a wide range of audiences and promote brand awareness among them. Blogging on the relevant niche and including some keyword-rich titles and descriptions on it will help your content rank high in the SERPs.
You can also access tools like Ahrefs and BuzzSumo to identify the trending topics in the franchise industry and make content on them. You can also focus on creating multimedia content for your franchise brand to engage more people who want to rank well in the search engine results.
- Optimize Your Content for E-E-A-T
According to Google’s Helpful Content Update, Google will now prioritize people-first content. This means content will be written primarily for people and not for search engines.
Google wants all website content to be optimized for E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). This is mainly because Google considers these factors as hallmarks for ‘helpful and reliable content.’
Though not an immediate ranking factor, E-E-A-T is considered a vital part of the Search Quality Rater Guidelines of Google. Therefore, creating E-E-A-T optimized content has become valuable for your franchise site’s SEO.
Optimize your content for E-E-A-T by following some easy tips:
- Include some source citations in your content that seem credible
- Leverage the power of user-generated content like testimonials and reviews
- Include Author information in your content to gain more transparency
- Acquire backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites
- Try to create a positive brand reputation by responding to good and bad reviews
If your franchise website content is E-E-A-T optimized, then it will surely address the needs of your target audience by providing advice and answering questions. Therefore, it makes the readers feel more satisfied with the shared information. It will also improve trust and user experience, leading to more conversions.
- Acquire High-quality Backlinks to your Franchise Website
Backlinks are usually links from other websites that tell search engines that your site is a reputable one. This off-page strategy is helpful while you are performing SEO for franchises.
Check out these few ways following which your franchise website can acquire quality backlinks to their site.
- Creating and optimizing your Google Business Profile and linking it to your site
- Submitting press releases to the editors in charge of the franchise location with a link to your site
- Getting involved in community events and acquiring links from local press
- Claiming accurate links from major business directories like Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc.
- Getting qualified links from niche-specific directories from your franchise location.
Thus, by acquiring relevant links from authoritative sources, your franchise brand can get more exposure.
- Ensure that Your Franchise Site is Mobile-Friendly
Another vital franchise SEO strategy that you cannot afford to miss out on is ensuring that your franchise website is optimized for mobile devices as well. Mobile optimization is one of the vital aspects of SEO for franchises.
Checklist to follow to ensure your site’s mobile-friendliness:
- Ensure that the content is easily readable and accessible on smaller screens
- Ensure that the images on your site are properly optimized
- Check for broken links
- Verify the text size and optimize it
- Make sure that your web pages load quickly
- Navigation elements and menus on your site are quite easy to access with a tap of the finger
If your franchise site is mobile-optimized, this will not only look great on different devices but you will be able to reach a larger audience. This will help achieve your site’s higher rankings and ultimately drive more traffic to your site.
9. Motivate Customers to Provide Reviews for Different Franchise Locations
According to a Survey report, users trust online reviews before choosing any local business online. So, if people do not find any online reviews regarding your franchise, it will reduce the trust of your potential customers in the brand.
This might also make most of them assume that your services are not up to the mark or your business is non-operational for that franchise location. This is why your franchise is failing to attract any reviews from the customers.
Reviews also play a pivotal part in providing customers with a chance to know about what people think of their brand, service offerings, location, customer service, etc. Thus, these reviews provide your business an extra SEO boost so that it ranks higher in search engine results.
So, review management is an important franchise SEO strategy that most SEO experts use.
Handle online review management of your site with the help of these easy SEO tips:
- Motivate customers to provide genuine reviews on Google Business pages for specific franchise locations
- Respond to all reviews empathetically and timely, whether positive or negative. If any customer has a bad experience with your business, you must show an effort to compensate them with a welcoming gesture.
- Show professionalism by trying to interact with the customer who leaves reviews on your site.
10. Include Location-specific Schema to your Website
Another SEO strategy that works really well is structured data or schema markup. These structured data provide search engines with relevant answers about the content of your page.
Like, if you own any franchise business online, then its product or service pages should possess a schema markup. This contains information like some reviews and ratings, product and service prices, etc.
Including schema markup information in your franchise site helps search engines like Google understand your website content in a better way. Thus, search engines will rank your content more appropriately and higher in the search results.
A location-specific schema might result in making your web page a part of Google’s featured snippets and rich results. Google will feature these rich results like pricing information, reviews, ratings, etc. while making your website’s appearance at the top of the Google search results.
Some frequently used schema markup for franchise SEO include the following:
- Product
- Price
- LocalBusiness
- GeoCoordinates
Though some technical knowledge is required to include location-specific schema on your site, you can go through Google’s schema markup to make this process simpler and easier.
Most Common Roadblocks in Franchise SEO
If you are in charge of promoting your franchise brand in every franchise location for improving your business’s search relevance, then you must be aware of some of the biggest roadblocks that might hinder your overall SEO efforts.
Some of the common ones include these:
- Presence of Duplicate Contents
When a piece of content seems similar to that of another page, it’s said to be duplicate content. Most franchise websites face this common issue of content duplication across different location pages.
If you have similar content across multiple pages, then search engines find it difficult to identify the most relevant result for any particular search query. This issue is quite challenging to avoid as franchises try to maintain consistency in branding, thus their website more or less shares the exact way of presentation and tone.
This might lead to decreased organic traffic, indexation of fewer pages in the SERPs, and lowered search engine rankings.
- Failing to Maintain Brand Consistency
If there are dozens of franchise locations for a single brand, maintaining consistency becomes difficult for them. They face a lot of challenges while maintaining a consistent brand identity in terms of messaging, design, and user experience across all their web pages including some variations.
Thus, the websites tend to drift away from the franchise’s actual mission and values. In order to avoid this situation, they should design a proper content marketing guide and make it accessible to all franchises.
Also, the franchises should follow brand guidelines to maintain uniformity across all websites. They should be provided with proper training and guidance to cope with this.
- Outdated NAP Information
It is vitally important that each of your franchise web pages is updated with correct NAP information. You must ensure that the name, address, and phone number of the specific franchise location are updated on the site.
Most franchise businesses make the blunder of updating their website with only the headquarters or corporate office’s information. This makes no sense to the customers. As this information might confuse the customers, Google doesn’t consider ranking such sites for their respective search queries.
- Excessive Interlinking
When you are interlinking one page of your website to another, ensure to do so strategically. Make sure that the anchor text you are using to interlink perfectly matches the content and context of the web page to whom you are linking.
Also, you should avoid doing interlinking excessively on your site. Because it might send some negative SEO signals to search engines and might result in preventing your site from ranking high on search results.
Knowing these challenges is not enough, you must also know how to overcome them for successful franchise SEO. Following the above-discussed franchise SEO strategies will help you with navigating these complexities successfully.
Conclusion
As a franchise owner with multiple locations, your immediate ultimate goal must be to reach more prospects who are looking for your business. This is where implementing SEO for franchises seems to be a wise move.
If you are an expert or possess little knowledge about SEO, then you will be able to implement these strategies effectively on your site and reach your target audience. However, if you are not, then you should partner with a reputable SEO agency to bring more success to your business.
They will create a specialized SEO strategies to improve franchises business’s visibility on the landing pages and online directories. Their services can help your multiple-location business grow even while you sleep!
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