Franchise means a business located in many cities and can be easily recognized because of its appearance. These kinds of businesses are operated by different individuals under the same brand and industries. Operating a Franchise business can be a real hustle, as it comes with many challenges and the matter of dealing with many locations. Businesses offer franchises to increase their company’s distribution and establish their brand.
But, now when everything can be marketed online, franchise owners are also in the race to improve the online visibility of their franchise business and gather a large audience from there. For marketing a business on an online platform, what could be better than SEO? But, do you know that when the franchise meets with the SEO, it opens up complex challenges for search marketers? Because franchise means more locations, more landing pages, and more content and all these things open up the gate for technical issues.
But, challenges make Franchise SEO possible. Today here, in this blog, we will light on Franchise SEO and will look at some strategies of how it can be applied for your business.
So, let’s not wait, begin the blog and be with us till the end.
What is Franchise SEO?
Franchise SEO is the set of processes for improving the online appearance of franchise websites. The main goal is to promote the overall brand by localizing pages for multiple locations of that brand.
For example, if someone searches for “hotels near me”, then your website pops up in their search results. This is an excellent strategy for a franchise business because it enhances your business visibility on search engines like Google and Bing.
The SEO franchise includes processes like
Targeting Local Keywords
Optimizing the Google My Business Profile
Developing locally relevant keywords
Updating duplicate content
Remember that, any business that has a physical location can benefit from Franchise SEO. Here comes the question, is local SEO required for Franchise SEO? And, it is absolutely Yes, so let’s see, why local SEO is important for SEO franchises.
Why do we need Local SEO for Franchise Business?
The local SEO for Franchise businesses helps your nearby customers and reach them to your physical store. Franchises are mostly built on well-known brands so that people can visit new locations comfortably.
So, no matter where you are franchising your corporate office or local physical store, local SEO is absolutely important for your business growth. It can increase your business visibility and lead you to more calls and conversions for your website.
Why is Franchise SEO Important for Franchise Business?
Franchise SEO is a unique digital approach that lets you reach your prospect’s customers. And, when you manage multiple businesses for multiple locations, local SEO can be beneficial for your business growth.
But, there are two most significant benefits of Franchise SEO for your business, let’s have a look
Better ranking and Visibility
A franchise SEO campaign can help your business to enhance its visibility on various search engines for multiple locations. Each of your Franchise competitors will compete with their own local competitors for specific queries. It also improves your search engine visibility in your local area, improves your general brand awareness and builds trust with new customers.
Gets Your Business on the Top of Your Franchise Competitors
As we have already stated, franchise SEO means competing with their local competitors and enhancing their visibility on search engines. It consists of a content-creating plan that is mainly built for locally searched keywords and phrases. Strategically targeting these keywords makes your business rank for the majority of top-ranking search results and outranks your competitors.
Importance of Franchise SEO
Franchises can also avail the benefits of SEO, like all local businesses to increase the visibility for your potential customers. SEO can help franchises by helping them reach a larger audience and increase their customer base. It can also help franchises gain a competitive edge in the market by setting them apart from their competitors.
Optimizing Google My Business, and writing valuable and relevant posts can help your site to increase brand awareness and build trust among your potential customers. And the best thing is all these things can be done for free. So, maintaining these SEO good practices can help your business to drive potential leads and sales to your business.
Franchise SEO vs Regular SEO – What’s the Difference?
Franchise SEO is a bit challenging for local SEO because it deals with numerous locations. It is important to know the optimization technique for dealing with these multiple pages independently.
While Regular SEO only focuses on content and keywords for uplifting the regular single websites. Franchise SEO is a special kind of local SEO that focuses on improving search engine ranking for each particular location. In doing these, you need to make sure that each page has similar kinds of elements and content on the webpage.
Overall we can say that Franchise SEO is more complex than regular SEO, as it contains multiple locations and you have to compete with each other. Maintaining the level of consistency throughout the pages can be even more difficult. But hiring SEO experts, with good skills and expertise can help your business to lead on the SERP.
Essential Franchise SEO Strategies for Business
Indeed, Franchise SEO can be challenging, and no matter whatever the products and services you are working on, the following strategies would help your business to establish your Franchise in search engine results.
List Different Locations on Google Maps
The mandatory first step to improve your Franchise SEO results is to create a Google My Business account. Now, Google is one of the easiest ways to find out any location. Whenever any searchers want to get any information, they directly head towards Google.
Search Engine provides a map of options and lets the users get directions to the one they get to choose with a few clicks.
If your business location does not appear on Google Maps, then you need to register to the Google My Business profile, follow the step-by-step instructions, and register your business on GMB. After registering, your business will appear on Google Maps and that would make it easier for the users to find your location on SERPs.
Find Local Keywords
Keyword research for Franchise SEO is the process of finding the relevant search terms for your business. These are the terms that your users use to find the relevant products and services for their needs.
Ranking for these keywords helps your business rank for a particular query that ultimately drives potential customers toward your business.
You can get keyword ideas from various SEO tools like Google’s keyword planner, Semrush, Ahrefs and many more. There are so many options available for finding the keywords for your business.
Use Consistent Branding
The main purpose of franchising is to make people aware of the different locations of your brand. So, it’s utterly important to keep consistent branding throughout all physical locations.
One mistake that Franchise users make is that they deviate from the established branding. Its colors, logos, and brand identity can recognize any established branding. If you fail to maintain this consistency, you will lose your potential visitors. So, the people visiting the same location, if they visit different locations would experience the same user experience.
While, in terms of website also branding is an important factor and that’s why always make sure to maintain the proper consistency throughout the pages. Ensure to stick with the same color, and theme across your website, and everything should be respective to your brand.
For example, if you are a Pizza Shop Owner and your logo, packing boxes, etc have some sketch designs. Make sure to implement all these things on your website.
Use the Right NAP
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number and they should be used in a correct format. While running a multi-location SEO campaign, make sure to use the NAP wisely. The NAP should be in the correct format on each of your websites.
For example, if you have used brackets for separating the area codes of phone numbers, then make sure to implement these on all your location pages.
Instead of mentioning the corporate map only, make sure to denote the NAP for each particular location. You can also include the contact number of the corporate and include it on separate pages.
Localize Your Website
Conducting Franchise SEO means optimizing the business for local SEO. You have to make sure that each location page is well-optimized and should be located on each page with the phone number, address, and other relevant information correct. Moreover, you should also make sure to include the area map with its marked location. This will make your website search engine friendly as well help the customers to find out your nearest locations easily.
Dealing with many locations, it is obvious that you have to work with multiple domains. Correlate these domains with each other, so that it would help your search engine crawlers to understand they are related.
Create Customized Local Landing Pages
The main purpose of customizing the landing page for the franchise is to distinguish the location from all others while maintaining consistency. So, customize your landing page with good SEO practice. Ensure that all the local SEO practices are followed on the landing page and that content is updated regularly. This will help the search engine crawlers recognize the page as the local landing page for that franchise location.
Here, we are giving some SEO tips to customize your landing page
Give links to all your individual pages
Make your call to action prominent and relevant
Provide high-quality images with keyword-rich alt-text
Include the Franchise location keyword within your headings
Deliver unique content that provides value to your business
Keep the company name, address, and phone number consistent with all other Franchise locations
Note that all franchise locations should have a local landing page on the Franchise websites
Localized Content Creation
Content is one of the important aspects of search engine optimization. If your content is powerful enough and relevant to your search engine’s intent, it is only capable of ranking your website alone. For Franchise SEO, you have to deal with a lot of content and maintain consistency throughout the pages.
To ensure your success, it is important to optimize your content for keywords, create backlinks, and focus on local SEO. Additionally, you need to create content that is tailored to your franchise’s target audience.
Create content that focuses on both local and national topics related to franchises such as blog posts, podcasts, infographics, and many more. Developing keyword-rich content with titles and meta-descriptions would help search engine crawlers to better understand your business site and know its intent. Content should look informative and entertaining to engage your potential customers. Videos, Images, and other multimedia are great forms of content to engage potential customers.
Add Location-Specific Schema to Franchise Locations
Schema markup is called structured data, it would help your Franchise SEO and local SEO strategy. With good schema markup, you would provide descriptive information about your content to the search engine crawlers. This will help the search engines to better understand the in-depth of your content. When search engines understand the content better, it automatically enhances your website rank on SERPs.
In various cases, search engines would use that information to show the rich results on SERPs.
Encourage Customers to Put reviews for Different Locations
Online reviews are like a reward for your business and this is why they are extremely important. Reviews can be great rank boosters. Because the majority of the users interact with the website and make sales only by seeing the reviews first. If your website is having good reviews, customers are more likely to deal with it.
So, making reviews for GMB is also a crucial task. No matter if reviews are bad or good, make sure to handle the negative comments gracefully too.
Furthermore, reviews give local customers a chance to see what other people think of your website and how they feel while interacting with your site. Good reviews catch Google’s attention fast and also make your site rank higher on search engines. Responding to customers all positive and negative feedback, makes them understand you are engaged and open to feedback.
Build Local Backlinks
Backlinks represent the authority and they are the links to your website from other sources. Quality backlinks increase your business authority and build the credibility of your business. There are many ways to earn high-quality backlinks and one of the best ways is to generate backlinks by posting high-quality and relevant content. And, make sure to get the links from highly authoritative websites.
You can also build relationships with influencers and other bloggers in your niche who might be interested in linking to your website. Additionally, you can reach out to other websites and offer to trade links with them.
Once you get the linkable asset, then you can reach out to the local publications to see if they will link to your website or not.
Some Tips for Building Local Backlinks are:
Reach out to the local non-competitors businesses for links
You can get featured in local trade papers
Sponsors local events and conferences
Support local organizations, schools, and charities
3 Biggest Franchise Challenges Need to Understand
However, Franchise SEO is not so easy to implement, there occur various challenges that you need to understand and apply strategies to overcome these challenges. Here, we are going to mention some 3 biggest Franchise Challenges that you should focus on.
Duplicate Content
Basically, organically locally optimized content is necessary for a website. But in the case of a Franchise website, a large amount of duplicate content from another website or franchise page can affect your Franchise SEO efforts. Google can penalize your website for having the same content and can result in a low ranking on search results.
High Amount of Interlinking
You need lots of strategies to link one page to another page of your site. For internal linking, you have to use relevant anchor text to correlate the contents of your page that is to be linked. And, doing these things excessively can send negative SEO signals that would even prevent your site from ranking.
Outdated Name, Address, and Phone number
On each franchise page, it is mandatory to add the name, address and phone number of that specific location. Many businesses make mistakes by adding the addresses of their corporate headquarters information that is of no use to their customers.
Franchise SEO Takeaways
Here, we have come to the end of this blog. I hope you have understood our blog very well. Franchise SEO helps your franchise business to rank locally. This helps you to build your business brand awareness, increase engagement, and get leads and conversions. It can be the best option to make your business popular among various locations.
This is a great way to earn profit and boost your presence in the top directories. So, if you have any business ideas with the franchise, then come to us, and we will help you to get the possible outcomes. At UPSQODE, you will get designers, developers as well and SEO experts who will take care of your business right from development to marketing.
FAQs
What is Franchise SEO?
Franchise SEO focuses on improving the search engine visibility of your Franchise business. It helps to increase your business distribution and improve your brand awareness for local customers. This includes different strategies and depends on where you are promoting your Franchise locations.
Franchise deals with many locations, this is why SEO for Franchise can be challenging. You have to think very precisely because for franchise you must ensure that every page and details are consistent with each other.
SEO for Franchise requires a lot of effort and attention, but it’s worth the effort. With the right strategy, Franchises can increase their visibility and reach more customers.
What are some challenges with Franchise SEO?
There are 3 major challenges associated with Franchise SEO and you need to overcome these, the challenges include
Duplicate content
Your franchise site must contain unique and relevant content if your site content matches the content of your other Franchise site. It may fail your Franchise SEO strategy. So, make sure to put only relevant and unique content.
Outdated NAP
Make sure your Franchise provides your name, address, and phone number. For your franchise website, make sure to add the location where your business is present, don’t add your headquarters location and this is one of the mistakes of various franchise marketers. Make sure the NAP is consistent across all your online platforms. Monitor and update NAP regularly to keep it up-to-date.
Unnecessary Internal Link
Avoid Unnecessary internal linking, link only where it is required. Excessive links can signal negative SEO and it would be harmful for your website. As a result, it would prevent your site from appearing on SERPs.
If you are having any problem regarding Franchise SEO, our agency UPSQODE can help you to get you out of all situations and make your Franchise business stronger than others. We are one of the top-rated SEO agencies offering comprehensive SEO services, designing, and development for your business, and committing to taking your business to newer heights.
What does Franchise SEO Include?
The franchise includes all services that any local SEO requires like
- Developing a content strategy for your franchise location
- Optimizing site elements so that crawlers can understand well
- Building local citations
- Google My Business optimizations and Google Mapping
- Building local backlinks for your site and of course many more
It includes full-fledged SEO services that can improve your online visibility and increase sales for your business
If you are thinking of hiring an SEO expert for your business and want a full-fledged SEO plan, you can consult our SEO packages that include everything that is suitable for your SEO strategy and improve your business visibility.
What are the benefits of Franchise SEO?
- Franchise SEO helps you to stay at the top of your search engine result pages and targets your potential customers.
- It increases your business reach and expands its distribution
- Builds credibility and brand awareness for your business
- Makes your business popular among local customers
- When it starts showing results, it increases your business leads and conversions and also doubles your revenue
How will UPSQODE help my Franchise Business?
UPSQODE first understands your business requirements and analyzes the Franchise location in every detail. Then find out the perfect local keywords, localize your website conduct comprehensive competitive research, and finally build out the strategy that could double your business visibility on SERPs.
At UPSQODE, you will get expert team members having working experience in various kinds of projects and ensure to bring your Franchise business to the top of SERP with minimal costs. Furthermore, our SEO packages are budget-friendly.
What are the most common Franchise Marketing Channels?
It’s usual for Franchises to implement an omnichannel marketing channel strategy that targets both in-person activity and lead acquisition. And, some of the common marketing strategies include SEO, Paid marketing, content marketing, and many more.