SEO marketing for franchises can be difficult. Instead of strategizing for one business and one location, franchises have multiple locations and stakeholders involved. With so many moving parts, it’s important to strategize SEO for franchises differently than SEO for a single location business.
Learn more about how to create an effective SEO plan for your franchise.
Choose the right domain structure
First thing’s first, think about how you want to build your franchise’s website(s). Franchises tend to use one of the following website structures when creating their online presence.
1.) Subdomain
In this website structure, individual franchise locations have their own unique subdomain. This structure looks like this:
Main domain:
mainfranchisewebsite.com
Franchise locations websites:
denver.mainfranchisewebsite.com
austin.mainfranchisewebsite.com
chicago.mainfranchisewebsite.com
Since each location has its own website, it can be easier to target local keywords relevant to their areas.
However, this method isn’t as good for creating domain authority. Having all the individual franchise information on the same domain, as they are in a subfolder setup, can help make the domain more optimized.
2.) Subfolder
This setup uses the same domain for every location, and groups individual location information in a subfolder.
A subfolder setup will look like this:
Main domain:
mainfranchisewebsite.com
Franchise Locations
mainfranchisewebsite.com/locations/denver
mainfranchisewebsite.com/locations/austin
mainfranchisewebsite.com/locations/chicago
In this setup, every optimized piece of content you write will live on the main domain (mainfranchisewebsite.com). This makes building domain authority easier compared to a subdomain setup.
That said, subdomain and subfolder setups each have their pros and cons. For example, you’ll need to manage multiple web entities using the subdomain setup, while a subfolder website doesn’t give you as much opportunity to upload and organize content unique to each franchise location. An experienced SEO professional can help you choose the option that works best for your unique franchise needs.
Own your local presence
The backbone of local SEO is having consistent business information across the hundreds of listing sites and business directories that live across the web.
With more franchise locations comes more time managing these listings, and more effort to keep your local presence up-to-date.
A listings service, like our Listings app, makes it easy to manage the location information for all your Franchise locations in one place. Plus, you can make updates on the fly, so when you have a surprise closure or need to change a location’s phone number, you can do so with ease.
Target local keywords
Unlike a stand-alone business that only serves one geographic area, franchises have to make sure their website shows up in all the places their franchisees are located.
Keyword research can help you determine what local search terms people are looking for in your different franchise locations. Fine-tuning your SEO content strategy to go after these terms can make a big difference in how many organic visitors are coming to your website.
Have an online reputation strategy
Local reviews are another thing that can greatly influence your franchisee’s local presence. On Google Maps, the top local rankings are given to businesses with a strong review profile, which can be achieved by having a smart online reputation strategy.
Your online reputation strategy should be twofold: first, you need to ask customers to leave a review. This can be done in person, through an automated email or even through text.
Second, you need to manage the reviews that come in. This way, you can respond to positive reviews and build customer relationships, and also be notified whenever a negative review comes in. Promptly and professionally responding to positive and negative reviews can help build your online reputation by showing potential customers that you care about the experience your customers have with your business.
Our Reputation app makes reputation management simple by enabling franchises to monitor all their reviews in one place, and request new reviews with ease.
About Marketing 360®
Marketing 360 gives franchise owners the tools and talent they need to grow their SEO across all their locations. Learn more about our plans and pricing today.