This is a comprehensive guide to search engine optimization (SEO) for franchisors and their franchisees.
This is a comprehensive guide to search engine optimization (SEO) for franchisors and their franchisees.
Franchisors and their franchisees are relying more and more on the internet for filling their sales pipeline with qualified leads. For franchisors, search engines like Google are now the main tool by which potential franchise buyers find and make first contact with you.
Similarly for franchisees, it’s very likely that a growing portion of local customers are finding them through online searches.
Whether you’ve taken steps to strengthen your SEO in the past or not, symptoms of a poor or non-existent strategy include any of the following:
While most businesses understand that SEO is important for getting found online, what it is, how it works, and why it helps may be less clear.
This guide takes the technical world of SEO in 2024 and boils it down for busy franchisors. You’ll learn what SEO is, how it applies to you and your franchisees, what you can do right now to boost visibility (for yourself and for them), and how an agency could help you do even more.
Before we jump in, it’s important to note that franchise SEO—or SEO for any business with a network of locations—can be particularly difficult for a number of reasons we’ll get into later. However, the fact that so many franchise systems get it wrong presents a huge opportunity for those that invest the time and energy to get it right.
This is your guide to getting there.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of following a set of principles that work to boost your visibility and maximize the amount of “good” traffic your website receives from search engines like Google.
More simply, it’s the process of making your website look and behave the way Google wants it to so your site ranks well and more buyers find you.
The better your website is able to meet Google’s expectations, the more likely it will appear at the top of search engine results for the words and phrases your potential customers search for when they want to learn about or buy a product (or in this case a franchise).
Since franchisors and their franchisees have different business goals—one being new franchise buyers and another being local customers—the way they “do” SEO differs somewhat, too.
Let’s pretend you’re a franchisor and sell carpet cleaning franchises. Some of your potential buyers may go straight to a franchise broker and find you that way. Others, however, may use Google to search on their own.
These folks may search for direct phrases like “cleaning franchises in Madison, Wisconsin.” They might also search for phrases less direct, such as answers to questions, like “how much does it cost to start a cleaning franchise?” or “do I need commercial cleaning experience before buying a cleaning franchise?”
There are hundreds of questions like these that a potential franchise buyer might search for when they begin hunting for opportunities. This is where the investment in SEO separates winning franchisors from losing ones. Those that invest in SEO and maximize their visibility online earn the attention of these buyers by having a web page ready for them with the information they’re looking for.
In addition, the very fact that they offered an answer in the first place makes exactly the kind of first impression a franchisor wants to make: one that leaves a potential buyer impressed and interested. By giving them good information they went looking for, you immediately build trust and position your brand as a problem-solver—all before anyone picks up a phone.
SEO is the essential ingredient that makes that first impression possible. It’s not only putting that information out there for buyers, but doing everything you need to do to make sure Google ranks your web page high in search results. Without this, these curious prospects may never find you. Even worse, a competitor might decide to offer that information instead, leading to a lost sale that would have otherwise paid for the entire SEO investment and much more.
Note: Effective SEO enables franchisors to capture the attention of new potential buyers, generating a steady stream of qualified new leads.
SEO is equally important for franchisees, but the goal is slightly different. Instead of attracting new franchise owners in territories around a state or the country, franchisees typically want to attract local customers to their brick-and-mortar stores.
Following the carpet cleaning example, this would be people with dirty carpets. A franchisee’s SEO strategy and tactics in this case should be adjusted for local searches, but the idea is the same: be as visible to potential buyers online as possible.
Imagine you own a carpet cleaning franchise in Madison, Wisconsin. You obviously want to be first on the list when local customers use Google to find service providers in the area.
These buyers are going to want to do a few things:
SEO for you as a carpet cleaner means ensuring all of that information is not only there for them, but accurate and easy to find. That takes a little work, but the payoff from effective local SEO can be huge—especially when your competitors don’t put the work in themselves.
The difference between your business showing up or not showing up when someone searches for “best carpet cleaner in Madison” can be hundreds of dollars a day in lost jobs when those potential customers find a competitor who’s more visible online. Again, the SEO investment quickly pays for itself in the business it generates.
Note: Local SEO awards franchisees coveted digital real estate in search results when local customers search for the products or services they provide.
When done right, SEO boosts the likelihood your website or business listing will appear to searching buyers. This, in turn, builds trust among those who find you at the top as searchers are more likely to see the top search results Google delivers to them as the “best.”
In short, being at or near the top in search results means more people calling you or converting on your website—more inbound leads.
From a franchise sales rep’s or a local franchisee’s perspective, warm inbound leads are preferred over cold ones any day of the week, because when an inbound lead calls or converts online, you can safely assume the need and purchase intent are there.
Now that we’ve made the importance of SEO clear for those on either side of the franchise world, let’s get into the details of how to actually “do” SEO as a franchisor. Then we’ll turn our attention to building a local SEO program for your franchisees.
Let’s focus first on getting you more franchise buyers. As mentioned before, most franchisors rely on traditional sales channels like brokers to put their opportunities in front of potential buyers. But with the internet taking some of the broker’s power of out of their hands and into the buyer’s, franchisors need to invest in being visible to these enterprising prospects who go it alone.
Here are four steps you as a franchisor can take to attract qualified leads.
SEO is like a puzzle with five essential pieces that come together to make it work. Each one is different, but when you put one next to another, part of a larger picture emerges. Whether you intend to make improvements yourself or work with an SEO partner, even a simple understanding of the five concepts summarized below can go a long way.
Before you can optimize your website for the words and phrases potential buyers search for, you need to know what those words and phrases are. There are a number of ways to research these keywords yourself, but be aware that keyword research is own rabbit hole. This is one area where an agency that specializes in SEO can lend their tools, expertise, and time.
→ Check out SEMrush's beginner’s guide to keyword research if you want to dive deeper, or grab our free case study and learn how we helped a client increase seven-year sales revenue by 412% and achieve 33x marketing ROI with campaigns powered by effective keyword research.
When search engines like Google crawl and index your website, they look at many different factors to determine its quality compared to other pages like it on the web. These factors contribute to your website’s performance in search.
Some of these on-page elements are simple, like page titles, header tags, and descriptions of your pages to be used in search results (meta descriptions). Others are less clear, like the a page's “relevancy,” and “quality,” or the “trustworthiness” of any websites that link to yours.
Optimizing on-page SEO factors is an ongoing challenge, but there are many tools that analyze your website to help you spot areas for improvement. Here are a few of them:
→ Check out Moz’s e-book chapter about on-page SEO to learn more.
Website load speed can affect search rankings. Slow sites provide a poor user experience, something Google’s algorithm prefers to avoid at all costs. There are a number of ways to un-bloat a slow web page and streamline it for better speed, but the first step is analysis.
The tools below are all great to use here:
→ Want to learn more about page speed and SEO? Check out SEMrush's post.
Simply checking off the boxes on the basics we’ve covered isn’t enough to rank well. Quality content is incredibly important. One part of this equation is ensuring you’re demonstrating E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trust). This guide does a good job explaining how to do that.
Use this cheat-sheet to evaluate your web pages for quality:
This is a wide-ranging set of elements outside of your website, such as citations (places your business is referenced elsewhere online such as Yelp), online reviews, links to your site from other websites, and places your brand is mentioned by others.
→ Want to learn more about off-page SEO? Read SEMrush's guide to off-page SEO.
Even for a boiled-down list, we realize it’s a lot to take in. Now that you’ve got a taste for just how complex SEO can be, we recommend taking a moment to re-read and do some of your own research into these five areas for a better understanding of them. You don’t need to be an expert, but it’ll help you the rest of the way.
Once you feel like you have at least a basic understanding of the main parts of SEO, let’s move onto the next step toward improvement: revealing your site’s current strengths and weaknesses.
If this is your first SEO project, just about every expert will recommend a comprehensive audit to get the full picture of your current strengths and weaknesses.
SEO audits that are too technical can fail to reveal the whole picture, so we recommend signing up for the free seven-day trial of the SEO tool Ahrefs and following their (totally free) step-by-step audit guide that brings way more into the equation.
The findings of this audit will likely reveal existing gaps and do much of the planning work for you. If, at the end of your audit, you’re given a list of things you know you need to do, but don’t know how to do, consider talking to an agency that can help you interpret the results and see the next steps that require an expert to spot.
If you have a working understanding of the five concepts summarized above, an agency will be able to explain exactly what can be done in each of those areas to make improvements.
As we mentioned at the beginning, franchise SEO is particularly problematic for a few reasons. Auditing is likely to uncover problems with your website itself, but some challenges lie beyond your website and outside the reach of the audit. It’s worth taking a closer look at those problems and investigating them separately.
We’ve summarized three common problems that weigh down franchisor rankings and prescribed an approach for fixing each of them:
This is a cardinal sin in SEO and is worth mentioning for franchisors despite being a much bigger problem with franchisee websites. When two pages offer duplicate information, they both suffer. If you use a website template and simply tweaked one or two areas of a page while keeping much of it the same across a number of pages (such as listing territories or locations), Google may confuse this as an attempt to manipulate the ranking system and penalize you accordingly.
What to do: Take stock of any series of pages that are very similar to one another and consider ways to consolidate duplicate information into a single page or another arrangement. Make sure no two pages are essentially identical.
Many franchisors link to their franchise locations from their main website. While this is done with the good intention of helping people find the location near them, Google, again, can misinterpret it as trying to game the system.
Links from one site to another are major factors Google uses when determining which pages to rank where. When the search engine sees many sites linking to one another (as franchise systems tend to do), it can appear to Google as an unauthorized link exchange, thereby risking a penalty.
What to do: Remove simple links to other branded franchise websites or make them nofollow links. Replace these with a more sophisticated tool for helping users find local franchise locations. If your website is built on WordPress, this article offers many plugins that do just that.
When franchisees are given the keys to their own website, some may engage in shady SEO practices that can ding the entire brand. This is one reason it’s advisable to retain some level of corporate control over franchisee websites and, at the very least, monitor these sites to prevent such behavior.
What to do: If your franchisees manage their own websites, hire someone to examine them for risks or challenges and fix them accordingly.
Once you have a functional understanding of SEO basics, established a baseline, identified gaps, and made sure you’re not suffering from common SEO problems, it’s time to get to work proactively optimizing your franchisor website.
We realize all these numbered steps can get a little confusing, but the following six steps offer the most straightforward SEO improvement process you can undertake. Before you jump in, realize that this can’t be done in a day, a week, or even a month. Effective SEO and digital marketing takes time, so move through these steps methodically and thoroughly.
Before doing any keyword research, you have to paint a complete picture of the audience—your buyers. Put yourself in your prospects’ shoes and answer five questions from their perspective:
With a good understanding of your audience, now you need to do keyword research. Think about how your buyers look for opportunities.
What kinds of things does someone who’s ready to buy a franchise right now search for versus someone who’s still learning about franchise ownership?
Here are three things to do when making a list of keywords to target on your website:
There are a variety of keyword research tools that can help you uncover what your buyers are likely searching for most and how competitive those keywords are. SEMrush and Ahefs are two of the best.
However, this can take considerable time and know-how to do on your own, which is why most companies hire an agency to do the work for them. If you’re interested in gathering all the keywords your business is ripe to rank for, talk to us about a doing thorough keyword research.
With your lists in front of you, fire up Google Keyword Planner and follow these steps. (Note: if you don't have a Google Ads account, you can learn how to access Keyword Planner for free here.)
To rank for keywords and keyword topics, your site needs to include pages that specifically address each individual keyword or topic. Keep in mind, targeting those keywords and topics requires at least one skilled writer to produce satisfying content.
Ensuring you have an informative and persuasive page for each of your services that provides a comprehensive overview of that offering is a powerful first step in boosting your search visibility through quality content.
Adding a Frequently Asked Questions page, for example, is a great way to answer prospects' additional questions.
And, while this content is often does not spring from keyword research, testimonials and case studies from happy franchise owners are fantastic content to have on your site for prospects evaluating your opportunity.
Unfortunately, the SEO world has a lot of bad advice. Some “experts” tout outdated strategies and tactics that not only don’t work but can actually hurt your website performance.
Others are just straight up sketchy or spammy (and still don’t work). Again, Google isn’t naive. Google knows people try to game the system, so it does its best to close the doors to them.
With that in mind, here are some tips for avoiding bad SEO advice. In general, it’s best to steer clear of any service providers that try to push any of these tactics on you.
Now let’s turn our attention to SEO for franchise owners. Specifically how you, the franchisor, can help them—either by conveying this advice to them yourself or having an agency partner work with them on your behalf.
When it comes to local SEO, multi-location franchises have a reputation for being difficult. Lots of locations with essentially the same name and brand can be a digital mess that Google can have a hard time sorting out accurately.
That said, it’s a mess franchises can’t afford not to clean up. Local visibility is too important. A franchise owner’s success may rely heavily on it and will likely depend on it even more so in the future.
Before getting into what franchisors can do to help their franchisees make local SEO improvements, it’s important to focus first on the key challenges and ways to overcome them. You may have some fires to put out.
With that said, here are the major local SEO challenges franchises often contend with and a step-by-step process for righting the ship before implementing the real improvements.
You can’t expect to convince your franchisees of anything unless you come into the conversation familiar with how SEO works and what needs to be done to improve it. That’s why we wrote this guide. Here are some tips for getting everyone on the same page.
This should be a joint effort between you and your SEO partner. While conference calls can be effective here, live webinars give you the ability to show visual aids and run through concepts on-screen. While no one should expect franchisees to become SEO experts, even an overview of the basics and likely outcomes will earn their support along the way. Ongoing education is important, too. Your SEO partner should always make regular progress reports as part of the program they offer. These reports also give you the opportunity to reiterate goals: why this is happening, and how it works.
Apart from communicating with franchisees, this is the first and in many ways most important first step you should take. If each location is managing its own website and business listings, there’s no hope of standardizing messaging across them. Even worse, their online citations—places their name, address, and phone number appear online—might be full of issues, which can negatively impact local search presence and can be difficult if not impossible to resolve without corporate control.
Note: This can be incredibly labor-intensive to take on yourself. A good SEO partner should have the tools to claim, update, and monitor all of your franchisee’s listings at once. We do this for clients regularly. Learn how we used local seo and search ads to increase marketing-generated revenue by 220.29% for franchise locations.
Another note: these are just some of the most important citation and listing services. Depending on your industry, there may be considerably more that search engines read for accuracy.
Customer reviews are a huge factor both for local search ranking and a franchise’s reputation. But comparatively few have a solid strategy for getting, monitoring, and responding to them. When poor or fake reviews are left unaddressed, prospects can immediately turn away.
With SEO, it’s easy to lose track of what a partner or a corporate team is doing for you. SEO by nature is behind the scenes, so even the best work can be invisible to those who are benefiting from it.
Once franchisees are educated and onboard with local SEO and have brought all their web properties and business listings under corporate control, it’s time to launch an improvement project.
Typically, franchisors handle their franchisee’s web presence in one of four ways:
There are a number of essentials that just about every type of franchisee mini site should offer, regardless of industry. These are important both from an SEO and usability perspective, which are often one and the same as Google tunes its search engine to value what people want from a website.
Here’s a checklist to ensure you’ve got the basics covered:
Landing pages are the “front doors” to a website, each optimized for local keywords. To capture the attention of a wider audience searching for your franchisees’ services, build pages focused on a handful of related keywords.
If you have a shortlist of general local keywords, Google’s Keyword Planner can reveal related, more specific keywords to target based on search volume.
When building these local landing pages, make sure to optimize a few key areas:
We’ve already covered citations—defined as mentions of a business name, address, and phone number on the web—and business listings. But it’s worth calling attention to in this sequence. For local SEO, a website alone is not enough. When serving up local search results, Google considers many factors from third parties like business listings.
Here’s a checklist to ensure your citations and listings are in order:
As we explained earlier in the guide, backlinks (links from other websites to yours) tell search engines that you’re a reputable and trustworthy site. Earning local links can be a little tough, but it can certainly can be done, and the payoff can be huge.
Here are a few ways to do it:
In summary, the more unique each individual location’s online presence can be made, the better for SEO. There are many factors to consider when putting this advice to work, such as the nature of the business, the size of the franchise, marketing budgets, skill sets, and more. Each franchise will have to weigh all these things and come to a decision as to their overall digital marketing strategy.
Once that decision has been made, look to optimize your site using the advice above.
As a franchisor, this guide may present a mountain of work and likely little time or resources to do it.
If this is the case for your company, it may be time to consider an SEO partner who can help you do everything explained in this guide—and more if you need it.
If you need help marketing your franchise online right now, contact us to get the conversation started.
Still researching? Learn how we helped franchise locations increase marketing-generated revenue by 220.29%.
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