Franchise SEO Services

0:00Why Franchise SEO Has Unique Challenges and Advantages

Hey, it's Brendan here from WP Speed Fix. In this video, I want to talk to you about our franchise SEO. This is one of the services we offer. We manage the SEO for franchises on an ongoing basis, for a number of different franchises. So I wanted to talk a bit about this service, and just our strategy and general approach.

Franchises have some unique challenges. They also have some unique advantages when it comes to SEO. In some ways the difficulties come with the type of franchise, how it's set up, the size, the number of locations, and just the general way the franchise operates, and how the master franchise, the franchisor, works in relation to marketing and all the franchisees.

But there are also some advantages. Because a franchise is basically a group of local businesses, there are some advantages particularly when it comes to SEO and link building. At the most basic level, having coverage across a lot of local locations or suburb locations or areas is an advantage, but it's also an advantage from a link building perspective. Each location can have its own unique set of links, whereas if it was just a standalone business you'd have just one set of links. So because of the way the business is set up, as a group of businesses, there's a kind of power there. That power combined can rank the site higher for a lot of terms, or a larger variety of terms and a larger variety of locations. So there are some advantages there, but it needs to be done right.

1:35Why Ranking Number One Is an Outdated Goal

Let's talk about some of the strategy and our approach. A lot of businesses today still have the outdated approach to SEO where the goal is "we rank number one in Google". That doesn't really work anymore, because number one differs depending on the device, the location, and where the user is. The search results layout is also completely different. You typically have four Google ads at the top. You might have some sponsored Google Maps listings. You might have some AI search. Right now, Google is showing Reddit and Quora and some of these other aggregator sites or forum sites in the mix when it comes to local searches.

So there are a lot more challenges today with SEO for franchise businesses. It's more than just "let's rank number one". The approach needs to be much more strategic and needs to cover a lot more areas. So let's talk about a few of those. This is on our website. If you go to wpspeedfix.com, under Specialties you'll see Franchise SEO Services is one of our specialties here, and let's just talk about a few things. There's a whole bunch of different areas that need attention.

2:25Local SEO, Apple Maps and Bing Places

First, local SEO and Maps rankings. That's pretty obvious and pretty straightforward, but there are some gaps here. A lot of people don't think about Apple Maps, for example. Apple Maps drives the default Maps app on iPhones. If Apple Maps listings are wrong or in the wrong location, which is very, very common because most of those listings are autogenerated, they were autogenerated off Yelp or even Bing years ago, it's quite common to see locations in a completely wrong spot. So having an Apple Maps strategy is important, and also a Bing Maps strategy.

ChatGPT by default uses Bing search, which means for local SEO and franchise related searches it's going to go out to Bing first for the information it needs. That means having your Bing Maps or Bing Places listings up to date and accurate, and having reviews on there, is significantly more important than it used to be even just a year ago. So that needs to be part of a local SEO strategy as well. Bing and Apple Maps carry a lot more weight than they used to, for those reasons.

3:59Brand SEO and Competitor Brand Ads

Brand SEO, let's talk about this. Making sure you rank correctly for your brand, and what the brand search results page looks like, is really important today, particularly with competitors getting smart and advertising against brand terms, and also review sites taking advantage of brand terms. Depending on what market you're in, there are some aggregator sites that are actually leveraging brand search to take business away from you.

We see this very commonly where it's not exactly franchise SEO, or maybe where it's a hotel chain, but in the accommodation space, where big sites like Booking.com and Agoda and Airbnb will bid against brand terms in Google Ads and push the actual brand way down the search results for brand searches. They get a commission if they get that booking. They get a commission for essentially nothing, for basically just squatting those brand terms. So brand SEO is really important, and brand searches are probably the highest value search, because it's people looking specifically for your business.

Now I'll say we also need a brand strategy for competitors. In some of the spaces we operate in, we actually run those brand ads, or ads against other competitor brands, and they do convert. So there is a strategy there to do the opposite: looking after your own brand search, but also chasing competitor brands as well. Quite often those leads can be quite a bit cheaper than head terms. We have some clients in the trade space where this tactic works very well, where there isn't a lot of brand loyalty, there isn't a lot of differentiation between services, and the market isn't necessarily very sophisticated. So things like brand search ads can work very well. I would suggest that you probably can't get away without running Google Ads for your own brand in this day and age.

5:30NAP and Citation Consistency

Let's talk about NAP: name, address and phone number, and citation consistency. Citations are basically a mention of your brand around the web. A name and address, or a name, address and phone number, is called an NAP. The consistency of your citations, or NAP, across the web is really important. One, because you don't want customers visiting the wrong location or getting old business information. Two, the NAP and citations are basically the link building in local SEO. Those citations, and the consistency and quality of those citations, will drive Google Maps rankings in particular.

Particularly for a franchise business where you have a lot of locations, and especially for an older franchise, you're going to have a lot of locations that have come and gone or that have moved. So having those citations up to date across the web is really important, not just for raw rankings but for customers as well who may be going to those locations.

6:39AI Search and LLM Visibility

Let's talk about AI search, so AI or GEO or LLM search. Again, like I mentioned, Bing is driving ChatGPT for the most part. Anytime it goes out to the web, it's using Bing search. So at a minimum, having those Bing Maps listings up to date is really important. Secondary to that, if you're an e-commerce business or have an e-commerce element to the business, having Bing Shopping set up is going to drive that portion of the search results inside ChatGPT. At the most basic level, that means making sure that you're fully indexed in Bing and all those Bing properties are up to date and accurate.

There are more broad strategies, and there are tools for tracking rankings in LLMs. If that is driving a large part of your business, then that would be more important, along with ranking for longer tail terms, or search terms that are higher up in the funnel, top of funnel or middle of funnel terms. But that is a bit more of an advanced strategy. At the bare minimum, being up to date is important there. You can read more on how to rank in ChatGPT and AI search on our site.

7:51Review Funnels and Reputation Management

Review funnels, and automating review funnels. Reviews are critical, and even more so now that search is fragmented across so many different platforms. So making sure that you have a review funnel that is completely automated and baked into the business or business processes, so those reviews happen on autopilot, is critical. A business that's got hundreds of new reviews every month is very hard to catch up with. If you have this set up on autopilot and you're getting hundreds of reviews a month, it's very hard for a competitor starting from zero, or starting from a low number of reviews, to catch up with you.

There is also activity on Google Maps listings in particular, which is correlated with higher rankings, and rankings for a broader set of suburbs. So an automated review funnel can go a long way towards helping Maps listings rank higher. It's really important that it's baked into the business processes, so that the reviews happen on autopilot.

Likewise, reputation management goes hand in hand with reviews. Make sure that you have a process in place to deal with negative reviews. It's the law of large numbers you're dealing with. If you're dealing with hundreds or even thousands of customers, there are going to be crazy people, and it may not even be the fault of the business. You may not have done anything wrong, but you're always going to have someone who is unhappy and is going to go online and put reviews everywhere, sometimes, depending on how unhappy they are. So having a system in place to monitor for those negative reviews, and doing something about it, is critical. It's not even a case of getting rid of them. Just looking proactive, and having a reply to those reviews, is important. Customers are not stupid. They understand that it's natural you're going to have some bad reviews from time to time.

9:24Content Strategy and Backlinks

Content strategy at the most basic level. Content strategy can be simple or it can be complex, but at the most basic level, if you don't have a page for something, you can't rank for it. At the most basic level, that is a page for every product and service you sell and a page for each location. That would be the starting point, and you'd be surprised at how many franchise businesses don't have that. If you don't have a page for something, you simply can't rank for it. That's a basic rule of SEO. So making sure those boxes are checked is basically the cost of entry to ranking for certain search terms.

Secondary to that, moving the first step of the sales process online would also be a relatively simple strategy to implement. Whether that's buying online, booking online like real-time booking, or the ability to see comprehensive product images or specs or videos online before someone books or buys or makes an inquiry, that is taking the first step of the sales process online. That is part of content strategy, and it's often very overlooked. There's also an innovation factor there. If you have that first step of the buying process online, someone can sit on the couch on their phone scrolling at 9:00 p.m. at night and work through that process. That puts you ahead of competitors. That's a form of basic marketing innovation that can really make a difference long term, especially in this more competitive world where we're dealing with AI search or LLMs or whatever.

Backlinks and content promotion: this is pretty straightforward. The cornerstone of SEO is getting backlinks to a website. Like I said, franchise businesses have a bit of an advantage here, because you can get links for every single location, and that is an easy way to beat competitors. In more competitive spaces, you need a more aggressive content strategy, and you might need digital PR depending on how big the franchise is, but this needs to be part of any strategy.

11:18Google Ads, Call Tracking and Email Marketing

Google Ads goes without saying. I don't think you can be competitive anymore in search without Google Ads, especially on mobile. If you load up any search term on mobile, you'll see that there are two or three scrolls before you even start looking at organic search results. So the only way to really be at the top of the page on a mobile device is Google Ads. There's just no way around that. Google Ads is often very much ignored, but it can work very well, particularly where the sale is a higher dollar amount, a specialty product, and where the numbers can justify spending a bit more on customer acquisition. But really, that's about maths. It's about how much you can pay for a customer, what they are buying, and how you convert them.

Call tracking and analytics. We use CallRail by default. Ranking isn't the end goal here. Getting a call, getting an inquiry is what we need, or getting a sale ultimately. Without call tracking and analytics, you've no idea what part of the funnel or what part of the marketing is working or not working. So it's important that we have some sort of call tracking and form analytics in place, so we can actually go back to the source of the inquiry. Ideally, we want that system hooked up to a CRM, so not only are we tracking the leads, we're tracking what happens after they call, what happens to that inquiry, and how we are managing it and nurturing it. But that's a whole separate conversation.

Email marketing needs to be a part of a franchise SEO strategy. Depending on the type of franchise, it's often completely ignored. Yet most franchises, especially older ones, again, have huge customer lists that have been built over years, decades almost. These are one of the most valuable assets a franchise has, and probably one of the most underutilized assets, and probably the cheapest marketing channel too. So it's really important that there's some sort of basic email marketing in place to manage customer emails, or get emails from customers, manage those and leverage those on an ongoing basis, with some sort of basic offer. Even a simple service business like a plumber can take advantage of email marketing with customized, intelligently built offers that go out to the market.

Typically, or broadly speaking, with any list of customers, people who've bought from you before at any time, 1 to 3% of that list is ready to buy now. So if you have a list of 100,000 customers, a thousand of those people, maybe up to 3,000 of those people, are going to be ready to buy. Say you have 100,000 people on that list and only, let's say, 40 or 50% of them open that email, so 50,000 people open it, and 1% of the market is ready to buy. That's still a lot of people for something that's pretty simple. It takes a couple of hours to do a mail out if you're doing it for the first time and setting up an email marketing tool, but those numbers work really well.

14:26Conversion, Technical SEO and Getting Help

Conversion rate optimization. This doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as making sure that any phone number mentions on the website are click to call. It could be something like having conversion optimized forms on the website, like the form we have on the WP Speed Fix homepage, or it could be more advanced, like A/B testing, but it doesn't have to be complicated. Simple things like an early close on the content, and ensuring all those phone numbers are clickable, can go a long way to improving conversion rates.

Technical marketing innovations, we kind of talked about this already. This is things like having real-time online booking on the site, stuff that adds real value for customers. These kinds of things set you apart from the competition. It can boost conversion rates and allows you to spend more on ads, too.

The last one is technical SEO and site speed optimization. It can be simple, it can be complicated, but you know yourself, if the site's slow to load, you quickly lose patience and click away. Franchise websites are no different. Particularly where competition can be fierce in local search, site speed is very important. Technical SEO is increasingly becoming important, particularly with AI search. In the age of AI, crawlers are becoming much more aggressive, so technical SEO issues and site structure issues can really hurt rankings in ChatGPT and other LLMs. So that's really important too.

That's pretty much it. I've tried to keep it short for this video. If you want help, head to our website. You can request a free audit. If you just go to our homepage, wpspeedfix.com, you can request a free audit there. Give us some details on what you're looking to do, some background about the business, and send through an inquiry. Typically one of the team will come back to you within one business day or so and tell you how we can help. Otherwise, if you have any other questions, put a comment on this video and we'll happily come back to you. Cheers.