Franchise SEO Services

We’ve worked with a number of multi-location and franchise businesses and each comes with it’s unique challenges.

Different franchising models, the size of the franchise and number of locations, physical locations vs service or mobile service, territory and geographic layouts all add complexity to how a search marketing strategy is deployed in these types of businesses.

On the flip-slide, these types of businesses have in some ways a big advantage over single location small businesses – the power of multiple locations provides the unique ability to get wider coverage particularly in Google Maps or Google Local search results across much wider range of locations, cities and suburbs.

Whether you have a handful of locations or are operating a much larger franchise with several hundred locations we can help.

Click play on the video below to learn more about our approach.

Franchise SEO Needs A Systems Based Approach

Franchise SEO isn’t just about being number 1 in Google any more. To be successful today it’s more about building a sustainable, repeatable system that can be replicated across multiple locations quickly.

Our Approach & Recommended Strategy

Broadly our approach and strategy for franchise SEO is the same for all businesses. We’ve honed these techniques over 15 years of providing SEO and search marketing services through our WPSpeedFix brand and our sister brand The Search Engine Shop, a web agency focussed on Australian customers.

Over the years our strategy has evolved from a purely SEO focus to a more broad search marketing strategy.

In order to be competitive online, today’s approach needs to cover a variety of areas including:

Local SEO and Maps Rankings

Traditional local SEO usually refers to ranking your Google Maps listing or Google Business Profile for relevant searches.

Today search is much more fragmented and ranking in LLMs like ChatGPT is becoming increasingly important. Depending on the type of market you operate in this can change the approach quite considerably. Because ChatGPT currently relies largely on Bing search, Bing Maps listings and reviews on those listings have significantly more importance.

Citation link building continues to be a key part of local SEO and in a franchise with many locations, this often requires heavy attention.

Brand SEO

Arguably brand searches are the absolute pinnacle of search and the most valuable search terms and often the most overlooked.

Ensuring high quality SERPs for your brand search results is key as is utilizing Google Ads brand search campaigns which can often be critical to defending against competitors high-jacking brand searches.

NAP and Citation Consistency

NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency is equally, if not more important that citation building as NAP inconsistency can absolutely destroy local SEO performance.

Incorrect citations and NAP details can also have customers visiting old business addresses and visiting locations outside business hours.

The older a business is the more important NAP consistency is as business locations tend to change over time.

AI, GEO or LLM SEO

With the rise of AI and LLMs, GEO (generative engine optimization) is becoming increasingly important. AI is developing rapidly and as such the tactics are changing too. For example, as mentioned above, ChatGPT largely relies on Bing search results and as such, being fully indexed in Bing and having clean, well reviewed Bing Maps listings is becoming increasingly important.

Automated Review Funnels

High quality customer reviews on key properties like your Google Business Profiles, Facebook Page, Bing Maps and Apple Maps are critical.

The key to generating a large number of reviews is building automated review funnels and baking these directly into business processes so they happen on autopilot.

It’s incredibly difficult for your competitors with a small number of reviews to compete with you when you’re generating 100s of reviews per month on autopilot.

Reputation Management

It’s only natural that when you deal with 100s or 1000s of customers on a monthly basis there are going to be customers that have a bad experience. It may not even be your fault, some customers will just never be satisfied so you’re always going to have to deal with 1 and 2 star reviews.

When done right, implementing review and reputation management processes that effectively deal with bad reviews can actually help boost your marketing and identify service delivery gaps or issues with particular franchises or territories.

Content Strategy

You simply can’t rank for something if you don’t have a page for it.

At the most basic level, you absolutely must have a page of content for every product or service you sell and a page for each location – that’s the absolute minimum requirement in order to rank in the search results.

Once these basics are dialed in, a more comprehensive content strategy to address top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel buyers can dramatically boost website and search marketing performance.

Taking the first step of your sales process online can pay off big time for many businesses. This differs greatly depending on the type of business you run.

For example, this may be in the form of comprehensive product images, product videos and technical specifications, realtime online booking capability where customers can schedule an appointment 24/7 without having to call you, buyers guides, tools and pre-sales qualifying checklists or downloadable resources.

Backlink and Content Promotion Strategy

Backlinks are a cornerstone of SEO and ranking in any modern search engine – a fundamental and foundational part of any local SEO and franchise backlink strategy is citation and social profile building.

In more competitive spaces a more aggressive backlink and content promotion strategy is required. Typically this will involve some form of digital PR and promoting content across social channels.

Google Ads

No franchise search marketing strategy would be complete without Google Ads. Google is essentially a paid search engine with some free results and if you’re not leveraging Google Ads, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

If you check the search results, particularly on mobile, you’ll notice that its a good 2-3 scrolls before you even begin to reach the regular organic search results. Google Ads opens up the opportunity to dominate the top of the page particularly in mobile SERPs.

Google Ads also works particularly well where the product or service being sold is more expensive and the numbers all for a much higher cost of customer acquisition.

Call Tracking & Analytics

Search is no longer a single channel or just “ranking number 1 in Google” like it may have been 5 or 10 years ago.

Today “search” is a behaviour and can happen on a number of devices, platforms and search engines before the customer decides to make a call or send an email.

Call tracking and analytics is a fundamental part of any franchise SEO strategy and without it, you simply have no idea as to which parts of your marketing are actually working.

Typically we recommend Callrail for phone call tracking, form tracking and analytics as it’s well supported and easily integrated into a variety of platforms.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is often completely ignored by franchises yet customer lists, often built over decades are one of the most valuable assets a franchise business owns.

Email marketing is one of the cheapest marketing channels a franchise can utilize and even the most basic email marketing campaign can perform exceptionally well.

Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO or conversion rate optimization doesn’t have to be complicated, it can be as simple as adding an early close and call to action to product or service pages, ensuring all phone numbers on the site are clickable and using conversion optimized forms like the form on our homepage.

CRO can also be more involved with A/B of landing pages on the website or A/B of Google Ads on the frontend.

Technical and Marketing Innovations that deliver real value to customers

In this bucket we’d put simple innovations like 24/7 livechat and real-time online booking. These simple innovations can dramatically improve conversion rates. Particularly in local search, where it’s winner take all, conversion rate optimization improvements like this can dramatically improve the commercials of a business.

Technical SEO & Site Speed Optimization

You know if yourself, when a site is slow to load you quickly lose patience and click away. Your site is no different. Passing Google’s Core Web Vitals benchmarks is critical for franchise businesses where local competition can be fierce.

Technical SEO is becoming increasingly important particularly in the age of LLMs, GEO and AI Search. AI search crawlers can be much more sensitive to site structure and technical issues so it’s critical your technical SEO is on point.

Our Team Can Help

Typically most of our SEO and search marketing work starts with a technical and onpage SEO audit. That said, we can tailor our services to your specific needs.

To start started, complete our free site audit form and tell us what you’re looking to do and what you need help with. Our team will review your request and come back to you typically within a day or so.