5 Local SEO Tips For Franchises & Their Locations
There are a few challenges to local SEO for franchisees and franchisees. These tips will help you improve your online visibility.
Local SEO is required for franchises and businesses to rank high in search engines and reach potential customers.
This includes SEO best practices like optimizing individual franchise sites and creating business listings for national and local directories.
SEO for franchises is different from regular local SEO in many ways.
Continue reading to find out how to rank franchises on Google and other search engines.
SEO for Franchises
Franchises, like all local businesses, can make use of search engine optimization to be found by potential customers.
The right SEO strategies for franchises will increase brand awareness and sales.
Increased search rankings can bring organic traffic.
You can drive leads and sales as long as your rankings are maintained.
The Unique Challenges of Franchise SEO
Online presence is a challenge for franchise owners.
Avoiding duplicate content is one of the most difficult challenges.
Each location will have its website. However, each site should look the same.
It’s harder to avoid duplicate content when you own multiple businesses in different places.
Duplicate content will not help your rankings, even if both sites have the duplicate content.
The other challenge is choosing the right SEO strategy to use for franchise websites.
Are you optimizing content for each area or business? Or do you have a national strategy to optimize the content?
It is also essential to give each franchise business the correct contact information and address.
Franchise SEO: 5 Steps To Improve Your Rankings
No matter what products or niches you’re in, these steps will help you rank for the search terms you want and drive organic traffic.
1. Use consistent branding
First, make sure you use the same branding around all of your websites.
The purpose of a franchise is to provide the same user experience at all of your physical locations.
Online presence should be the same.
Customers who visit multiple branches of your franchise can expect the same experience at each.
They will also expect the same layout and color scheme when visiting each franchise website.
It’s all about the user experience.
People may leave your site if they expect your website to look the same way but they end up on a page with a completely different design.
2. Every Franchise Website Should Have Local Content
You need to know some essentials about building a website for your franchise.
These will help you with SEO and usability, but they also give value to what users want from your website today.
- Optimizing franchisee pages using the most searched terms and including them in Title Tags and Content
- Embedded Google map showing the location of the franchise.
- Hours Operation.
- Images from your management. Work done, before and afterward. Anything unique to this location?
- Localized testimonials at that franchise location.
- Direction details. Where are you located? What areas are you available to service?
- Structured local markup.
3. Make sure you use the proper NAP
NAP stands for Name, Address, & Phone Number. It is crucial for local SEO that you use the correct format.
It would help if you used the correct NAP when running multi-location SEO campaigns.
The NAP should also be displayed in the same format on all your websites.
You can use the parenthesis to indicate the area code for a single franchise number for all phone numbers posted on franchise websites.
It is vital to use the NAP of each location rather than the corporate NAP.
It is possible to include contact information for corporate clients on a separate page and then add a “Corporate” option in the footer menu.
4. Use location-based keywords
Each website should contain location-specific keywords
Use a keyword tool to find competitive keywords and allow people to see you.
There might be better ideas than targeting national search terms on some websites.
Although you may be ranked for them, the people who land on it might not live near the franchisee.
This exception applies if your website is national and automatically redirects users to the closest franchise location.
5. Decide On A Content Marketing Strategy
This is a crucial part.
A successful digital marketing campaign will be based on content.
It can be difficult for franchisees.
- Do you want to blog about topics related to your niche, products, or interests?
- Or Should you blog about topics related to each franchise’s specific area?
It’s better to do the former.
Blog posts should be written with nearby residents in mind
There are two types of local-targeted blog posts.
The first category discusses local news and current events.
This type of blog post is helpful, but it’s only possible if you have a large target audience or sell products that are easily used by a broad range of people.
You could blog about holidays in your area if you own a franchise of a bagel shop that is located in multiple cities. Then, in the end, you might offer limited-time promotions.
It’s best to blog about the niche with a local perspective.
You could talk about how weather conditions in a particular city can cause roof damage and need repair.
You can also talk to your pest control company about common rodents and pests that residents of that area (or other areas) are most familiar with.
You can also discuss weather conditions and how they can affect hairstyles.
You can create local-targeted content if you own a nationally recognized brand.
Your brand will be known to many people.
You may be considered an authority in your field, and they might turn to you for general information.
Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts are just a few examples of such companies.
You don’t have a well-known business.
The point is that businesses with this level of visibility can be positioned as experts on hamburgers, coffee, and donuts.