Five SEO Strategies That Work for Franchises

Business owners whose companies are growing, whose income is increasing, and who feel like they are ready for the next step often take a hard look at franchising. If part of your long-term growth strategy is to franchise your business, expand your brand, and expand your reach, then incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) into your digital marketing strategies is going to be key to your success.

At InnoVision Marketing Group, we understand what it takes to successfully market a franchise at both the franchisor and franchisee levels. Like any local business, franchises need to utilize digital marketing and franchise-focused SEO to rank in search engines and reach customers. From our marketing experts, here are five tried and true SEO strategies that help franchises rank higher.

1. Utilize Location-Based Keywords

Businesses that utilize SEO to boost their online presence naturally focus on keywords and content that apply to their products or services and the company as a whole. Including location-based keywords is also important, especially in franchise SEO. You need to maximize SEO for each individual franchise location.

The specific location-based keywords you choose to define your business will set it apart from the other franchisees and help you to better compete against similar businesses closer to your location. It may seem counterintuitive to focus so narrowly in your franchise SEO strategy, but customizing your keywords will help you target the right customers for each location.

2. Optimize Your Online Presence

Having an online presence means more than just having a website or social media pages. Take the time to check for, claim, update, or create Google Business Profiles and Yelp business pages to bring in even more customers. Accurate and up-to-date information is crucial on these pages if you want to succeed with your franchise SEO strategies.

Listings and review pages like Google and Yelp are trusted sources of information for many consumers, even more trusted than a business’s main webpage in many cases. Customers will often defer to what it says on either one of those platforms. This is why keeping everything updated is so important.

3. Build Consistent Branding

While you need to narrow things down with your franchise SEO keywords, you want to broaden out again when it comes to branding. Franchisees have some freedom in their individual locations, but the overall branding of the store and products tends to be consistent for all locations. So, you get to choose the colors, fonts, logos, and general theme that will identify every one of your stores as part of your franchise. This way, when people see that design and color, they know it’s associated with a name they know and trust. It’s no different when you want to be recognized online.

People take in thousands of pieces of information a day. To get noticed, it’s important that you stand out—whether people come across you on social media on search engine result pages. You need to use the branding you’ve worked so hard to create so customers recognize your brand when they shop online, from their local franchise location, or from a global distributor.

At InnoVision Marketing Group, we help franchises create the perfect representation of their businesses for their websites, marketing material, and digital presence. It’s important to communicate your branding message through web design and development that is innovative, unique, and user-friendly. Once your business is known to be good at what it does, your branding can help attract even broader audiences.

4. Optimize Your Blog for Organic Searches

A blog is a great way to engage with customers and potential customers. You can talk about your products or services, highlight current events, or discuss topics more broadly related to your business. Taking your blog a little further by adding SEO, however, can improve your search engine ranks and increase traffic to your website.

With a few tweaks, your content can work a little harder for you:

• Include an image.
• Use one relevant keyword in each blog article. Include it in the title and mention it a few times throughout the article. Avoid keyword stuffing, however.
• Utilize location-related keywords to draw attention to specific franchisee locations and rank well in locally based searches.
• Break your articles into several smaller sections and designate heading levels to improve readability.
• Optimize the URL to include the title of the article and/or the keyword.
• Write a meta description of what the article is about and include your keyword.
• Select relevant categories and tags for the article.

5. NAP and EAT

N-A-P stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. Using the correct format is critical for local SEO in all forms. Search engines constantly check for NAP consistency across platforms to keep determining which are the legitimate business listings. NAP should be in the same format on each of your websites. If you use the +1 before the area code of one franchise’s number, use it for the phone numbers posted on the websites of all franchises. Don’t forget to use each location’s NAP instead of the corporate NAP. You can include corporate contact details on a separate page and put a “corporate” option in the menu.

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, and it’s even more important for local franchise SEO success. We have mentioned trustworthiness before. Customers want to trust that your brand is a safe and reliable source for your product or service. Businesses that include a variety of content, such as customer reviews, product descriptions, contact information, FAQs, and so on show consumers they are reliable.

InnoVision Marketing Group wants to help you grow your business into a thriving global franchise through web traffic and targeted franchise SEO that represents everything you do and the communities that care about you. Take advantage of our expertise to support your work and help you be successful. Contact InnoVision today.