If you own a franchise or multi-location business, you already know that your brand’s success depends on the success of each individual location. Each branch has its own lot of competitors to contend with, and target audience to attract. And that is doubly true for your website, online visibility, and search ranking. These challenges require multi-location businesses to adopt a unique approach to organic digital marketing: franchise SEO.
In this guide, we’ll explain what franchise SEO is, why it’s vital for multi-location businesses, and how it can help drive success for each location and brand as a whole.
Table of Contents:
What is Franchise SEO?
Franchise SEO is a specialized search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that specifically helps franchise and multi-location businesses improve rankings in local search results. Franchise SEO is unique because it optimizes each location to rank better in their geographic area under the same brand.
For example, let’s say you own a gym with multiple locations. Franchise SEO ensures that each location ranks separately for its local area. That way, when a person searches “gym near me”, the gym branch that is closest to them appears in Google search results.
In other words, each franchise location ranks better in search individually, increasing high-quality traffic and leads from potential customers, while also strengthening the brand’s online presence overall.
Why Franchise SEO Matters for Multi-location Businesses
When it comes to SEO, franchises face unique challenges: multiple locations, independent managers, and locations sharing the same website. This can make search engine ranking tricky, especially for different cities. Without a highly targeted SEO strategy, locations can struggle for visibility in search, lose potential customers to competitors, and weaken the franchise brand.
But franchise SEO specifically addresses these challenges and provides a myriad of benefits.
Improves Local Search Visibility
Word of mouth is not enough nowadays for local businesses to stay afloat and grow. More and more people rely on search engines to find products and services near them.
In fact, 86% of consumers rely on the internet to find local businesses.1 Google estimates that 97% of its users searched online to find local businesses. And of those local searches, 78% resulted in offline transactions.2
If you aren’t positioning each of your franchise locations for success online, you’re missing out on a growing percentage of potential customers.
Increases Web Traffic and Leads
Often multi-location business owners worry that when one location does well, another location suffers. And self-competition can be a very real concern if your marketing strategy doesn’t account for the fact that your business has multiple locations. But franchise SEO specifically optimizes your website(s) so that each location targets only users in its area.
Let’s return to our previous gym franchise example. A well-thought-out franchise SEO strategy helps ensure the gym location closest to the user appears in search results for “gym near me.” Instead of all your gym locations competing against each other for the top spot in search, franchise SEO helps each location target users in its immediate area.
This can help maximize each location’s reach and success by driving more high-quality traffic and website leads.
Ensures Brand Consistency
As JFK once said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Franchise SEO is smarter marketing made simple. Rather than each location having their own individual marketing strategy, their own content, and their own website, franchise SEO unifies these efforts into one cohesive approach.
Good franchise SEO uses tactics like a consistent tone of voice, standard product and/or service descriptions, uniform website designs, and a similar marketing strategy for each location. That way, users know what to expect no matter which location they patron.
Franchise SEO Best Practices
By now, you hopefully understand that franchise SEO isn’t just important; it’s crucial to your business’s online success. So, let’s go ahead and discuss best practices you can adopt in 2025 to help your franchise start ranking better.
Unified Brand Design
When it comes to web design for franchises, make sure that your branding is consistent, whether your franchise has one or many websites. A consistent online presence is key to building trust and recognition for a brand. Maintaining uniform branding ensures a cohesive customer experience.
If your franchise has multiple websites, establishing a standard template and clear design guidelines will help keep branding, tone, and messaging consistent across locations. This helps strengthen brand identity overall, while also establishing an online presence for individual locations.
And if your franchise uses a single website for all or many locations, consider using individual location pages for each branch. Location pages give each franchise branch their own presence on the shared franchise website.
Location “Landing” Pages
When your franchise shares a single website, location “landing” pages can help inform search engines and users alike that your business has more than one location. A location “landing” page, or location page for short, refers to a dedicated webpage on your website that displays a single location’s business information.
At the very least, a location page should include your location’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) information and business hours. But you can also include other details. We encourage all our franchise SEO clients to provide staff photos and profiles, as well as photos of your location. We’ve also seen great success in including details about how to find the location using other local businesses and landmarks.
There are many benefits to having individual pages for each of your locations:
- Location pages are great for sending traffic from your local listings. The information on your local listing will mirror the information on the location page, which builds credibility.
- Location pages give users more information about each location so they can choose which is most convenient for their needs. This also benefits search engine ranking because it tells Google which location serves what area.
- Location pages give more legitimacy to your individual locations as part of your franchise brand. This helps build your website’s experience, expertise, authority, and trust (EEAT), which can significantly impact your website’s search engine ranking.
Global and Localized Content
Content creation for franchises can be particularly difficult if you don’t know what to expect. On the one hand, you want content—text and images—to feel uniform and consistent. On the other hand, you also want each location to rank well for its given region. And ranking for a specific area can be hard when you’re using the same shared language across all websites. Franchise SEO helps balance global (shared) content and local (individualized) content.
Global Content Syndication
If your franchise has multiple websites, franchise SEO can help take the headache out of regulating content creation with global content syndication. Global content syndication ensures that all individual websites use the same core content, whether that’s your business’s mission statement, product details, or service descriptions.
By syndicating these parts of your website content, you can easily push changes, updates, or remove content without having to do it one website at a time. This saves you time, money, and helps ensure that users always have correct information at their disposal no matter which site they visit.
Localized Content Strategy
When you’re optimizing a franchise website, you also have to consider how to rank for multiple locations with a single domain. This can be particularly difficult when those locations are in different cities. Franchise SEO employs a localized content strategy with geo-targeted keywords to overcome this unique challenge.
For a solid localized content strategy, you’ll want to consider a few things:
- How do your customer’s needs vary from region to region? For instance, one part of town may prefer luxury options, while another may prioritize budget-friendly ones.
- How does language change from area to area? For example, people on the West Coast use the word “soda”, people in the North call it “pop”, and still others in the South call it “coke”.
- How do customers search locally? In other words, what phrases do they use to indicate they want a local result versus a national or global one? For example, someone looking for a gym in their immediate area might search “gym open now near me”.
A strong franchise SEO strategy accounts for all these aspects to create content that appeals to high-quality, high-converting users in each local area.
Local Listing Management
One of the easiest and most often overlooked aspects of franchise SEO is local listing management. Local listing management refers to the practice of identifying, optimizing, and monitoring business listings on online directory platforms. These directories act like online phonebooks: people frequently use them to find businesses in their area. The most popular online directories include Google Business, Bing My Places, Yelp, Meta Business, and Apple Maps.
When it comes to optimizing and managing your local listings, you should focus on the following:
- Ensure that your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) is correct.
- Use an appropriate webpage to send traffic.
- Make sure business hours and any upcoming holiday or specialty hours are up to date.
- Include pictures of your location, both interior and exterior photos, to give people an idea of what to expect.
By managing your local listings, you can ensure that information related to your business is always accurate and consistent across all online listings. This benefits your business for a few reasons:
- Accurate listings means that people who find your business listing will always have the most up to date information to contact or patron your business.
- Google uses referral links from websites like Yelp and Facebook as a ranking signal which can improve how well you rank in Google Search.
- Rather than waiting for potential customers to find you, local listings position your business where customers are searching.
Get a Free SEO Audit for Your Local Franchise
Despite the initial hurdles, businesses with multiple locations like franchises can still conquer local search with a tailor-fit franchise SEO strategy. And working with a digital marketing agency that specializes in search engine optimization like West County Net can ensure your business’s online success. Our SEO specialists will work with your team to develop a personalized strategy that balances your brand’s needs with those of your individual locations. With one comprehensive plan, we can ensure that no location gets left behind.
Ready to see what SEO can do for your website? Contact us today to get in touch!
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References
- The Importance of Local Search Engine Marketing – Statistics and Trends. GO Globe. Last updated 30 December 2024. Found on the internet at https://www.go-globe.com/the-importance-of-local-search-engine-marketing-statistics-and-trends/
- The Importance of Local SEO – Local SEO Statistics You Must Know. GO Globe. Last updated 21 August 2024. https://www.go-globe.com/the-importance-of-local-seo-local-seo-statistics-you-must-know/