No franchiser wants to see their brand fade into the background. You want your brand to grow and attract new franchisees. And the trick to doing that means treating your franchises like they’re famous.
First of all, you want your franchise to be locally famous. Don’t think of it as an extension of headquarters, but as a local business that can be well-known in its own right; this way, you’ll attract repeat customers. Not only that, but if your franchises are profitable, your possibilities of attracting new business are growing.
Your goals boil down to helping your franchisees perform better. These days, that means making sure your franchise marketing is working: most crucially, it’s making sure potential customers find you.
Are you aware that:
These five online marketing tips below are based on these changes in user behavior. Read on and learn how to make your franchisees even more profitable.
The share of mobile internet usage is rapidly growing. You don’t want to lose out on this traffic, which is why you need to make sure your site and franchisees’ sites (if those sites are separate) are optimized for mobile users’ experience.
When designing for mobile, keep these user experience (UX) tips in mind:
When someone is looking for food, home repair services or a store, they usually indicate the location they need: “Italian Restaurant Liverpool downtown,” or even, “vegetarian store near me.” For location-specific searches, Google has specialized map listings, which point users directly to the nearest place on the map.
To improve your local business ranking in Google Map Results, keep in mind that:
You need to research for which keywords you want to rank — that’s usually a combination of your business type and location, which go together to match how your customers find you online:
“Chinese food Norwich”
“home care services Philadelphia downtown”
“roofer and drainage service near me”
In order to choose the right long tail keyword, you need to do some research with the help of a keyword tool to discover keywords that (a) have a high search volume, (b) have a low competition rate and (c) match your area of service. To successfully rank for your search term, you need all of these factors together, in the right balance. If you choose a keyword with a very high search volume, the competition might be too fierce to be able to make an impression, but if you choose a keyword with very low competition, it may not be searched for frequently enough to bring you traffic.
We usually advise clients to go with the most localized keyword, since that’s where competition is lowest, chances to rank are highest, and users are most willing to convert: in your case, that means making an appointment, ordering food or showing up at your location right away.
Make sure your business information is consistent across directories with a category, description, name, address and phone (NAP). The top local directories to go after are:
Use your keyword research to include them in the description of your business’s online listing and to improve your on-page optimization. For the title, you should use your business name as is: “Noodle Bar Feng Shui.” (It’s NOT recommended to include your location: “Henrietta Home Care | Liverpool.”
For best results in local listings, Google recommends that you:
Here’s a very handy tool which will help you:
Once you’ve added or updated your franchisees’ listings in all the major directories with consistent NAP, you should continue adding it to other local directories on a regular basis. Aim for 5 to 10 new listings per month.
Don’t forget to keep your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistent, so the bots identify your business and aggregate results from all directories.
Adding images and videos to your listings increases the click-through rate, since users are more likely to choose a listing with images than those without. Images of your office, restaurant or business location work well.
Your click-through rate is an important ranking factor for Google Map results ranking. If yours is high, it will eventually increase your position in local listings results.
No doubt, you already have many happy customers. Email them or request on social media that they recommend your services to others. Positive user reviews will drive new clients to your door and will help increase your rankings in Google Maps.
Google’s AdWords platform can help you reach your clients faster during this mobile and local shift in the users’ search behavior. Below, we’ve listed some new techniques and tips that can lead to rapid changes in how your ads perform:
Look at this blog post for more details on how to optimize your Google AdWords campaigns for mobile.
Many local business websites use the same page title and meta description for a whole set of pages. This is a big rookie mistake.
Since these two pieces of metadata tell search engines what a given page is about, it’s crucial that the title and description are unique for each page. If you have the same metadata on your homepage and all of your franchisees’ pages, you’re decreasing your chances of ranking well in search results for any of them.
Make sure you have a clear website structure. The best practice is to have the services you provide as main menu items, so that they are available for your users and the search engines to review and index (e.g. Roofing, Drainage, Home Repair, Painting). These services are usually the keywords people use to find you online, so you want to keep them central in your website structure and with clear descriptive titles and meta descriptions.
Once you have the main structure right, make sure your keywords are integrated into your page titles, meta descriptions and in the headings of your content. You can check your site’s page titles and meta info with Screaming Frog and see which titles/meta descriptions are duplicated.
For example:
<title>Home Repair Services Manchester | By Handyman</title>
<meta name="description" content="Professional emergency help with roofing, drainage, electrical issues, plumbing, and more. Serving Manchester, Stockport, Salford, Reddish.">
<h2>Roofing Services</h2>
<h2>Electrical Issues</h2>
<h2>Emergency Plumbing</h2>
Your site has to be fast. Users will often lose interest if a page takes more than a few seconds to load. And since Google doesn’t want to frustrate their users, slow sites don’t show up high in the results.
Use GTMetrix to see how quickly your website loads.
There’s still tons more you can do to help your franchisees thrive. Check out our other blog posts for more tips and feel free to contact us if you have questions or need assistance.
With my extensive knowledge of SEO, I take a personalized approach with each SEO strategy tailored to the unique needs of each client.
