The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
As franchises can have a large number of locations by nature, search marketers are faced with the ever present hurdle of scale. More locations means more content and landing pages to manage, and a much bigger chance of running into technical SEO issues. These challenges can be even more daunting when combined with an older CMS, franchisee-generated content, and tracking issues.
At Go Fish Digital[1], we’ve been able to work with quite a few franchise businesses and advise on their SEO strategies. Over time, we’ve been able to identify common problems with these campaigns, and ways to solve these issues, the framework for which I’ll cover in this piece.
What is franchise SEO?
Franchise SEO is a set of initiatives to improve the search engine visibility of franchise websites, which are websites that promote an overall brand while at the same time offering localized pages for multiple locations of that brand. Strategies include scaling keyword research, creating localized landing pages, and removing duplicate content.
Broadly, franchise SEOs need to always be thinking about scalable approaches, local page quality, and technical issues that are common on these types of sites. Below I’ll cover some of our favorite approaches when handling a franchise site.
Franchise SEO best practices
Scaling keyword research
To start your franchise SEO campaign, you’ll want to identify and track the keywords that are most valuable to your business. Tracking your core keywords will allow you to monitor a couple of things:
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Visibility changes for individual keywords
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Aggregate rankings to see the overall SEO health of your website
The issue that most franchises face is that