Franchise SEO

Create and Optimize Google My Business Listings for Better Google Maps Performance

When it comes to SEO for franchise businesses with multiple locations, your most important step to see better results in the SERPs (specifically on the maps side of things) is to create and optimize your Google My Business listings.

Creating a Google My Business listing is easy. Simply go to google.com/business/, sign in and get started.

The process to set up a business listing is very intuitive. Simply fill out all of the business information, placing the highest priority on showing the correct name, address, and phone number.

Be sure to do this for every franchise location.

Once each franchise location has a Google My Business listing, make sure you’ve optimized the listings. Here are a few of the most impactful pieces to optimize:

• Business hours – Be sure to always have up-to-date business hours. Google allows you to block out holidays and time off, making it extremely helpful. From a user’s perspective, the last thing we want is for a user to find your franchise in the maps, get directions to your store, and find it’s closed for the day even though the hours online say it should be open.
• Products/Services – There’s no better way to improve your Google My Business listings’ relevancy to search terms than filling out the Products or Services section of your account. This gives Google a direct way to know what you should be showing up for in searches.
• Business description – Another great way for search engines and users to see what your business is all about is through the business description, found on the Info tab in the Google Business Profile Manager, at the very bottom. Google allows 750 characters (as of June 2022), allowing you to be creative and tell a gripping story (as well as allow you to include relevant keywords for your franchise).
• Photos – Upload as many photos as possible! It’s important for users to understand that you have a legitimate business. The obvious high priority is to have Identity photos (cover photo and logo). From there, continue uploading photos as often as possible! And be sure to tag your photos as well with Interior, Exterior, At work, and Team. Again, we want users to get a good feel for your franchise.

Additional Citations

(Yelp, etc.)

Once you have created and optimized your Google My Business listings for every franchise location, find and create optimized citation listings for as many other citation sites as you can.

Yelp is a great next step after Google My Business, for every business but especially food-related businesses.

From there, you have a lot of options for creating more citation references of your franchise locations. At the end of the day, the strategy is for there to be more references of your business locations with the correct business information (see more in the step below).

There are specific tools (Yext, for example) that allow you to create a profile per location that will then push to other citation sites. This is known as an aggregator. Online software like Yext allows you to control the information across multiple citation sites (and even suppress duplicates).

Consistent Brand Info

(NAP)

A very important SEO strategy for local businesses is to ensure you have consistent brand information for every reference of each business location, especially when you have multiple business locations.

The most important information to keep consistent is the name, address, and phone number of every location.

A solid SEO campaign for franchisees will prioritize this every time because this is a quick way for users and Google to be confused about your business.

Say, for example, you started a business at home 5 years ago, creating a lot of information online about that business. Later, you moved to a new city and decided to make a small change to your business name.

In this example, there are likely references to both business, with different business names and locations, and probably different phone numbers as well.

By auditing citations and ensuring every reference of your business is updated, it will be a huge value add for users trying to find your locations online.

More Online Reviews and Consistent Online Reviews

A great way to have better online visibility for local searches is through customer reviews.

Again, our priority will be with Google reviews.

We encourage franchise owners to create a system that leads to consistent reviews.

The reason this is so important is because we can’t always change our business location and, because of that, the proximity of our business to our users’ locations (a primary ranking factor in the maps). We can, however, improve our perceived trust with users (which is another way to rank better in local searches).

Build the Right Site

Building the right site can be dependent on the type of franchise you have or are starting.

Some franchises allow franchisees to create their own microsite on a unique domain, while others only give the franchisee a dedicated page for their location.

We typically recommend a microsite and unique domain, although it’s subjective. The reason why recommend franchise websites that are not tied to the franchise site/domain is because of the level of customizability it gives us.

In short, we can do basically whatever we want if we’re working on a custom microsite.

The drawback is that it can take longer to see results.

The big benefit is that the long-term results are typically much better, as we’re allowed to create more pages and posts than we otherwise could have.