Do you know that local SEO can be an incredible approach for franchises? Local SEO enables franchises to get closer to customers thus boosting website traffic as well as one on one businesses. However, we can’t mention franchise SEO without mentioning Tom Johnston an expert in search engine marketing as well as an SEO professional.
When put together with offline marketing and pay-per-click approaches, SEO takes the lead to be the affordable approach in terms of costs-per-lead. It is good to know that operating franchise SEO can be complicated as one will be handling numerous mobile components like domain versus sub-domains, local versus corporate landing pages, national versus regional visions, mobile versus operators. Additionally, an effective local SEO strategy for franchises involves a lot, especially on the creation stage.
This article, will explain what local SEO is, why franchises should use SEO and ways that local SEO can be implemented to ensure franchises get more customers online.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is an approach that aims at optimizing websites to enable it to be displayed in search results when a user searches locally on search engines. Local SEO has grown tremendously as a result of the advent of smartphones where more people are connected to the internet in whatever locations they are.
Although Search Engine Optimization is the word that is popularly used, local SEO’s main aim is to make you stand out from the websites of businesses in your city or region. It can be termed as a digital version of the old phone book or Yellow Pages in your region. What makes the difference between local SEO and the Yellow Pages is that local SEO makes your business easier and far for accessible to more searchers online.
To some extent, local SEO can be said to interrelate with organic SEO but these are two different things since local SEO enables a searcher to get search results that are significant on their present cities or regions.
Several tactics are involved when operating local SEO such as incorporating geographic keywords in you post, title tags and Meta descriptions, including particular city or region details on your site as well as incorporating region-specific endorsements and reviews. When you are already a franchise, you are a beneficiary of a well-known brand but how do you ensure potential prospects find your exact city or region? Local SEO is what you need!
Why do franchises need to leverage local SEO?
Local SEO has numerous benefits to franchises and one of them is that it keeps your business at a higher chance of being seen by customers on your city or regionally.
Since franchises enjoy the benefit of marketing established brands, prospects are not worried when visiting currently developed locations. However, there is the need to make customers to know that they can access a specific location in their city or region else they will not be able to visit and buy products. This now calls for both who work in the corporate workplaces of a franchise brand and those who are owners of particular locations to make maximum use of local SEO so that they can get more customers and generate more sales.
Local SEO approaches for Franchises
Let’s face it, if you are a franchise, you must admit that you experience distinctive challenges as with any other franchise when it comes to digital marketing and local SEO. This article will also highlight some of the popular local SEO strategies that are used by franchisees.
Although local SEO is a continuing approach, the following common strategies are helpful when it comes to the launching of your franchise in search engine results.
List each specific site of yours in Google Maps
Unlike in the olden days where it was difficult to find a storefront, today you just search for it on Google and it displays the results for you. Google has map features that enable people to get GPS directions to where they want within a single click of the mouse.
However, it might be difficult for your businesses to appear in Google’s map search results without enlisting them using Google My Business. It’s a very simple and easy process as you just need to visit Google’s map website where you will be led by a step by step procedure. Once you are done with the process of account creation on Google maps, your business will be able to display whenever a customer searches for its direction.
Listing pages
In this strategy, the franchise has all information in a central site that contains all the necessary information concerning the business. Another important thing that works well with a franchise is a blog and social media pages like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram account and even a Google plus page. One of these pages is where the important contact information is listed.
Regularly list your site Name, Address and Phone Contacts
It is good to note that, customers are most interested in knowing your location’s name, address and phone number as well the working hours. In fact this is very crucial for any local SEO effort. To ensure these details are listed by search engines in an appropriate manner, you must make sure you regularly list them on a variety of web pages as you can. Note that, search engines will always list multiple details which they can verify. So if you don’t list your details consistently, it will be hard for search engines to display them when a user searches for them.
Ensure your location’s name, address and phone number appear in the:
- Caption, footer or sidebar of your location’s site to enable it to be visible on all the site’s pages
- On every location’s Social Media page you own.
- On every reviewed site where your location is reviewed.
- Sin corporate directories like Google My Business.
Use keywords that are related to your specific location
This is one of the sure-fire ways to ensure your business is visible on local searches. For instance when you own a store that is based in your city or region; you need to include your city or region in your keywords in all your essential title tags, headers and body of contents.
