One of the most complicated organization structures for an SEO is the franchise model because brands do the franchise model so many different ways. Below you will find some of the questions you and your SEO consultant should be discussing.
What is Franchise SEO Marketing?
Franchise SEO is the process of optimizing a franchise website for the search engines. The goal of franchise SEO is to improve the visibility of the franchise website in the search engine results pages (SERPs), with the ultimate goal being to increase leads and sales for the franchise.
There are a number of factors that go into optimizing a franchise website for the search engines, including on-page SEO factors (such as title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags) and off-page SEO factors (such as link building and social media engagement).
The key to successful franchise SEO is to focus on the factors that will have the biggest impact on your search engine visibility. For most franchises, this means focusing on on-page SEO and link building.
Franchise SEO Reporting and Metrics
The most important aspect of any SEO campaign is to get aligned when it comes to the SEO reporting and which SEO metrics are the most important to the owners, the brand leadership and the SEO team or vendors.
- Which SEO metrics do you use to track success for franchises?
- Keyword rankings
- #1 Position
- Top 3 Positions
- Top 10 Positions
- Featured Snippets
- Organic sessions / new users (Google Analytics)
- Which segments and filters does your analytics and data team use?
- Organic clicks (Google Search Console)
- Organic impressions (Google Search Console)
- Organic CTR (Google Search Console)
- Keyword rankings
- How do you measure data?
- Year over Year
- Month over Month
- Quarter over Quarter
Franchise SEO Funding Questions
After figuring out what the quarterly and annual SEO goals are the next questions to consider are who funds the SEO strategy?
- Shared Advertising Fund
- Franchise Owner Funded
- Hybrid Model
- Corporate Funded
Franchise SEO Questions
Here are some of the first questions you should be asking and answering when working with a Franchise SEO Consultant.
- Do you have an approved SEO vendor list that the franchise owners can choose from?
- How many different vendors are your owners using?
- Is each owner able to have more than one subfolder or subdomain?
- Do your owners use microsites? (websites external from the corporate domain)
Other Franchise SEO Considerations
- Who is responsible for making the optimizations and updates to the website(s)? Is it an in-house team, external vendor or the owners themselves?
- Are the changes being made to a development website or straight to the production (live) website.
Once all of these questions are answered the actual seo consulting can take place. If you hire a SEO consultant and they do not ask you these questions you should be weary.
