SEO, or search engine optimization, is a digital marketing essential for your local franchise business. By utilizing proven SEO practices, you can improve your website’s rankings on search engines and drive more customers to your business. There are many aspects that go into SEO, but the first step you should take is hiring a well-respected franchise web development and SEO agency to help you market your franchise business locally. A franchise SEO agency will develop a professional website with optimized content and employ SEO strategies that will help your new website rank prominently in search results for geographically targeted keywords and phrases. This will help you attract customers locally.
Before you begin marketing your local franchise business online, it’s important that you understand the brand guidelines of your franchisor. Understand what the company’s values are and what messages it is trying to portray. Once you fully understand your brand, you should incorporate it into all aspects of your online marketing campaign for your local franchise business.
As a local franchise business, your neighbors are also your customers, so what concerns your neighbors should concern you. There are many ways to get involved in your local community, such as sponsoring a youth sports team, contributing to a local charity, hosting or participating in charity events, having a booth in a local fair or festival, holding well-publicized contests and participating in community organizations. You’ll need to spend some time out in your community to see what’s important to your neighbors.
Building a properly developed website for your local franchise business is a critical component to establishing an online presence and should be your primary area of focus as you begin your local online marketing journey. While it is important how your website looks, it is even more important how it works. The objective is not to “look cool”, but rather to allow people looking for your type of goods or services, your prospective customers and clients, to easily find you and learn something about your business and how you can help them. It’s much more than just having someone design a brochure-style website and use tricky SEO techniques to drive more traffic to your website.
The online marketing process involves leveraging a local business website, organic search engine optimization, local franchise marketing strategies, online business directories, customer review sites, and social media pages that establish your franchise business as a leader in your local or regional marketplace and will make the search engines sit up and take notice.
Savvy franchisors nowadays look to leverage the Internet and social media to strengthen marketing and branding efforts, and in turn boost lead generation and sales at the local level for their franchisees. However, it’s next to impossible to do this well without a certain level of franchisor support and franchisee participation. It’s no secret that most franchisees are unhappy with the marketing support provided by the franchisor and these franchisees are already seeking out ways to market their locations online, more and more each day.
To better understand the best path to a successful local franchise marketing strategy, check out our most recent franchise marketing article: SEO for Franchise Businesses – What is the Best Strategy for Local Search? . The article explores how multi-unit enterprises and franchises can work together to develop a strong local online marketing program and narrow the widening gap between corporate control and the local franchise owner’s need for lead generation and business growth.