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In the United States, the franchise industry accounts for almost 40% of all retail sales. Unfortunately, many franchise companies with large networks of franchisees spread throughout the country are not taking advantage of on-page search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. Here are three on-page SEO tips for franchisees to help get found by more people looking for their products and services.
1. Create an Optimized Page Title
Your page title or title tag is the most important piece of real estate on your website. Why? The page title is the first thing search engines read when crawling your site. Page titles are crucial because they tell search engines what you want to get found for. Many franchisee websites experience difficulty getting found by prospects in organic search because they haven't optimized their page title with the appropriate keywords. In fact, a common mistake many companies make is having a generic page title that reads "Home." Having "Home" as your page title tells search engines that you want to get found each time a searcher types in "Home." Not ideal.
Another common mistake is setting your company name as your page title. Making sure you are not making these two simple -- yet powerful -- mistakes will go a long way toward helping improve on-page SEO for your franchise.
What should franchisees do?
If your page title reads "Home" or "X Company," we suggest changing it to something that contains your top one or two keywords. For example, imagine that you own a leather furniture store in Jacksonville. The page title on the home page of your website should not be "Rick's Furniture Store" unless that's what you want to get found for. Rather, your page title should be something like "Leather Furniture Store Jacksonville | Leather Sofas Jacksonville" because those are likely keywords that searchers who have never heard of Rick's Furniture Store will be typing into search engines.
2. Optimize Your Page Titles Around Geographically Specific Keywords
Many local franchisee websites fail to optimize their page titles around geographically-focused keywords. Failing to do so is a simple yet costly mistake that many websites make. Making this mistake, especially if most of your business comes from a local geographic radius, means you are instead competing for keywords that are much more difficult to rank for because of the increased competition around these more broad-based keywords.
For example, a Google keyword search for "leather furniture" shows 18.8 million website pages in the Google index. A Google search for the keyword "leather furniture Jacksonville" instead has only has 299K website pages indexed in Google. This means there is a lot less competition, and therefore, it is a lot less difficult to rank organically for "leather furniture Jacksonville" compared to plain old "leather furniture." In other words, instead of competing with everyone in the country who is vying for that general keyword, you are only competing against other local businesses in your geographic area.
What should franchisees do?
Many franchisees either do not have a website or do not have access to their website to make geographically-focused SEO improvements. First, if you do not have a website for your locally owned and operated franchise, we recommend getting one set up ASAP!
Second, it's also important that your website has an easy-to-use CMS, or content management system. A CMS will allow you to easily update and edit your website when necessary instead of paying a webmaster $100 or more each time you need to make an update.
3. Use Each Web Page as an Opportunity to Rank for a New Keyword
Each individual page of your website offers an opportunity for you to rank for a new keyword in search engines.
To see this in action, perform a Google search for "George Washington." Notice that the first result that pops up is the Wikipedia page where the most important on-page SEO elements (page title, URL, H1 tag, alt text) are all optimized around the keyword "George Washington." This is not an accident. One of the reasons Google has indexed this page as the most relevant and authoritative website on "George Washington" is because its on-page SEO structure is perfectly optimized. Wikipedia also has strong off-page SEO based on its authority from inbound links, which is another contributing factor that helps this page rank so well in search engines.
What should franchisees do?
Take the time to carefully search engine optimize each page on your website for specific keywords you want to target. Make sure you weave that keyword into as many on-page SEO ranking factors as you can without sacrificing readability for your site visitors.
As a franchisee, how does your website's on-page SEO stack up? If you're making any of these three mistakes, it might make sense to spend some more time improving your on-page SEO. Your search engine rankings will thank you.
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