Build the Best Franchise Website: 2 Design Trends That Help SEO

Building a checklist for the best franchise website is tough because the answer is always changing. Not only does Google constantly update its algorithm, but certain design trends fall in and out of style in ways that can dramatically affect critical user engagement statistics.

Rather than giving you a rigid, inflexible, and soon-to-be-irrelevant definition of what makes the best franchise website, we are going to spotlight two design trends that have performed exceptionally well with crawlers and users in 2017.

Read on to learn how to make your franchise website look great and perform even better!

The Emotional Interface: Designs that evoke (or convey) emotion.

A 2012 blog by Aaron Walter discussed the value of the “emotional interface design.” Websites designed in this way try to convey a sense of the franchise’s products, services, and spirit, which makes them more memorable and engaging, and contributes to the overall branding effort.

Emotional interface design gets users more invested in your site, which makes them more likely to:

• Share content on social media or through SMS
• Link to your site in blogs or social posts
• Contribute content or participate in conversations on-site in forums or comments sections
• Remain loyal over the long haul
• Stay on-site longer, browsing additional pages

You can see how our web designers were influenced by the “emotional interface” in a recent franchise case study. This particular company emphasized their “Pleasant Remodeling Experience” as a chief selling point, so we designed the architecture with that spirit in mind. To that end, we used a very pleasing color palette of soothing pastel greens and blues, along with a no-nonsense design, and intuitive, easy-to-use navigation. When all these site design features come together, we created a calming, stress-free site experience that epitomized the “pleasant” experience the brand built itself around.

The SEO results were pretty great, too; a year-long SEO campaign garnered a 58% boost in organic traffic, along with over 70 keywords on Google’s first page.

Scroll-Triggered Features: Build interactive rewards for user engagement.

The best franchise websites tend not to overwhelm their visitors by bombarding them with offers, buttons, social links, and calls-to-action all at once. Instead, they use scroll-triggered features to “reward” users who have finished reading a particular section.

Scroll-triggered features not only boost page views and page view times; they encourage the user to give each new piece of content more focused attention than they would if they all appeared at once. With the right design, you can prime your site’s content delivery in a way that lets you pack more information, while also increasing the user’s engagement and retention.

You can see scroll-triggered features in action on our homepage at https://clicktecs.com. As you begin to scroll, a general “About us” section is replaced by an itemized service listing that sweeps in from the margins. If you continue to scroll, a slider bar of testimonials appears, before a dynamic, shifting list of featured clients is displayed. This sequence allows us to engage general searchers, then present service details to those who are interesting in partnering up, before finally presenting testimonials and featured clients to give that final push for a conversion.

This multi-leveled, “narrative”-style approach allows us to focus the user’s attention on selling points, and give them a sense of progress to keep them engaged throughout. This in turn results in better SEO outcomes, since user engagement metrics are being valued more than ever in 2018.

Learn more about how to build the best franchise website for your brand at https://clicktecs.com.