Franchise Website SEO 101: The 2018 Beginner’s Guide

Today’s post is for newcomers to the art of franchise website SEO. Read on for a succinct beginner’s guide to this essential advertising strategy that factors in Google’s 2018 algorithm changes.

What is franchise website SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a combination of web marketing strategies used to boost your franchise website’s visibility and ranking in search engines.

Simply put, webmasters use SEO to tell search engine crawlers that their sites are of high quality and relevance, and that they’ll do a good job of answering the user’s specific search queries. In 2018, franchise website needs to go beyond playing to the crawl-bots and focus on giving the user the best possible browsing experience.

Broadly speaking, franchise website SEO consists of:

• Franchise website content;
• Franchise website structure;
• Number of links to a franchise website.

How important is franchise website SEO?

Assuming that the goal of your site is to generate traffic – whether that’s to drive customers to your franchise unit or to attract qualified candidates to your franchise opportunity – franchise website SEO is non negotiable.

Some franchise owners generate an impressive amount of traffic from their social media platforms and outreach, but search engines are still by and large the primary source of visitors. Search engine traffic is also generally more valuable to franchise owners because it is highly targeted, as opposed to non targeted social media visitors with no real intent to buy your product.

What should I look for in franchise website SEO packages?

• Keyword research. Your franchise website content needs to pinpoint search terms that your target audience uses to connect with those potential buyers. This boils down to determining audience intent, as well as useful industry jargon, which will be different for every business. Get in touch with our franchise website SEO team for more on keyword research.
• On-page SEO. Fit your keywords into title tags; leverage SEO-friendly URLs; and add modifiers to your title (years, “best,” “guide,” or “review,” for example) to rank for long-tail versions of competitive phrases. Wrap your titles in H1 tags; use H2 tags for keyword-loaded subheadings; and be sure to drop your keyword in the first 100 words of any targeted copy. Use high-quality outbound links to boost your page’s relevancy signal, and add 2-3 internal links to every post for better indexing.
• Emphasize site speed. Google has publicly stated that page speed is used as a prominent ranking signal, which makes it a major part of franchise website SEO in 2018. Most users won’t revisit a site that takes longer than 4 seconds to load, and 60% won’t even let the page finish loading! Switching to faster hosting, compressing images, and content delivery networks (CDNs) will all up your site speed.

• Regular, long-form content. The old franchise website SEO adage that “length is strength” should not be ignored. Expand content you want to rank with to at least 500 words for best results, but don’t go overboard with 3000+ word posts unless you have a specific reason to do so. Regular content is best, since Google rewards sites based on the “freshness” of their posts.
• Off-page SEO. Some of your franchise website SEO takes place on other people’s sites, namely link-building. Getting links from Wikipedia, social bookmarking, blog comments, and guest posts are all viable tactics. You can read more about sustainable link-building tactics in our blog this month, or contact a member of our team directly at https://clicktecs.com/contact-us

That’s all for today’s introductory guide, but you can keep the conversation going by visiting our blog or calling 866-311-7189 for a free consultation.