Optimizing PPC for Franchises: Best Practices and Common Mistakes

Pay-per-click or PPC for franchises is a great way to get your brand message in front of potential franchisees without needing to print a forest’s worth of flyers, brochures, or newspaper ads. Today, we talk best practices and common mistakes franchise owners make when leveraging this marketing asset.

ALWAYS take advantage of the negative keyword field.

Negative keyword fields allow you to ramp up the relevance of your campaign by filtering out unwanted searchers. For example, if you’re looking for big-time investors to get on board with your franchise, you might want to omit words like “cheap,” “affordable,” and “low-cost.” These searchers won’t have the money or interest required to work with you, so why pay to have your ad placed in front of them?

NEVER ignore the power of localized keywords.

Incorporating local city names into your keyword phrases is a proven method for optimizing PPC for franchises. Most consumers prefer to deal with local businesses, and these individuals will be drawn to PPC ads that mention their hometown.

Choosing localized keywords also cuts your competition down significantly, pitting you only against those businesses in your area rather than taking on the whole world.

All in all, localized keywords means higher conversions for lower bid prices, which sums up why they must be included in PPC for franchises.

DO use long-form keyword strings; DON’T use generic phrases.

Choosing generic keywords is a major issue we see with PPC for franchises. Though it might sound like hyperbole, choosing generic keywords will fundamentally set your campaign up to fail.

People gravitate to generic keywords thinking that they’ll be searched more often, thereby increasing their odds of being seen. While it’s true that generic keywords are searched often, this line of thinking fails to take into the account either the fact that they are tremendously competitive. Moreover, generic keywords are rarely relevant to the kind of searchers you’re trying to attract.

To give you an example, a senior care franchise targeting the phrase “senior care” would face fierce competition that would cost time, money, and effort to beat. Not only are they competing with other senior care franchises, but they’re now competing with every mention of senior care in every single context! That means beating basic definitions of senior care, discussions of shifting age demographics, senior care tips, senior care service contact information, and every other iteration of the phrase you can imagine, which (surprise!) can get very expensive. On average, you can expect to pay around ten times more for generic keywords than you would for long-tail keyword strings.

Now let’s imagine this franchise somehow managed to beat “senior care” keyword competitors. Their ad pops up by anyone who searches this phrase, and gets tons of visibility. Great, right?

Wrong! Ranking for generic keywords can actually hurt you in the long run. Not only do they cost too much, but they attract a huge volume of “garbage traffic” that wants nothing to do with your franchise site – take those same people searching for basic senior care definitions, for example. These users bounce off right away, and when Google notices this user behaviour happening at a high volume, they’ll start to penalize you.

In reality, the value of PPC for franchises is only truly achieved when it attracts interested consumers. In other words, while big-budget PPC campaigns with generic keywords might get a lot of display time on browsers, they won’t necessarily get a lot of conversions.

In short, long-tail keyword strings are always best. Dive deeper into this subject at https://clicktecs.com/pay-per-click/.