SEO for Franchise Websites: 4 Simple Tips to Rank and Index Content Faster

SEO for Franchise Websites: 4 Simple Tips to Rank and Index Content Faster

June 22, 2019 By

With SEO for franchise websites, rank and index speed is a serious competitive advantage.

In some cases, getting your content read first is the difference between winning or losing a customer, such as when special promotions are being offered–it doesn’t matter how good your offer is if the customer already bought the item off your competitor, who published their special yesterday.

We want our content read as soon as it’s published. That means being able to find it in the search results as fast as possible. Unfortunately, many franchise websites aren’t set up in a way that allows their content to truly go live–i.e. be searchable and discoverable from a “neutral” off-site search engine, usually Google–from the moment they click Publish.

Ranking and indexing can be a long process. Some content takes weeks or even months to appear

There are some sneaky workarounds you can use if you can’t get your content ranked and indexed fast.

Relying on social media shares with direct links is one option. But like most others, this approach applies on you already having an established customer following that is active online and engaged with your platforms. And even companies with millions of social media followers are still limiting their audience by relying on social shares over efficient ranking and indexing–you’ll never have more followers than there are Google users, after all. Furthermore, Google searchers will be actively seeking the products, services, or information you’re promoting via content, whereas social media shares involve showing your content to “scrollers” without serious purchase intent.

Addressing your ranking and indexing problems is a much more effective approach. With that in mind, here’s 10 easy tips to rank and index your published content faster:

Leverage URL inspection/fetch and render tools.

Google provides us with some helpful tools to index content faster. Make sure you’re using them! The URL Inspection Tool is a good starting point. Think of this like the new Search Console, which was previously called Fetch and Render. With this tool, you can submit a URL (i.e. your newly published content) and tell Google to crawl it. It’s not instantaneous, but your URL is added to the “priority crawl queue,” which gets it looked much faster.

Put Sitemaps to good use.

Sitemaps are one of the quickest and easiest ways to get your URLs indexed. Make sure it’s been made available to Google–the Search Console Sitemap Report can help you there. Alternately, you can let Google know about your sitemaps by simply pinging them. It’s easy: type google.com/ping and then put in the sitemap with the URL. Take a reading break and do this now if you haven’t already!

Experiment with Google Indexing API.

The Indexing API allows any site owner to instantly notify Google about the addition or removal of any new pages. Google uses this information to schedule a fresh crawl, which can improve the quality of your traffic. This tool is meant primarily to be used specifically by sites with “job posting or livestream structured data,” but many companies have had great success employing it for SEO for franchise websites.

Avoid “orphaned” pages.

Orphaned pages are those which lack incoming links from your site’s main pages. Linking to new content from important pages like the homepage, blog, or resources page tells Google you have something new to crawl and also lends the new publication a bit of main-page authority.

Learn more SEO for franchise websites

Visit https://clicktecs.com or call 866-311-7189 to speak with a rank-and-indexing expert, or dive even deeper into SEO shop talk!

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