Strategic Franchise SEO Considerations to Make Before You Build Your Website

Today’s post highlights some franchise SEO considerations that need to be addressed before your website development is underway. Read on to learn what your site needs for franchise SEO to avoid paying for web development and site architecture problems down the road!

Franchise SEO Questions to Ask Yourself Before you Build

• Who are we targeting? How large is your market? Is the audience waxing or waning? What demographics are you appealing to? How do your target users behave online?
• How we do communicate our brand message and mission statement? Once you’ve identified your company’s value proposition, you’ll need to find the right way to express it. This means using terms that the people you defined in the previous question are already searching for.
• Who are our competitors? If you’ve been in your industry long enough, you’re undoubtedly familiar with your market competitors, but we’re talking specifically about your digital competitors. Search for companies offering the same products and services and ask yourself: How they differentiate themselves? How strong is their brand? Are they beatable? Are site architecture features shared among industry leaders?

Once you’ve got an idea about your audience, brand message, and competition, it’s time to start building your site using franchise SEO best practices!

Building your Site with Franchise SEO Best Practices

• Choose a SEO-friendly URL. Beyond incorporating a relevant keyword, your URL should not be too long, and should end with either the “.com” or “.ca” domain name extension (for Canadians). The perfect franchise SEO-friendly URL will do all these things while also giving readers a better idea about your business at a glance.
• Limit your JavaScript’s. JavaScript’s don’t load particularly well on mobile devices, and they can cause crawling issues when used in excess. Franchise SEO is really about making your site easy for people and crawlers to navigate, and JavaScript complicates this. You don’t have to abandon it outright, but use it sparingly!
• Accept no substitutes for responsive web design. Responsive web designs ensure your site looks great on every single screen, whether it’s being browsed on a laptop, desktop, mobile phone, or tablet. If the fact that the majority of web searches today happen on mobile devices doesn’t convince you that responsive web design rules, know that Google authorities have recommended it, and even implied that non-responsive sites will be penalized.
• Always invest in quality hosting. One under-appreciated franchise SEO factor is page load time. Not only do mobile users tend to bounce off of sites that don’t load after 5 seconds, but Google will penalize sites with excessive wait times. In addition to investing in quality hosting, you can increase site load time by using smaller images, browser caching, minimizing JavaScript’s, and enabling compression where feasible.
• Stay diligent with site-mapping. Creating Sitemaps has been an established web design best practice for some time, but it’s now extremely important for franchise SEO. This is true because sitemaps now inform crawlers of any site updates, which means proper site-mapping can get your webpage indexed faster than the competition.

These five web design best practices for franchise SEO should get you started, but there’s plenty more to learn on the road to optimization! Visit https://clicktecs.com to find more free franchise SEO resources – including a real and recent franchise SEO case study – or get in touch with a member of our team at 866-311-7189.