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Tag: multi-location businesses

Successful Franchisers Do These 5 Things to Find More Leads Online

Ok, so you finally made that leap of faith and decided to franchise your business. And why not? You have a proven business model that works. Your operational systems are tried and tested. You know how you want to grow and the best locations for success. It is equally important to build and protect your brand. Trust me, I have seen what can happen when you blindly give your logo to someone with publishing software without brand standards in place. You will end up with ads like this.

As a franchise owner, you may have already seen the difficulties with maintaining brand consistency across all of your marketing. Before pushing into online advertising, take a deep breath and then read this blog or view this SlideShare that provides five tips that will help you land more leads online.

April 21, 2016
4 Tips for Managing the Reviews & Reputation of Your Multi-Location Business

Managing your business’s online presence can help you set yourself apart, especially when it comes to big franchises and multi-location businesses that are often too large to handle things like responding to reviews.

1. Monitor What’s Being Said About Your Overall Brand

By using tools that monitor mentions of your brand name online, you can keep a pulse on the overall tone and sentiment customers express about your brand. Social Searcher is a simple, free tool that allows you to track mentions on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ and to get alerts about the mentions in your email inbox. This can help you reply to feedback about your business that comes in forms other than review platforms like Twitter posts and Facebook statuses.

2. Address Reviews Both Good and Bad

Responding to reviews online is important for showing that you are a brand that is active and engaged in your widespread community. It is often assumed that large franchises and multi-location businesses are too big to handle the relatively large amount of feedback they receive. Being able to manage and respond to those reviews is a great way to set yourself apart from your competitors and show concern for and interest in your customers. While it’s much easier to respond to positive reviews, responding to negative reviews gracefully and respectfully can also lead to a greatly improved reputation for your business.

3. Check Out Industry-Specific Review Sites

Some industries have their own niche sites where you’ll find reviews. These are great opportunities for building and understanding your business’s online presence for those who are actively engaged in your industry. For example, GolfNow is a site that helps golfers locate courses all around the US and even internationally. Within each course’s listing, you can also find reviews from golfers that use the site. Another interesting feature of this review site, which can be seen on the Audubon Institute‘s Audubon Park Golf Course listing, is that reviewers who book their golfing experience through GolfNow are shown as “verified,” which gives more authority to the reviews. Having authoritative resources across the web pointing back to your business is also a great way to increase your business’s visibility in search engine results.

4. Get Creative with Review and Testimonial Opportunities

Think about what type of engagement your business attracts and try to come up with a way to engage and feature your customers’ feedback on your site. Everyone these days is taking pictures of their food, so restaurants would be smart to feature tags of their food in the form of an Instagram stream on their site using free tools like Instansive. These kinds of tools allow you to generate a code to implement on your website that shows photos from your username or using a unique tag. Similarly, business owners can take note from the clever Donaldson Plastic Surgery. Dr. Donaldson’s patients are proud to share their selfies and testimonial videos on site, so this is a great opportunity to leverage positive reviews for their business in a fun and engaging way.

Whether you’re a three-location local business or a countrywide franchise, it’s important to maintain control of your online presence. Check out the ways in which Search Influence can help your business grow its presence online on our services page.

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Five-Star Image

January 19, 2016
Google My Business Brings the Holiday Cheer with Special Office Hours Pre-Sets

Yesterday, a new My Business feature was published by Google in the product forums. This new feature allows business owners to pre-set special hours to their My Business listing for holiday closings or special times that are exceptions to your day-to-day office hours.

There is more information in Google Support documentation. If you have many locations to update, there is a spreadsheet upload feature. If your business has hours that extend into a second day, there is information on how to manage that scenario.

Editing Your My Business Special Hours

This morning, I updated the office hours of a local credit union. This feature will be especially helpful in publicizing the dates their office is closed in the upcoming weeks. It will also be especially helpful to the community for finding the times each branch is closed, and we know Google is focused on user experience.

Once you log into your Google account, navigate to your list of locations and choose one location to edit the location details. Scroll down to “Special Hours” below the standard “Hours.”

Click on “Special Hours,” and you can choose a day from a drop-down calendar and either apply early closing hours or mark if the office is closed the entire day.

If the hours will be the same at all of your locations, Google has thoughtfully provided a button to apply the hours to all locations within your account.

Your final Special Hours or office closing times may look something like this for your summary review. Some days they are closed, and some days the branch is closing early:

Great New Feature

You may want to set up some reminders to update your holiday hours every quarter or every six months.

I know businesses have wanted this feature for quite some time, and now it’s available just in time for Thanksgiving and the December holidays. Very good timing, Google!

November 4, 2015
Continuity Is Key: 5 Tips for Syncing Up Your Multi-Location Franchise Marketing Plan

To the Small Business/Franchise Owner Interested in Growth:

You have started a business and are considering an expansion, which will include another location (or several)! In doing so, you’ve been able to achieve what many people only dream of doing. You’re reaping the rewards and ready for more, so what do you do next with this new intent to further grow your business?

You probably have hundreds of things on your business “to-do list,” but be careful not to lose sight of your online marketing efforts along the way. After all, 97 percent of consumers search online for products and services, according to SCORE, a U.S. Small Business Administration-supported nonprofit association. Although 51 percent of small businesses have websites, many are not built for success. Simply put, the success of a business can depend on the success of its online marketing strategy. Therefore, while you may be concerned with all of the logistics of expanding, you must remember to analyze your current marketing and understand how to evolve your strategy with regards to the changing business environment.

Small businesses have great potential to benefit from localized advertising and franchise marketing. Several factors are to be considered when expanding your marketing strategy across multiple locations with regards to SEO for small business, Internet franchise opportunities, and more.

Timing (Is Everything)

As with your decision to open a new franchise location, the timing of your release of marketing initiatives is crucial. If your marketing efforts are out of sync, you can easily confuse potential customers about your brand and the logistics of your new operation. Here are a few questions you should ask yourself about the timing of your Internet marketing efforts:

•Are your locations on different schedules?

•Is the seasonality of one business different than another? For example, if you work in retail, will one store have a stronger focus for the holiday season?

•Does one location exist in a space where certain holidays or events are celebrated that have lesser (general) importance? For example, if you operate a clothing store in Baton Rouge and want to open a new location in New Orleans, you have to consider adding merchandise and respective advertising for events like Red Dress Run, White Linen Night, and of course, Mardi Gras.

Implement Franchise Social Media at the Local Level

Whether it was a part of your previous local business Internet marketing efforts or you’re new to promoting your business on social media, it is important to create and maintain a social media strategy as your business grows and you build more locations. From there, you can manage your growing business and make sure the right people are seeing you throughout their daily routine on their platform of choice, and you can investigate the Ads Managers available to your business. Keep these questions in mind while you consider what role social media plays in franchise SEO for your business expansion:

•Do your multiple locations all warrant the same type of social media coverage?

•Do you have to create a new Facebook page for your new location, or can your posts promote all of your locations at once with the same content?

•Is one platform suited for all of your audiences, or does your new location/venture speak to a different client base that may be better reached another way?

Consistency Across Platforms

In addition to social media, it is important to make sure you provide marketing coverage for your business across all of your existing channels. Maybe your new location is something you want to push a little harder, so you might decide to purchase an outdoor advertising package or a television ad spot! No matter what marketing channels you use, do not lose sight of your original message. Don’t get so caught up in your expansion that you lose your brand and unique identity. Make sure that, no matter the platform, whether it’s traditional or digital media, you are consistent in your output.

Content Marketing Strategy

During this tumultuous time that could possibly make or break your brand, it is crucial to produce fresh, up-to-date content with a consistent message across all of your media channels. More eyes will be on you during the first few weeks (even months) of your new location, so soak up that limelight and wow them with fresh and captivating content! Keep in mind “content relevance.” For example, if your new location attracts a different type of customer, even a slightly different type, think about the sort of content that will spark their interests the most. Research the latest trends in your industry and see what they’re suggesting you write about or how you present yourself. Always remember: the medium is the message!

Build Solid Relationships

You’ve done it from the very start of your business, and it continues to be important as your business grows. Networking never goes out of style. As your business grows and you expand your marketing across multiple platforms, remember to keep spreading the word about your brand! Of course, if your brand is well-established already, people may be excited enough that they will come to your additional location without question. But some may require more convincing. Therefore, don’t neglect the relationships and connections you’ve made throughout the life of your business, as they can prove useful in helping to promote your newest venture.

Want to make sure you attract customers online for your expanding business or franchise? When it comes to online marketing solutions for multi-location businesses and franchises, trust the experts at Search Influence. For example, a Search Influence franchise client with more than 160 locations saw a more than 85 percent increase in total website traffic and an increase of more than 135 percent in total organic (unpaid) website traffic. This website traffic increase resulted from just two years of online marketing efforts. To translate that to dollars, revenue generated from organic website traffic increased by 65 percent. If you would like to see these results across your own business, contact us today to get started with a new, successful strategy to online marketing with Search Influence.

August 13, 2015
More Locations, More Problems? Optimize Your Franchise SEO—Part 2
In part two of this two-part series about how to successfully optimize your franchise SEO, you will find three more winning strategies and steps for multi-location or franchise SEO.

It’s All About Location

The effort to have each location found in its own market is often perceived as the most challenging part of multi-location SEO. In part one of this series, we discussed the importance of building the central brand. Now we will tackle how to deal with individual location information, and the ways your franchisees can help to best optimize your franchise marketing and location SEO.

1. On-Site Location Pages

Now that you have built up your central brand, it is time to focus on your individual franchises. Each franchise location should have its own location landing page on your company’s website. Taking extra care to create separate location pages allows search engines to better understand that you have individual locations in specific geographic areas. It also gives you an opportunity to tell users about the unique products and services offered at each different location.

Here is a list of the necessary elements for an effective location page for Internet franchise opportunities:
- My Map to Google+ page
- Unique content for the specific location
- Directions to the location from different landmarks, highways, surrounding cities, etc.
- Photos of the location
- Reviews of the location (probably best to have a separate page for these)
- List of products and/or services (should link back to the main products/services pages)
- Schema MarkUp to the name, address, and phone number
- Link to the individual location’s social profiles
- Link to staff member profile pages
- Strong call to action
As with all web pages, it is a best practice to implement unique, compelling content on your location landing pages. Users expect a rich experience when navigating your site, and bland content may turn them away. At the same time, content that is too dense with information or full of keywords may deter users from your web page. To keep site visitors interested, give them valuable information using bullet points in case they are in a hurry. Some multi-location businesses leave a portion of these elements to be completed by the individual franchise owners and managers. In an ideal world, this would be an effective solution, but knowing that these kinds of franchise marketing requests are often put on the backburner, it is best to have a solitary stakeholder in the corporate office responsible for these tasks.

2. Citation Building

Citation building is perhaps the most daunting exercise when approaching multi-location SEO. As it is with SEO for single-location businesses, consistency of name, address, and phone number in your online business listings is key. You will often see name formats including the location, such as “Company Name – Lakeview Location.” However, this is not a best practice for SEO purposes. Instead, remove the location information, and keep the business name exactly the same for all of the locations. The different addresses and phone numbers for each location will be enough to differentiate them for both Google and your potential customers.

Each location should have a unique business description written for its online listings. This task may be best completed by individual franchisees, as it might be difficult for any one individual to write multiple, unique descriptions for essentially the same business.

On the other hand, you should choose the same categories and logo for every location. Adding unique pictures of each location and its staff would be a nice touch, as well, but it may not be worth the trouble if you have upwards of 10 to 15 locations. Some directories will offer more fields than others. It is in your best interest to provide as much information as possible.

Rather than taking on the incredibly time-consuming task of doing this for each individual business directory for every single location, consider using Moz Local. This tool makes pushing out each location’s name, address, phone number, categories, business descriptions, etc., to major directories as easy as a simple click of your mouse.

As you can see below, the major online data feeds and directories share their information with each other, which should allow Moz to take care of most of your citation building and cleanup. Just 90 days after you submit the listings to Moz, go back and see where you stand. Some manual cleanup may be required.

Expanding your search for niche directory opportunities for your company’s industry and each franchisee’s market is also highly recommended. By getting listed in these hyper-specific and hyper-local directories, you are giving search engines that much more information about what you offer and where your business should be found.

3. Enlist the Help of Your Franchisees

Enlisting the help of your franchisees may be a time-consuming task for some, which is why everything preceding this recommendation can be taken care of by one single source.

Allowing each of your locations to manage its own social presence can be both empowering and helpful for your visibility in search engine results. To help manage the challenges that may arise, you should create a clear social media policy outlining what is and what is not acceptable. Make your branding and the content of the posts a top priority when creating this social media manifesto. You will also want to make this a working document just in case someone finds a loophole that needs closing.

Each location should also be responsible for collecting positive reviews and testimonials from their customers. I would highly recommend incentivizing this effort and coaching your managers on the proper way to approach their customers. Written testimonials on the website serve as phenomenal selling tools. Reviews on Yelp, Google+, and other third-party review sites are even better.

Getting everyone on the same page with webinars can also be advantageous to the cause. Some topics that you will definitely want to cover include social media branding, social media posting, social media interaction, and how to ask customers for reviews. Break each of these up into bite-sized chunks, and keep your focus on the industry’s top three social media platforms. Side note: record all of your webinars, and make them available to your franchisees at their leisure.

Get Started!

As you can see, there is plenty of work to be done in order to achieve success with multi-location SEO. As your franchise grows and brings on new franchisees, use the above recommendations as a checklist for each new location. You can get most of this done within a week’s time for each new franchise location. Doing so will save you a lot of trouble down the road. It may be in your best interest to contact Search Influence for your online marketing needs, especially including the complicated maze of managing multi-location SEO and franchise marketing.

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Local Search Ecosystem image
May 11, 2015
More Locations, More Problems? Optimize Your Franchise SEO—Part 1

Do you ever feel like your efforts to market your business with more than one location are ineffective? Do you live with the constant doubt about whether or not you did as much for one location as you did for another, or if your franchisees are doing something counterproductive that will painfully squander your efforts? You may also be wondering how to get users from all of your markets to find their corresponding local franchise business. How much is too much when it comes to overstuffed keywords for franchise SEO and duplicate web pages with franchise marketing?

You don’t need to be an industry professional to know that comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) requires a balance of more than a dozen simultaneously active elements. From consistently monitoring your targeted keywords to constantly generating new, compelling website content, maintaining high search engine rankings proves to be a multidimensional effort. It seems like all it takes is one surprise update or manual action from Google, and your entire SEO strategy can collapse like a house of cards. For multi-location businesses and franchises, this balancing act becomes even more complex, which is why Search Influence is here to help you not only maintain, but maximize the results of your Internet marketing and digital franchise efforts.

In this two-part series, you will receive a five-step guide that should answer all of your questions about multi-location or franchise SEO. This first piece will focus on building the corporate brand—a frequently forgotten necessity in effective franchise marketing for any business, regardless of the number of locations.

Build Your Brand

This may seem logical, but many times, webmasters and marketers get so caught up in the challenges that come with the individual locations that they forget they have a brand to promote. These recommendations have nothing to do with location-based information; however, they are just as significant to your franchise SEO and Internet marketing success.

1. Focus on the Main Pages

When I refer to the main pages, I am referring to the homepage, the “about us” page, your blog, and your products and services pages—in other words, any page that contains content that is applicable to the brand and its offerings.

These pages need to contain the best content on your site, as they will likely be the most visited. Depending on how many locations you have, you may want to include each location in the title tags of these pages, but I would avoid this practice if you have more than three, as title tags should not appear forced or spammy.

The blog, on the other hand, can be more versatile with regards to the content that you create. Your blog should be focused mainly on industry-specific topics, but it should also have a touch of personality. Things like showcasing your community involvement or a franchisee’s achievement are both great blog topics. Search engines love active blogs, because they show that you are keeping your site up to date by offering the latest and greatest industry knowledge in a timely fashion.

Having a mobile-friendly site is important to your franchise’s digital marketing efforts, especially with our heavy reliance on smartphones today. As Google rolled out one of its most significant algorithm updates in April 2015, your site could have been practically wiped off the map if it was not mobile-friendly, and the same is just as true today.

2. Off-Site Authority for Your Brand

Since Google’s more recent Penguin updates, the link building game has changed. Instead of worrying about getting links to your website and becoming keyword obsessed, we need to be thinking about building authority and a stronger overall presence for the brand.

The simplest way to do this is by creating social profiles for your brand. This is not to say that franchisees cannot or will not create their own individual pages, but you should own the brand and its voice by claiming and being active on the major social channels.

What are the major social channels, you ask? Google+, Facebook, and YouTube are all surefire winners here. But why Google+ and YouTube? One, they are both owned by Google, and you always want to make friends with the decision maker. Two, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. By regularly posting content to these profiles, search engines will get a better sense of what you offer and, in turn, what you should be found for. Note: you will have to rely on your franchisees to help you verify their individual Google+ listings.

Listing your company in categorical directories can also help the cause of brand building. If there is a relevant directory for the product or service you offer, your business should be listed, along with all of the details of your offering. In this scenario, becoming a part of industry associations can have as much of a benefit online as off.

There is nothing that can beat real, newsworthy press. Whether it be a press release, a magazine article, or a blog post, when your brand is mentioned online, Google is going to recognize it and correlate the content around it to your website. A link back to the site in these cases can prove helpful as well.

Now that you have a better sense for basic brand building, stay tuned for part two of this blog series, which will explain how to manage the optimization of all of your individual locations. At Search Influence, we are best equipped to help you succeed with your franchise marketing plan and franchise SEO efforts. Contact us today with any inquiries regarding how we can guarantee a successful online marketing strategy for your company.

May 6, 2015
5 Tips for Managing a Multi-Location Business Online

Managing a business with multiple locations online can be challenging. It’s important to connect potential customers online with the business location nearest them. Follow these 5 tips for best practices for managing your multi-location business.

1. All locations need their own individual page!

It’s important for each location to have its own page on your website. You want each location page to rank for local search in the area. Having one page for each location maximizes the relevancy of the location web page to a searcher and has better chance of ranking locally, especially in blended results (organic mixed with maps results).

2. Optimize content for each page

Add content to the page optimized for a top level keyword and location. Make sure to do this in a way that reads naturally.
Content can be relatively short and simple, explaining what the business is / offers, unique selling points, and where the business is located. Make sure to also optimize the On Page heading (H1), title tag, and meta description as these are all important factors for SEO. It is crucial to have unique content for each page. Many businesses use the same content for all location pages, only switching out the geographical location. This duplicate content leaves the site vulnerable to penalties from Google. For a business with over 100 locations, creating unique content can be difficult. A tip for the writing unique, compelling content for these pages is to incorporate some “local flare” or any information specific to that location in the copy.

3. Provide a good user experience

On each location page, also be sure to list out the name, address, and phone number for that location. Its important for visitors that come to the page to be able to easily contact the business or find out where it is located. Adding a map with a pin on your location also proves to help visitors get a better visual of exactly where you are located. When listing the NAP for each, keep the format consistent across all pages. Make sure the name is the actual, official name of the business–instead of “Domino’s New Orleans”–as this will be consistent with other local listings across the web.

4. Tell Google where you are!

Implement Hcard or schema around each name, address, and phone number of the location pages. Let Google know who and where you are. These are microformats that provide a standardized way to tell Google and other search engines your contact information. By implementing Hcard around your NAP, you can let Google know “this is my physical location.” Adding this code to the site will help the location page rank well in local search. By knowing where your business is located, Google now knows the page is more relevant to searchers.

5. Consistent Citations

When creating local citations across the web, be sure to list the name, address, and phone number of each location consistently. Having consistent listings across online directories helps enforce your physical address to Google and increases the chances of ranking locally. It is especially important to have your NAPs listed consistently on your Google+ local listings. If the directories allow, add the location landing page url in the website field, as this page is most relevant to the listing information.

Google offers businesses with 10 or more locations a way to bulk upload local listing information. The upload process creates new listings as well as edits pre-existing listings. From my experience, this method has proved to be a very slow process. Bing offers very similar services for multi-location businesses, but 25 or more locations are required to use this upload. The most efficient bulk upload offered by a directory has to be Foursquare. I created a bulk upload for a business with 117 locations, and in less than 24 hours all the listings were created/updated and live.

Following these 5 steps can dramatically help your local search presence. What other tips do you have for managing a multi-location business? Please share in the comments below!

July 29, 2013