Did you know that 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information, and 76% of people who search for something nearby visit a business within a day?
For franchises, this means that if you’re not showing up in search results, you’re missing out. Without proper search engine optimization (SEO), potential customers may never find their nearest franchise location, resulting in lost foot traffic, missed calls, and fewer online orders or bookings.
Even with strong brand recognition and a good franchise marketing strategy, many franchises struggle to appear in local search results or on Google Maps.
SEO is the ideal way to solve this challenge. A well-planned SEO strategy helps both the franchisor and each franchisee rank higher in search results, drive local visibility, and boost sales.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about franchise SEO, including link building, keyword targeting, local SEO, technical SEO, and crucial on-page activities.
What Is SEO for Franchises?
SEO for franchises is the process of improving the online presence of both the main franchise brand (the franchisor) and its individual locations (franchisees) so they can appear in search engine results.
This is important because the top three organic search results on Google receive almost 70% of all clicks.
Franchise SEO involves ensuring the websites for both the overall brand and each location are easy to find when people search for relevant services or products.
➡️ SEO for franchisors
The franchisor is typically responsible for the main corporate website and overall brand visibility online. The goal at this level is to build authority and attract potential franchisees, (people interested in buying into the franchise) as well as customers nationwide.
National SEO is important at this level. This involves using keywords that target a broader audience and aren’t tied to any specific location. Keywords are the words that people enter into Google when they’re looking for something.
Examples of industry-wide keywords for franchisors include:
“Best coffee franchise”.
“Top pizza franchises in the USA”.
“Affordable home cleaning franchise opportunities”
These keywords help the franchisor’s website appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) related to the industry, attracting both potential customers and future franchise owners.
➡️ SEO for franchisees
Franchisees are the individuals who own and operate a franchise location. Their main focus should be on local SEO, which involves optimizing their website and listings to appear in local search results. Local search results are when customers search for services or products in their specific geographic area.
For example, a franchise might want to show up in search results for:
“Best coffee shop in [city name]”.
“Pizza delivery in [neighborhood name]”.
“Car repair near [local landmark]”.
These are examples of local keywords that help customers find the franchise location closest to them.
Local SEO is especially important because people often search for businesses near them. Showing up in local search results can drive foot traffic and local leads to a franchisee's location.
For franchisees, SEO focuses on optimizing local listings and managing online reviews, which we’ll discuss in more detail later in this article. These factors help improve local visibility and credibility for the individual location.
Why Is SEO Important for Franchises?
Now that you know more about franchise SEO, let’s look at why it’s so important for your business:
✅ Drives consistent traffic to both the brand and local locations
SEO helps franchise businesses generate consistent, organic traffic to both the main brand website and individual franchise locations. In fact, search engines drive 68% of all website traffic.
For franchises, this means not only attracting customers to the brand’s national site but also driving local traffic to each franchise location.
For example, someone looking for a “coffee franchise in New York” might end up visiting the brand’s corporate website to learn more about the company.
Then, if they’re in New York, they may also land on the specific location page for that city, which can drive foot traffic to that franchise.
In the example below, this coffee franchisor has location and franchise pages on its corporate website. It directs users to local franchise locations and their individual pages:
✅ Supports franchise success and growth
SEO plays a vital role in helping franchisees succeed. By optimizing their franchise websites and listings, franchisees can attract more customers in their area, resulting in increased sales and growth.
For example, if a franchisee owns a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, SEO can help them show up when someone searches for “best fast food near me”.
When done right, SEO boosts a franchise’s visibility, which can directly increase the business’s success. Over time, strong local SEO leads to increased trust and better brand recognition, which contributes to long-term growth.
✅ Helps franchises compete locally and nationally
At the national level, franchisors can target broader keywords related to their industry, such as “top restaurant franchises” or “best gym franchises.”
These keywords attract people interested in starting a franchise or learning more about the brand.
Locally, SEO is essential for helping individual franchise locations compete against other businesses in their area. This is important because customers who do a local search engage with a store within 24 hours.
For example, if a customer in San Francisco searches for “best pizza near me”, it’s almost guaranteed that one of the local franchises that appear in search results will be visited.
✅ Builds trust and credibility online
Franchise SEO is key to building trust and credibility. When your franchise’s website ranks higher in search results, it shows users that your brand is trustworthy and relevant.
Additionally, good local SEO involves getting positive reviews and having a strong presence on directories. This builds credibility and trust with prospects, which is crucial in turning visitors into paying customers.
✅ Reduces reliance on paid advertising
One of the biggest benefits of franchise SEO is that it reduces the need for paid advertising. While ads can be effective for getting immediate traffic to your site, they require ongoing investment.
On the other hand, SEO works over time to improve your website’s rankings, and once you’re ranked highly, you continue to receive traffic without having to pay for every click.
According to statistics, 70% of marketers consider SEO to be more effective than paid advertising in generating long-term results and more traffic.
Franchises can reduce their reliance on expensive ads by focusing on SEO, saving money in the long run while still maintaining strong visibility in search results.
5 Proven Franchise SEO Strategies to Get Right
You now know how important franchise SEO is, but how do you get it right? Let’s unpack some strategies you can use to boost your SEO and search engine rankings for both franchisees and franchisors.
1. Launch a strategic link-building campaign
A link-building campaign is one of the most important strategies to improve your franchise’s SEO. It helps your website gain authority and show up higher in search engine results.
A strong backlink profile can make a big difference for both franchisors and franchisees. Backlinks are important because websites that appear on the first page of Google search results have an average of 200 backlinks.
🔗 What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links on other websites that point to your website. You can think of them as votes of confidence. When another website links to yours, it signals to search engines like Google that your website is trustworthy.
The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your chances of ranking well in search results.
Below is an example of a resource list. A resource list is a web page that lists tools and guides related to a specific topic, which can be helpful to visitors. This page is a resource list of the best franchise opportunities in the U.S. Each franchise on this list receives a high-quality backlink to its website:
🔗 Why are backlinks important for franchises?
Building backlinks is essential for improving your franchise’s SEO for several reasons:
Increases website authority: As mentioned above, the more trusted websites that link to your franchise’s site, the more search engines see you as an authority in your industry.
Improves search engine rankings: Backlinks are a key ranking factor for search engines. More high-quality backlinks may mean higher search engine rankings.
Drives referral traffic: When a website links to yours, it can bring in direct traffic from users who click on the link, helping more potential customers find your franchise.
Enhances local SEO: For franchisees, local backlinks, such as those from local businesses or news sites, help boost visibility in local search results, attracting customers in your area.
🔗 The best link-building tactics for franchisees
For franchisees, the focus should be on building local backlinks. Here are some effective tactics:
Local business directories: Get your franchise listed on local business directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and local chamber of commerce websites. These are trusted sources for search engines and can drive local traffic to your location.
Local partnerships and sponsorships: Partner with other local businesses, events, or charities. When these businesses link to your franchise’s website, it helps improve your local SEO. For example, if you sponsor a local sports team, ask them to include a link to your website on their page.
Local news outlets and blogs: Reach out to local online newspapers, blogs, or media outlets and offer to provide guest content or information about your business that could be used in an article. Many local sites will link back to your website as a part of the collaboration.
Create local linkable content: Focus on creating content that’s likely to attract backlinks. For example, if you own a pizza franchise in Miami, write about the best local ingredients or events in Miami related to your business. Other local sites may link to this content, which helps you build authority locally.
Famous Toastery, a Charlotte-based brunch and lunch franchise, sponsored a local sports event and secured a backlink in a news article in a high-authority publication:
🔗 The best link-building tactics for franchisors
For franchisors, the focus should be on gaining industry-wide and authoritative backlinks. Below are some key tactics:
Industry publications and guest blogging: Write guest posts or articles for industry-leading websites or publications. These platforms often allow you to include a backlink to your franchise’s website. This helps position your brand as an authority in the franchise industry.
Franchise directories: Get your franchise listed in reputable franchise directories like Franchise Direct or Franchise Global. These directories often rank well in search results and can drive significant traffic to your corporate website.
Collaborations with bloggers and influencers: Reach out to industry influencers or bloggers to collaborate on content. For example, if you’re in the food industry, you could partner with a well-known food blogger to write a review of your franchise and link back to your website.
Franchise-specific content: Create high-quality content like case studies, industry reports, and white papers that showcase your franchise’s success. Share these with media outlets or franchise-related websites to encourage them to link to your content.
Press releases: When your franchise launches new products, opens new locations, or reaches significant milestones, issue press releases. If they get picked up by news websites, these can generate valuable backlinks to your site.
Chocolate Bash, a famous dessert restaurant, opened a new franchise location in Huntington Beach, California. They issued a press release to cover this opening, which got picked up by a local restaurant news website. This earned them a backlink to their corporate website:
🔗 Monitor your backlink profile
Your backlink profile is your collection of links that point to your website from other sites. Once you’ve started building backlinks, it’s important to regularly monitor your backlink profile to keep track of where your links are coming from and ensure they’re high quality.
You can use SEO tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to track backlinks pointing to your website. They can also help you check for bad or spammy backlinks that could be affecting your rankings. Spammy backlinks come from low-quality websites with thin content that don’t add any value to your site.
Here’s what Chocolate Bash’s (the franchisor in the example above) backlink profile looks like on Ahrefs. They have over 250 backlinks that are driving strong traffic to their corporate site:
2. Conduct smart keyword research for both brand and local needs
Effective SEO involves targeting the right keywords. For franchises, this means identifying search terms that serve both the national brand and individual franchise locations. Here’s how to approach it:
🔎 Separate keywords into national and local categories
Franchises should divide their keyword strategy into two levels:
National (brand-level) keywords for the franchisor.
Local (location-level) keywords for franchisees.
This separation helps ensure you’re targeting the right audience at each level.
🔎 National keywords for franchisors
At the brand level, focus on slightly broader keywords that highlight your industry and franchise opportunity. These keywords attract people interested in becoming franchise owners or learning more about your company.
Examples include:
“Best fitness franchises”.
“Franchise opportunities in the food industry”.
“How to buy a coffee franchise”.
🔎 Local keywords for franchisees
Franchisees can focus on local SEO by targeting keywords that include their specific city or region. These keywords attract customers in their area who are looking for the products or services they offer.
Some examples are:
“Dry cleaning in Dallas”.
“Best tutoring center in Seattle”.
“Fast food near me”.
🔎 Use long-tail keywords that reflect customer intent
Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific phrases that often reflect exactly what a customer is looking for. They typically have lower competition and higher conversion rates. Examples include:
“Affordable dog grooming services in Austin”.
“Best gluten-free pizza in Denver”.
“How much does a car wash cost in Chicago”.
🔎 An example of brand-level keyword research
You can use keyword research tools like Ahrefs’s Keyword Explorer to find keywords to target. Let’s look at an example of how a franchisor could use Ahrefs to find the right keywords to target.
When using Ahrefs, there are two metrics that are important to understand:
Keyword Difficulty (KD): This is a score from zero to 100 that rates how difficult it would be to rank on page one of Google’s search results for a keyword.
Search volume: This is how frequently the keyword is searched for on average per month.
You could target a broad keyword, such as “pizza franchises”. However, while this term has good search volume, it would be relatively difficult to rank for:
If you were to go for a more specific keyword, like “best pizza franchises”, you’d have a better chance at ranking while still having decent search volume:
🔎 An example of local keyword research
Let’s say you’re a pizza franchise based in Tulsa. You could target a local keyword such as “pizza near me”. However, this would be a difficult keyword to rank for, despite having good search volume:
If you were to target “best Tulsa pizza”, you have a better chance of ranking well for the keyword, and you’ll still have some search volume:
3. Build a strong local SEO foundation for each franchise location
Local SEO is what helps each individual franchise location show up in search results. It’s the key to driving foot traffic, calls, and local leads. Local SEO is important because local searches contribute to nearly 23% of all website traffic.
Here’s how to get local SEO right for each franchise location
📍 Claim and optimize a Google Business Profile (GBP) for each location
Each franchise location should have its own Google Business Profile (GBP). A GBP is what appears in Google Maps and the search engine’s Local Pack. Google’s Local Pack is the map and listings you see in local search results.
Here’s an example of Google’s local pack when we search for a local keyword:
To optimize your GBP:
Use the correct business name.
Choose the right product or service categories.
Add photos, opening hours, and the services you offer.
Include a local phone number and website link.
Here’s an example of a well-optimized GBP that makes the franchise more discoverable, trustworthy, and could be boosting its search engine rankings:
📍 Ensure NAP consistency across all listings
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. These details must be consistent across all online directories, including your GBP, Yelp, Facebook, and local business listings.
Inconsistent NAP information can confuse both search engines and users, and it can hurt your local rankings.
📍 Encourage reviews
Customer reviews not only influence buying decisions, but they also boost your local SEO. Locations with lots of positive reviews often rank higher in search results.
Encourage happy customers to leave reviews on your GBP and other online listings by:
Asking after a successful service or sale.
Sending follow-up emails with a review link.
Displaying signs or QR codes in-store.
Be sure to respond to both positive and negative reviews to show that you care about customer feedback.
Here’s an example of a positive review left on a GPB for a franchise. The GBP has over 274 reviews, potentially improving the business’s local rankings:
4. Nail your On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves optimizing individual pages on your website to help search engines understand what they’re about and make them more appealing to visitors. It includes everything from the keywords you use to how you structure your content.
High-quality franchise SEO campaigns can drive an average return on investment (ROI) of 748%, and on-page optimization is a crucial part of this.
Here’s what to focus on:
👉 Title tags and meta descriptions
Title tags are the clickable headlines that appear in search engines, and meta descriptions are the brief summaries beneath them.
Each page on your website should have a unique, keyword-rich title tag and meta description.
Title tags should be no longer than 60 characters, and you should keep meta descriptions between 70 and 155 characters.
These elements help search engines understand your content, and they’re the first thing potential customers see in search results.
Here is a good example of a title tag and meta description for Donatos Pizza Franchise. It’s descriptive, compelling, and keyword-rich:
👉 Headings and subheadings
Use headings, like H1, H2, and H3 headings, to organize your content clearly. Your main title should be an H1, and subtopics should use H2 or H3 headings.
This structure makes it easier for both readers and search engines to understand your content.
You should naturally include keywords in your headings and break the content into readable sections for a better user experience.
👉 Location pages
Each franchise location should have its own dedicated page with location-specific details, including:
Address and contact information.
Products or services offered.
Local team details.
Area-specific keywords.
This moving company franchisor has dedicated pages on its website for each individual franchisee. The location pages include area-specific content, contact details, and reviews for that specific location:
👉 Image SEO
You should optimize the images on your website to support your SEO efforts. You can do this by:
Using descriptive file names, such as denver-carpet-cleaning.jpg.
Adding alt text that describes the image and includes relevant keywords.
Compressing images to keep page load times fast.
5. Prioritize technical SEO for scalability and performance
Technical SEO involves the behind-the-scenes setup of your website that helps search engines understand and rank your website. It also impacts how users experience your website, which Google takes into account.
This is a challenging aspect of search engine optimization, so you may want to enlist the help of franchise SEO experts or an agency.
Here are three key areas to focus on when it comes to technical SEO:
⚙️ Ensure your site is mobile-friendly
Over 60% of searches come from mobile devices, so your website needs to look and work well on phones.
A mobile-friendly site adjusts automatically to fit smaller screens, loads quickly, and has easy-to-tap buttons and menus.
Google also prioritizes mobile friendliness. It looks at the mobile version of your website first when deciding how to rank you.
You can use tools like Google Search Console to check if your site is performing well on mobile devices.
⚙️ Optimize page speed
Over 50% of people leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. And a one-second delay in load times can impact conversion rates by up to 20%. Page speed is also a key ranking factor for search engines.
To improve page speed:
Compress large images.
Minimize the use of unnecessary scripts and plugins.
Use fast, reliable web hosting.
Enable browser caching.
⚙️ Use canonical tags
Franchise websites often have duplicate or very similar content across multiple location pages. This can confuse search engines and cause ranking issues.
Canonical tags tell search engines which version of the page is the main one. For example, if two location pages have nearly identical content, you can use a canonical tag to point ot the original or preferred version.
Skyrocket Your Franchise Link Building Campaign with High-Quality Backlinks
Franchise SEO is challenging, but it’s also a huge opportunity. With the right strategy, you can boost brand visibility at a national level while helping individual locations attract more local customers.
As mentioned above, one of the most powerful tools in your franchise SEO strategy should be a solid link-building campaign.
At Linkbuilder, we can help franchises build strong, scalable backlink profiles that drive real results.
Whether you’re a franchisor looking to boost brand authority and attract new owners or a franchisee aiming to dominate local search, we tailor our link-building strategies to meet your unique goals.
Our approach ensures you get relevant, authoritative, and high-quality backlinks that improve your rankings and increase your online visibility.
Get in touch with us today to start building a stronger SEO foundation for your franchise. We’ll show you how we can help grow your franchise the smart way.