Let’s Recap: SEO Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Franchise ROI

Franchises, or multi-unit organizations, will always need to know how to make a positive return on their marketing investments. The best way to start is to understand where to put their marketing dollars. As a franchise marketer, you understand the value of good, actionable data, especially as different individual locations offer multiple data sources at once. Now the question is how to gain that data and direct it towards your marketing efforts to drive revenue?

In our first webinar, TruPresence’s Jeremy LaDuque spoke with Nils De Moor from WooRank and discussed how franchisors can achieve a faster return on their marketing investments by utilizing the latest SEO and analytic trends and by using the right business intelligence tools that offer analytics and insight specific to franchise level operations.

The Latest with Google

One of the simplest ways for a franchise to accelerate its marketing ROI is by staying up to date on all things Google. Incorporating Google’s SEP criteria into your web page creation, even for individual location webpages can improve local SEO, while staying informed on Google’s latest analytics can help maintain data reporting in times of industry-wide change.

Core Web Vitals

Always prioritize Google’s user experience metrics, known as its Core Web Vitals (CWVs). Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID) are three things Google looks at to determine how positive an experience your website offers to its visitors. LCP determines the span of time it takes for your website to load its largest piece of content; CLS looks at how your site’s content layout moves and shifts dynamically, as a user scrolls or navigates through a page; finally, FID times the amount of time a browser takes to load your site to where users can actively engage with the content. Franchisors treat individual location webpages as separate websites for those locations. Because of that, those location webpages need to adhere to CWVs just like the corporate site. Active communication between franchisor and franchisee is essential to create an understanding of shared responsibility for creating optimized content that matches the CWV requirements.

Establishing National and Local Authority

Content is king, so it becomes mission-critical to optimize your site content and establish authority. One interesting way to do this is to make sure all content is relevant, getting rid of any content that is out of date. This may seem counterintuitive, but the content is king, and relevant content is even more so. Franchisors can utilize the local expertise of a franchisee to help create optimal content, while also remembering to follow CWV guidelines.

Getting in on Google Analytics 4

Google’s most impactful news is its move from Universal Analytics to the new Google Analytics 4. The new Google Analytics centers on the journey the user takes to find, engage with, and leave your website. As Jeremy and Nils outlined in the webinar, there is no automated migration path to the new Google Analytics 4, so franchises that need data analytics for each location need to prioritize switching manually to maintain their data reporting.

Insightful Reporting

To properly collect, filter, and report on data, franchise marketers need powerful business intelligence (BI) tools. Without BI tools, we would have no way to accurately report on our own data. The Google Analytics data we collect is important, but static, known as “artifact data.” Artifact data tells us what happened but leaves us wondering why it happened in the first place. Third-party BI tools like Google Data Studio and TruPresence let you further understand your Google Analytics data, by allowing you to filter data and build your own reporting. Filtering your data is imperative for a franchise marketer, so to accurately collect, report, and differentiate the data provided by one location from another. Knowing the message that data sends can help you direct your marketing budget to where it’s most needed, rather than to where it might not be as effective.

The Value of Location Analytics

TruPresence’s SEO tool is uniquely suited to benefit franchises and franchise marketers, providing analytics for each individual location. Jeremy and Nils define these “location analytics,”, where a franchisor can score the online performance of each individual location by collecting and aggregating its webpage data. Franchisors understand that a webpage for an individual location, under a larger domain, acts as its own website.  Traditional SEO tools have trouble differentiating the main website and any subdomain; however, TruPresence understands this difference and offers actionable reporting and insight for each location at scale.

Location analytics significantly benefit any franchise operation, where franchise marketers now have the tools to accurately measure location performance, build and establish best practices for every location, and increase the return on their marketing investment by knowing where to dedicate their efforts.