SEO for franchises: the corporate site and the local one are different jobs

Somebody searching your brand name wants head office: what the franchise is, what it costs to buy one, where it operates. Somebody searching your service plus their town wants the nearest location: hours, phone number, whether you cover their street.

When both are answered by the same page, one of the two searches is served badly. When every franchisee builds their own site on their own platform, the brand splits into dozens of weak sites that compete with each other and none of them ranks.

The top of this query is held by marketing agencies and business media rather than by franchises themselves. That tells you the subject is written about far more than it is solved, and that the advice available is generic by design.

The practical version is unglamorous: one system, one set of location pages, consistent contact data, and local pages that are genuinely local rather than the brand page with a town name swapped in.

Address, hours and phone number as text rather than inside an image, and the same everywhere they appear.

The services that location actually offers, because franchises differ and a page promising something the location does not do produces angry calls.

The staff or owner, when the franchise allows it. A face is the fastest way to make a chain feel local.

Enough of its own text to be a page rather than a template fill. A location page that is two hundred words of boilerplate is the thin page every search engine has been trained to ignore.

We build the corporate site and the location system as one thing, so adding a location later is a form to fill rather than a new project. The price is published and fixed in writing before work starts.