Your website has a specific job: get potential franchisees interested in your franchises.
Once you have garnered a franchisee lead’s attention, you need to encourage them to follow through on their interest by contacting you directly and asking for more information. However, your website isn’t going to accomplish this goal if those prospective franchisees can’t find you or your website. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) plays a big role in your franchisor marketing efforts.
Wise SEO choices will help your franchisor site rank higher in search results for keywords and phrases relevant to the franchising industry like franchise fees, franchise funding or master franchises. This is especially important as a franchisor; your SEO rank directly relates to your credibility and exposure.
Be Cautious with Franchise Keywords
Your franchise site isn’t going to rank well if you don’t have rich, high-quality content. Gone are the days of stuffing your content with franchise keywords and writing for search engines; Google and other companies are constantly adjusting their algorithms to ensure searching is fair for everyone, so your franchising content needs to hit the mark in terms of quality, relevance, length, and frequency.
Search Engines versus Marketers
The SEO game is constant; marketers are always looking for new ways to improve their company’s search result rankings, and the search engines are consistently re-leveling the playing field so every brand has a fair shot at high ranks. Your franchising content plays a critical role in SEO: It should be keyword-dense enough to contend with your franchisor competitors, but not so much that it becomes an unintelligible mess that readers will see was written for the search engine.
Effective Advertising
Franchisors should consider pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to make your franchise business stand out in search results. With PPC advertising, you pay for the ad space only when a prospective franchisee clicks on your ad. Your ads will shoot to the top of search results if they’re relevant to users.
Encourage Engagement
Generating franchisee leads is all about getting them to make the leap from investigating your franchise site on the surface to digging for more in-depth information on franchising. PPC advertising ensures your franchise business appears at the top of search results for keywords and phrases relevant to the franchising indfustry, and wise SEO practices ensure that your site features the right franchise keywords in the right densities.
Establishing a strong brand identity is an ongoing battle. You need to tell the story of why your franchise business exists, why it matters, what it has to offer prospective franchisees, and what kind of success it has provided.
With SEO and PPC, you can guarantee your franchise website is getting in front of the right feanchisee leads and that you aren’t wasting your marketing budget on ineffective methods.
