No matter what kind of business you own, an online presence is essential. The more efficient your online presence you have, the more customers you will get.
Online presence could come in various forms. This could be social media, digital marketing, or your own website. All these are important, but your website is perhaps the most important one.
Owning your own website allows your customers to find you easily. It also allows them to learn more about your business. Since franchises have various locations, this becomes more important.
Your own website for your franchise makes it easier for potential customers to look for your locations.
Since having your own website is important, you must know what to do with your website. There are things you have to cover for better results.
Opt for Simple Design
When you go to a website for the first time, the first thing that you see is the design. You will lose all focus if the design (UI/UX) is not easy and simple. It will be harder to find what you are looking for.
On top of this, you will want to leave and go to another company’s website. A simple design allows your visitors to have a better experience throughout the website.
Your design should also be responsive and fast enough. No one wants to wait for minutes until they get what they want. For franchise websites, this becomes more important.
Since franchises have many locations, potential customers may jump from one location to another.
They don’t want to wait when they are looking to find the most suitable location. Make your design simple and fast enough for customers to navigate easily.
Easy Navigation Throughout the Website
A simple design is not enough to make the navigation around your website easy. You might have a minimal and simple visual design, but you have too much going on.
If there are many layers to finding something on your website, this will also frustrate your visitors. Your website must have everything openly laid out.
When a visitor wants to find something specific, they should easily find what they are looking for. Your website must be easy to wander around.
Put a search box if you can’t simply have everything laid out in one or two clicks. This way, the visitors can just simply write down what they want and find it faster.
Finding the Locations
The most important thing with franchise websites is the locations. Because your business has multiple locations, everyone needs to be able to find the exact location they are looking for.
Use a store locator or a similar feature. This feature makes it easier for people to search for the location they want.
They can also find the nearest location to them with this feature. This will drastically increase your results.
Have A Solid Mobile Design
Nowadays, the use of computers is racing with the use of mobile phones. People are using mobile phones more and more for everyday use.
If your website doesn’t have a good mobile design, you will likely lose a huge portion of potential customers. Your mobile design should be responsive and fast, and simple to use.
A good mobile design doesn’t just allow your customers to have a good experience. Search engines will list your website higher than those without mobile design.
It helps search engines to index you better. If Google or other search engines can index you better, your website will rank higher on search results, giving you better results.
Create Different Pages For Each Location
Franchises have multiple locations. Some franchises could even have more than ten or a hundred locations across a country or several countries.
When you have more than different locations, you need people to find those locations easier. You might create sections within your website about your locations, but that is generally not enough.
You need your customers to get detailed information about a location and find them on search results.
You need to create separate pages for each location to do this. You might even create different websites for each location.
This is up to you. However, this is a bit tricky. Whether you create pages or websites, you need to be careful about duplicate content.
Since all the locations belong to one business, most things will be the same. Name, branding, design, and so on.
You need to add a canonical tag that will direct to one main website. This way, whatever you do, won’t be duplicate content.
Yet, your customers can find these locations on search results and many more. This will increase the views and results of your website.
Include Call-to-Actions
When a customer is wandering around your website, they should know that you have something to sell.
You might lose some potential customers if there is no hint or nothing to pull them towards your services or products.
However, these hints can’t be annoying or too much. They have to be subtle and embedded within the texts or pages smoothly.
These are known as call-to-actions. You can generally put them in blog posts, but they can fit anywhere within a website if you do it well.
The main point of call-to-actions is to provide value to the customer and get them to buy your services or product.
Call-to-actions tell them that you can solve their problem with your service or product. A call-to-action can be:
- Offer to sign up for a freebie
- Subscribe for updates, freebies, or new stuff
- A free try-out
- The “Learn More” button
Try to include the call-to-actions on either your main page or a blog post. However, adding them to each of your locations could potentially increase your conversion rate.
Adding call-to-action in each location page of your franchise website design will give you better results.
Have An Active Blog
A blog is a must for every kind of business and website. A blog will give you so much edge in increasing your conversion rates and getting better results.
Blogs are the conventional method of getting better results for every business. With franchises, a blog can provide even more value.
Because you have multiple locations, you also have much stuff to discuss. You can write a different blog post for each of the locations.
Each of these different blog posts means more opportunities to get listed on the search results.
If you have an active blog that you continuously post, potential customers will find you easier in their location. It is a lot more work, but it will provide the best results for your franchise business website.
Local SEO
One of the biggest upsides to writing blogs is SEO. With the right SEO, you can rank your website as high as you want.
Franchise businesses must focus on a special type of SEO which is known as local SEO.
Since each of the locations has different customers, you need to specially design your SEO for them. Blog posts in different locations must be specially designed for them.
Doing this takes a lot of time and effort, but it is a must. Local SEO and personalizing your blog posts for each location opens the door to the best results.
You need to do a special type of research, mainly different from general SEO. The things you have to look at are:
- Frequently used keywords in that region/location
- Things people share and talk about in that location
- What is more popular than other locations
- Any other information that might be related to that location
The Verdict
In conclusion, the things you need to cover for the best results for franchise website design could be a lot.
They could be even more depending on the kind of business you are in and in which locations you work. However, there are general things that you must cover for the best results.
Simple and mobile-friendly website design, call-to-actions, easy navigation, and store locator are just some of them.
You can always try to find other things that could affect your website’s results. Your main aim when you are trying to cover things on your website should be to help your customers.
Your potential customers must find you easily, and when they do, they need to smoothly navigate the website. All these processes have various things to help.
Sources:
Amit Gupta is the founder of DrFranchises – a digital marketing agency that helps brands rank better on Google Maps through local SEO strategies. Amit has over 11 years of experience in digital marketing, SEO, email marketing, and social media marketing. He’s also the owner of multiple franchises and has helped countless brands achieve success online. When he’s not working, Amit can be found playing with his dog.