Ever since the increase in digitalization, the need to have a website has increased drastically.
Back in the old times, having a physical store and doing offline marketing would help you improve your business performance.
Even if you were a franchise, you could still do something similar. But websites and other digital means have taken the role of improving the performance of a business.
If you are a franchise business owner, you are probably aware of how beneficial a good website is.
A responsive, clean, and good website could help you to improve your franchise performance in no time. In addition, there is also a lot of other stuff that you can do to improve your franchise performance.
While trying to improve your franchise performance, you also must be extremely careful with some stuff.
Because you are a franchise, you will be handling a lot of different content, website, and location that belongs to one business.
Creating similar stuff could hurt your SEO and ranking efforts. Let’s see how you can improve your franchise performance using the website in 2022.
How To Improve Franchise Performance Using a Website?
Synchronize Your SEO Efforts
Franchise businesses have tens or even hundreds of different locations. These locations also have their microsites or separate websites.
When you have to manage hundreds of locations and their microsites, it gets extremely complicated.
This complicity comes from avoiding duplicate content or an entire page competing with your original corporate website.
Try to implement different SEO efforts, both on-site and off-site. If you don’t, you are likely going to make duplicate content.
This duplicate content will not put you on the search results because Google will ban you. To overcome this issue, you have to synchronize these SEO efforts.
Coordinate all of the main elements of SEO from one central location. These elements include backlinks, site architecture, meta descriptions, canonical tags, title tags, and other digital assets.
These unified and synchronized SEO efforts strengthen your SEO efforts. They help you rank higher on location searches without creating duplicate content.
Using the same efforts also allows you to increase the domain authority of your original corporate site. Because all microsites link to one main domain, this increases the domain authority in the main domain.
Make Use Of Each Data
You probably have tens or hundreds of microsites and other profiles for each location as a franchise. With all of these websites, there are also thousands of data coming in.
In every business, data is important to understanding more. You can understand your customers and visitors, what you are falling short on, and other important details.
However, this gets harder since you have countless data from tens or hundreds of different websites. There are different ways to make use of each piece of data.
Most of them require you to put in some effort and possibly invest some money. However, the most important part is probably a single website, as we discussed above.
You make your domain stronger by connecting all of the microsites, domains, and social profiles to one single domain. You also make it easier to read your data.
Once they are in one place and easy to ready, you can use each data you need. You can also use cloud services like Google Cloud or something else. However, these clouding services require professional help.
Create Content And Have A Blog
Creating content for potential customers is one of the best ways to increase your website and business conversion. This content could be anything videos, small posts, blog content, whatever.
It needs to appeal to your audience. When you create this content, you give more to potential customers. You tell people you are an expert and can help them.
If there are more potential customers spending time on your content and what you can offer them, the higher performance you will get.
Because franchises have more space to create this content, it becomes utterly important. You have tens or hundreds of websites for each location.
Each of these websites needs content. Your chances to attract customers when you create more content you create.
One of the most popular ways to create content is to create blog posts. Blog posts give you a little bit of everything. You can inform your customers, do SEO, and also cross-sell.
Generally, people write blog posts to rank high on search engines. The ability to do deep franchise SEO is something you can’t do with any other part of your website.
Choosing The Topics
When you are writing content or a blog, choosing what to write about is the hardest thing. For this, you need to conduct an intense market study.
This research about your market will give you enormous information about your potential customers.
Knowing what your customers look for, you can then create any content. Some customer base might like to watch videos rather than read blog posts.
Once you understand what your customers want and spend most of their time on, you can then decide on the content. Ideally, you should opt for a topic with a balance between demand and supply.
If there are one million contents on a specific topic and similar demand, writing about this topic would be a huge risk. Taking risks might yield results but not every time.
You could attract more people if you look for low content and high demand without as much risk.
Your content should also ideally cover everything about the topic. You must focus on giving the customer a broad understanding of the topic from the beginning to the end.
It also needs to be unique. You should write it or shoot it on your own. Applying the keywords for your SEO efforts and mentioning your services here and there within the content will help you turn those visitors into customers and improve your website.
Use Store Locator
One of the pain points of franchises is that customers can’t find what they are looking for in the location they desire.
Your main website might give all the information, but it might not give enough for a specific location.
That’s why you need to give easier access to the stores. Installing a store locator on your main website is the best way to do this.
A store locator page allows customers to find the closes store to them by choosing on a map. It also shows all of your stores everywhere.
You could make this an interactive page where people can click on a store and go to its page or website. This would connect all of your locations to one website more efficiently.
By putting this store locator, you also allow people to visit your main webpage rather than a single location page.
When people visit your main webpage to reach the store’s website and get more information overall about your business from your original domain, it increases the domain authority.
With an increased domain authority, you attract more people and improve your customer base for your franchise. This automatically improves the overall performance of your franchise.
Get A Professional Design
If your website is sluggish, slow, and doesn’t seem professional, many visitors will not stay for long.
You must keep your visitors and convert them into customers to improve your franchise performance through the website.
Getting a website with a professional design could help you solve many of your issues. When your website looks professional enough with a good and responsive design, the customers will be more likely to wander around your website.
However, a professional design is not just a good look throughout your website. Thanks to a clever design, it will also make people visit the franchise store.
To do this, if you are working with a professional to design your website, you should also hire another professional so that they can work together with the designer. If you are doing it yourself, you might need to spend extra time on it.
Ideally, you would want your website to be extremely open. That means when visitors visit your website, they should be able to navigate wherever they wish without having to look for something in particular for a long time. You have to put everything out in the open so that they can find what they want.
Conversion Focused Website
Another thing that many franchise websites are missing is conversion. Franchises are mostly localized businesses that need visitors to enter the physical store.
This is harder than an online business or a mixed business. You need to attract people to your store. To do that, you need to offer something.
You must put various offers throughout your website to convert your visitors into customers. This could be a discount, limited-time offer, free consultation, or anything related to your sector.
It has to appeal to your visitor. However, you shouldn’t do it excessively. Putting in slight hints here and there within your content and main pages should do the trick to having a highly conversion-focused website.
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.