Enterprise SEO: Best Practices and Insider Tips for Multiple-Location Businesses

Sponsored Content by Thrive Internet Marketing Agency.

A fragmented search engine optimization (SEO) strategy means wasted resources for a franchise brand. With 97 percent of internet users searching online for a local business, it also means lost opportunities via less-focused targeting for your franchisees. More results of such mistakes include brand inconsistencies, hit-or-miss lead generation and stunted revenue growth.

Time to level up with enterprise SEO. This large-scale strategy has the power to tie everything together and turn in more positive results. How? It addresses the unique challenges and complex requirements of SEO at the enterprise level.

Whether you have thousands of website pages or hundreds of business locations, you can adapt this enterprise marketing channel to your needs. Achieve better brand awareness and reputation. Attract high-value leads. Here’s how you can change the course of your multiple-location or franchise SEO efforts ASAP:

Perform an In-Depth Search Audit

Enterprise SEO services and solutions are agile. They fit the current and most urgent needs of your site, pages or sub-domains. To know which services should be included in your latest strategy, make sure to conduct a thorough site audit regularly. Enterprise marketing experts recommend doing it two to three times a year, at a minimum. Some items should be tracked weekly, others monthly.

A proper audit checks for things like your site’s structure, technical elements (e.g., are there broken links?), security, content quality and user behavior. It then determines how to fix the errors through solutions like on-site optimization, technical SEO, Core Web Vitals and conversion rate optimization (CRO).

For example: Some of the abovementioned modifications were executed by an enterprise SEO company for a client after an audit. The client, a multiple-location orthopedic practice group, then allowed the professionals to apply optimization techniques to rectify the errors found.

In just a month, the SEO campaign generated a 69.8 percent swell in organic traffic and a 61.4 percent increase in new website users.

Ensure Brand Consistency

A brand that is consistent no matter the business location is an equity booster. By using the same logo, colors and fonts, a franchisee is identifying itself as an extension of an established, reputable corporate brand. Otherwise, if you make it hard for people to recognize you, they will probably think twice about your company and go elsewhere.

This is a matter related to enterprise marketing because consistent branding online and offline drives more leads. And for franchisors, it’s about attracting future franchisees. For franchisees, it’s about connecting with potential customers.

Customize Your Strategy for Each Location

If you’re applying one franchise SEO strategy across multiple franchise accounts, you’re thinking small. Individual franchisees have unique needs and goals, no matter how unified your corporate brand is.

“It’s important to remember that different locations will have different competitors in local search results, different state laws to follow and different seasonality concerns,” said Shannon Thammasiene, the director of SEO services for enterprise SEO agency Thrive. “Don’t take the easy way out by treating all locations the same.”

It’s advisable to begin building out local pages for each location. Or have an enterprise SEO agency handle it for you. This process involves separate keyword research and strategy, competitive analysis, Google My Business and other online directory listings, content creation and customer review management.

Take the example of one multi-location restoration company with more than 180 locations in the United States. By executing custom strategies with the help of an enterprise SEO agency, its locations have targeted and become more relevant to their local audiences. The result? A whopping 89,422 total leads in 2020 alone and an average of 497 leads per location since 2019.

Use Schema Markup

Adding structured data, particularly schema markup, to your site’s HTML makes it easier for search engines to interpret your content. Schema markup is code that tells the likes of Google to display additional details above your meta description in search results. These could be your address, service areas, opening hours and client ratings.

You can choose which information to show, enhancing the users’ understanding of your business locations. An enterprise SEO company should be able to assist you in finding local schema opportunities for your multi-location business.

Be a Topic Expert

A part of enterprise services is positioning your brand as a topic authority in your field or industry. The best way to do this is by generating high-quality, in-depth content. Avoid stuffing your site with recycled blog posts that say the same thing as your competitors. Set your enterprise marketing apart by presenting new information, adding insights from your people on the ground and putting interesting yet actionable facts in your content.

Of course, optimize each piece to ensure your target audience can find them on Google Search and other search engines. Better visibility should be followed by a longer “time on page,” keeping your bounce rate as low as possible and sustaining your search rankings in the long run. To cover all your bases, seek an enterprise marketing company with a wealth of experience in content development for franchises.

A Word on Duplicate Content

A franchise website and its subdomains may contain similar or duplicate content. Likely sources are the About page of each franchisee, product descriptions and press releases. The beauty of having a dedicated enterprise SEO agency is they can weed out the duplicates and rank unique pages for your locations.

Thus, we end with …

Work With Franchise SEO Experts

There’s a reason you got stuck with a fragmented strategy and less-than-stellar results. Whether it’s an overwhelmed marketing team or a misaligned partnership with a service provider, it’s not too late to pivot.

In the competitive digital landscape, your best bet at streamlining your optimization efforts across the board is an enterprise SEO company. Your new partner should have proven itself in this particular area and offer comprehensive enterprise SEO services.

An expert with a solid track record should be able to steer you in the right direction. They should have the bandwidth to support your massive marketing undertakings, so you can focus on providing the best products or services to your clients. Their mantra: No franchise account or business location is left behind.