How to optimize local search results

[seonovice2012]

We will be building a new website soon and need to optimize our local search results in our franchisee markets. It is best to create individual franchisee sites in order to optimize local SEO results or to keep franchisee pages hanging off a main corp page?

[KernelPanic]

We will be building a new website soon and need to optimize our local search results in our franchisee markets. It is best to create individual franchisee sites in order to optimize local SEO results or to keep franchisee pages hanging off a main corp page?

Depending on the strength of the competition you might consider both

[socialtraffic]

I also would like to know more ways to optimize local searches. Hope to read more responses from those people who have success stories in local searches.

[vkonnect]

We will be building a new website soon and need to optimize our local search results in our franchisee markets. It is best to create individual franchisee sites in order to optimize local SEO results or to keep franchisee pages hanging off a main corp page?

If you really do have good amount of funds in your pocket and you are able to manage all of them at the same time than i prefer you to have separate sites even for franchises. However if you have management or funds issue than you should stick to one! Choice is yours and only yours!

[NIXSEOTeam]

For small businesses, I think will be useful, and the following tips.
link: nixsolutions.com/blog/development/seo-sem/local-seo-6-tips-for-small-business/

[localoptimizer]

I'm going to mention a couple of alternative ideas, some recent developments and the way I'd address it now:

1. Following the anti over optimization hit by Penquin a lot of small business sites got hit and penalized. One reason is simply a single small business or in your case a franchisee is probably not going to have the resources and time to build the ranking strength organically and alternatively directed at G Maps....that they will get strong rankings or visibility on their own.

Probably the small smb's got a lot of easy but crappy things like directory links with anchor text and nothing much else. They might have done other things to try and get focused strength through other "faked methods".

A lot of franchisees are limited in their manpower and other resources to obtain strong signals through the web that aid in ranking...either organically or via the Maps/visibility in google.com

Some of the ones I know have national websites...they are franchisees or versions of them. The suggestion has been to tank the local sites and redo everything in one main site.

If I were to go that route...I would still make individual pages for each location.

By example if one looks up pizza from any city in the US, in a lot of cases you see in the natural serps high rankings for pizza hut, papa johns, and dominoes. They are all national brands. You will also see a "pac of merged listings" with address info. Those are usually local pizza places. In some cases the organic results will be above the PAC. In some cases the organic results will be below the pac.

2. Frankly the big franchisees can also directly tackle the pac results for their individual locations in a city. The PAC results are a function of ranking strength from organic results and from Maps efforts. Lets say for simplicity's sake that organic results are a function of links and Maps results are a function of citations. Frankly a big entity can more effectively and efficiently accomplish more on both bases than individual operators.


We run a bunch of businesses in a different kind of structure. We have groups of partnerships with an operating partner in every case. Frankly the operating partners are best tasked with running their businesses. They can't do from an seo side what I can do from a central perspective.

Frankly if I was a franchiser I'd include charges for seo/maps optimization in my fees. I'm 100% confident I could get 1,000 times more effectiveness on the rankings side by getting excellent knowledgeable focused attention on all the ranking issues than any individual franchisee.

From a further personal perspective, when I do operating business stuff....I can't or don't do seo stuff. Its a time management issue. Most franchisees have none of the time capabilities to handle that aspect of the business.

.... and that is my $0.02

[bruce99]

yes there are lots of options you have.

having many sites that the franchisees are not going to manage is going to be a real expensive pain.

you are going to most likely have one super site, with franchises pages hanging off it. The bonus of this is that you can location optimize the page with titles, headings etc and you can get them to put some effort into the game by getting them to send links to their specific page on your site.

Make them put a bit of effort back into their page and they will take it a lot more seriously.