What is the best strategy for franchise companies when building local sites?

[yvonneq]

Hi, if you represent a national franchise, I have noticed that Dominos and others do NOT use local websites for LOCAL SEO, rather they use their own MAMMOTH sites with a store locator for the local stores with a few NOT keyword rich pages with very basic information. However, for LOCAL SEO, I have been thinking that using e.g. Hyperfranchise.com for the main domain and then e.g. buckhead.hyperfranchise.com or buckheadhyperfrnachise.com would be better for LOCAL SEO including Yelp, FourSquare and more.It will take time to rank for all local sites, but is that not better in the end than having e.g. 6 pages of content that are "local" on the main site?

However, I have not seen any of the big ones do that, but that might be because they are so entrenched in their own OLD system that might be ranking well anyway for their local franchisees?

Any comments, ideas, suggestions?

[lethal0r]

in terms of scalability and maintenance, I would think they'd need to be on subdomains. it would require a lot more resource and cost if each franchise had its own url.

I think facebook should be the first call for a local franchise. that instant interaction you get with your customers really gets the word out and is hard to match any other way. a competition or giveway or in the case of my local burrito company an 'all you can eat challenge' and everyones talking about you!

[blu42media]

Agreed, go with subdomains or dedicated pages, depending on the amount of content you have per location.  With a franchise, you're ultimately trying to rank the brand so keeping all that content on one root domain certainly has its advantages.

For local SEO, set up separate social pages that point back to your location pages (or subdomains) on your main site.

If it makes sense, offer up a feed of content from your local social sites on your local site pages so it stays nice and fresh too.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Yvonne,

I believe the main reason most franchises go the way you've summarized is manageability. The alternative is to entrust all work to individual franchise owners, including not only their own websites/content, but also all of their Local SEO. Can individual franchise owners be counted on to know what they are doing writing optimized copy and creating violation-free Place Pages? Maybe they can, but more often than not, I'd bet the answer to that would be no.

By maintaining control over everything that happens, you control quality. You can do just fine with Local if it's all managed from the top across the board.

On the other hand, I empathize with your wish to try it a different way. Good stuff can happen if you decide to be different, but if you see something working for tons of similar business models, reinventing the wheel may not be the safest or most successful route to go.