Franchise Business: In competition with... itself!

[Treefrog_SEO]

I manage SEO for a franchise business that has multi-point markets like Toronto, where several locations are competing with one another for visibility.

Assuming Google wants to give preferential treatment to businesses that are putting effort and energy into their unique website landing pages and their Google My Business pages, the exercise is like whack-a-mole. Put effort into giving visibility and ranking priority to one, another one gets upset.

Also, it just so happens that the business is a competitive market (automotive repair) and so Google wants to show variety in search results; i.e. multiple businesses offering repair services in a given area. It tends to select one of four locations for a given multi-point market for the brand, which makes three out of four franchise owners upset.

Anyone run into this before? I'm just trying to balance out the effort so that each of the locations gets equal visibility, but alas I have no control over what Google decides to display as the authoritative result for the geographical area.

Looking for suggestions on how to manage client expectations and explain this issue properly. Anything I am missing?

[RyanPurkey]

Is there a contract in place that explains what you do and how it's equitable amongst the franchises? Do the franchisees have the option of doing their own work in addition to what you're doing?  If so you can say, "Hi angry franchise owner. Why yes, I've been working on your site's presence as per XYZ in the contract. Oh, you see franchise owner #2 in the search results? Yes, I did XYZ for him too. It looks like he's been really active in getting reviews though..."  If there isn't something in writing you might have a lot cat herding on your hands.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Kevin,

Great topic and a tough situation! You are quite right that neither you nor the client will able to control what Google is displaying in their 7-packs for these multi-branch/same city scenarios, unless the overall business decides to promote one branch and not the others. Now, if the brand is known and the customer is doing a brand search, Google will often show them all of the branches nearby. Example: if you just look up McDonald's, chances are, Google is going to show you several of these that are nearest to me in a single pack.

But, if the competition is for non-branded phrases (tires, muffler repair, oil change, autobody shop, etc.) then it does seem to me that Google seldom shows the same brand twice in the same pack, at least in the US. Not sure if this is different in Canada. For example, if I look up 'tire shop' Google shows me 7 different businesses in the pack - there are no repetitions of any brand within the result.

So, this scenario your client is in is almost guaranteed to result in unequal treatment of the businesses ... with one important exception you should consider discussing with the client. One of the most important developments that's been growing in Local SEO over the past few years relates to how the user has become the new 'centroid' of search, particularly in mobile local results. What this means is that if your client has one tire shop at one end of Toronto, and a second at the other end, there is a very good chance that the user will be shown the result that is physically nearest to him at the time he performs the search.

Given that this phenomenon clearly now exists, the strategy I would be recommending to the franchise would be to market all branches with equal effort and then, step back and leave it up to Google to parse which location is nearest to each given searcher. This will be the best any business can do in this situation. And I would back this up with research into hyperlocal blogging and advertising, based on neighborhood-related terms.

Good luck!

[LindaBuquet]

Wow, excellent response Miriam and right on!

The other thing you might want to consider is getting more rankings for long tail queries for each location by actively incorporating neighborhood SEO. So each location tries to get more rankings for neighborhood and other regional queries to help compensate for the fact they may not rank for KW + city.

I think there have been several posts about this, but here is one I found for you from SE Land:
http://searchengineland.com/ready-googles-neighborhood-algo-194161