The Franchise Challenge: How should I handle 200 franchisee websites?

[scottclark]

Hi all.. this is not a question about how this can be done but which is better for SEO.

Franchises make up 8% of the USA small business market.  This is no small potatoes.  But everything about Google seems designed for the unique, stand-alone business (Places, Analytics, Adwords, Duplicate Content Rules, etc.)  ... I think about this issue a lot so wanted to put it to the community.

Imagine a franchisor with 200 locations.  This company licenses its brand and business operations system - that's what a franchise is.  So each local franchisee starts out with a "content ready" website template which they are required to use for brand compliance.

(Each local franchisee has a Google Place page and a Local Website in their territory.)Assuming each solution has the same number of local citations around 50% duplicate content on its services pages (e.g. branding text)... which of the following does Google like best?

1. A single, customized CMS (e.g. Drupal) which places each franchisee site in a subfolder of the TLD.  Highly duplicated services pages are given canonical pointers to the main site's version.
   domain.com/location
2. A single, customized CMS (e.g. Drupal) which places each franchisee in a subdomain of the TLD.  Highly duplicated services pages are given canonical pointers to the main site's version. location.domain.com
3. A multi-manager dashboard (e.g. ManageWP) which operates an individual Wordpress installs on a single server (dedicated self-install server, sites share IPs)
   _localdomain.com _
4. A multi-manager dashboard which operates an individual Wordpress install on multiple, diverse servers (e.g. shared hosting on diverse hosts.)
   localdomain.com

I know that the best case would be for each franchisee individually to be so motivated to set up their own site and properly use brand elements, get links, etc. but this is impractical (trust me.)~~~~~~(*update 4/4/13 - I have written a blog post which describes what I think is the ideal franchise web marketing & SEO program and would welcome additional comments!)

[scottclark]

This thread is fantastic and very helpful to me - thanks to all who chimed in to answer questions.  After a lot of thought and a few months' drafts, I created a post which I hope describes the current "state of the art" for franchise/franchisee web marketing and SEO.  I would be happy to have commentary/debate on the solution!

[scottclark]

I have been through this with other sites.   Nightmare.  Every time.

There is a period of time when any properly designed, optimized franchisee "site cloud" is built  before it ranks, and most franchisees will freak out - making the CMO's life a living hell.  Search engines, analytics, paid search programs, ratings/review sites and social networks are not set up to help manage the parent/child relationship inherent in franchises. There are no super-user, admin setups so that, for example, you could have all of your franchisees in YELP with normal capabilities, but have a superuser which could manage them all from a single page, fix things, and even remove them if needed.

Anyone out there thinking of starting a franchise needs to lock "imminent domain" rights onto any website created right in the franchise agreement. The franchisor needs to state, with clarity, that they can make any change to the franchisee's provided website they wish, and that all franchisee-initiated online marketing programs must be approved by the franchisor.  No rogue sites, no rogue facebook pages, instagram sites, etc. are allowed.   If they do they forfeit their franchise license and ultimately could be sued for trademark infringement.

But this implies that the franchisor must come out firing on all cylinders, with a seriously good plan and best practices giving the franchisee the best chance of success.

Many franchisees are horrible business people, who have been mad at the franchise since the first week of ownership.  This is often their life savings we're talking about, and after grand opening is when the hard work starts, and poor decisions come back to haunt.

[RyanKelly]

I have a franchise customer who is looking to reel back in several "rogue" franchisees who did set up their own domains, like www.[franchise][location].com.  The problem is that, as I think was mentioned here, those local sites are ranking higher than the "fully optimized" main site with the location sub-folders.  Now having to go back and require 301 redirects is an absolute nightmare, particularly when you're at 100+ locations.

Has anyone done a successful migration away from multiple sites into a single root domain?

[RyanKelly]

This is a great point, Scott.  I wonder though if you couldn't use the zip code feature in Adwords to create unique campaigns for each store location, even in the same market, and then drive each ad to their respective location page on the root domain.  Would this work?

[scottclark]

In one case, which uses subfolders, the number of authority high page rank sites linking to the individual franchisee subfolders (and therefore contributing to the TLD's link equity) is substantial, yet the overal site cannot seem to break into page 1 of Google (despite weak competition.)   Their SEOMOZ crawl and LInkScape profiles are good.  They also have sporadic local ranking regionally despite linked Google Place pages and decent local citations (BBB, chambers, etc.)  Other competitors, with less attractive link profiles are eating their lunch - out ranking them at every turn and at every region.

I explained the Penguin issues to the client a few weeks ago (in this case it could be Panda also) and nobody was willing to rip out an entire site architecture (including the CMS training of hundreds of owners... and other related issues) just in case their page 2 rating was caused an algorithmic penalty.   That's especially a hard sell when the entire system is providing good consumer experience and doing no fringe SEO.  The "new" architecture would look very similar to the old one - so nobody's buying that plan

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Lots of good answers here, so let me start at the top.

Looks like you are dealing with 3 issues/questions.

1. CMS - No difference

2. Shared server or different server - Google is most likely going to be able to determine an administrative relationship between your sites one way or another, so this probably doesn't matter anyway.

The real problem comes when you start to interlink 200 sites. This can cause penalty headaches when done aggressively between different domains or subdomains (especially in light of Penguin). This typically isn't a problem with internal links on the same domain. +1 for subfolders.

3. Subdomain, Folders, or Directories - As far as Google Places goes, all are fine - as long as each seperate business has it's own separate

• Webpage (whether it's on the same domain, subdomain or folder)
• Address
• Phone #
• etc

... then Google will treat them as different business that you can claim in Google Places. (and you can manage them in bulk)

The advantage of placing everything on the same (sub)domain is that you consolidate your ranking power. Instead of doing link building for 200 sites, you can link build for just one. (Although you still want to target local links to specific pages - helps a ton). As long as you spread link equity amoung the individual business pages (both internal and external) you may have an easier time ranking when everything is on the same domain. +1 for subfolders.

The disadvantage of the folder method is branding. It makes your URLs potentially longer, and you might prefer the shorter domain names for local websites.

There's no "right" solution, but if it were me, I'd build everything on the same domain.

---

By the way, here's an interesting article from Matt Cutts

"If you have a lot of store or franchise locations, consider it a best practice to 1) make a web page for each store that lists the store’s address, phone number, business hours, etc. and 2) make an HTML sitemap to point to those pages with regular HTML links, not a search form or POST requests."

Wish I would have found that before I wrote out my answer.

[scottclark]

the downside here is pretty obvious - Google Adwords. Having the same top level domain name in multiple accounts is a problem. This means that in a dense metro, several franchisees could not show adwords ads at the same time. This causes squabbles and fits.

But I'm trying to figure out in a post-Panda and post-Penguin world how to make sure my legit franchisee network does not look like we're trying to manipulate listings.  We just need to display the right listing in the right territory

[SEOLocal92]

look like you learn something from books you are correct some content in home page changing this days because of the new update but no this site is up in many areas and infect look in Google for locksmith service and tell me what you think about our position with such a strong general keyword.

regard the many locations , its really not something that i can avoid as this company really have about 1000 techs and subs in all this locations nationwide, i am just the SEO guy

Mike

[SEOLocal92]

sorry you are correct i didn't understand before what you need.

I will go with number 2 location.domain.com

Mike

[scottclark]

Sadly, Google is not your friend when it comes to scaling this up.  Especially on Google Places.  Neither is Bing.   It's a mess.

[scottclark]

I really appreciate your response and those from others

This is not a question about how this can be done but which is truly better for organic SEO, especially for the local franchisees.

[Ianpbarnes]

I also like the idea of one main site and then sub-domains for regions. This would allow the main site to focus on the overall brand and the sub-domains can concentrate in local search and adjust content to answer the specific problems of the region. Many technologies can do this but Wordpress multisite would be good. The main blog being the main brand and then all other blogs can be put on sub-domains based on the franchise regions. You also can control the brand with the Wordpress theme on offer. You could then even extend this model as a communication mechanism as you have all the franchises in one place.

[tcolling]

Interesting.  I ask because I own an independent (not franchised) business that provides non-medical in-home caregiving services, allowing the elderly to continue living in their own homes instead of having to move to nursing homes.  I was speculating that that might be the industry of the client that you were asking about, or something similar.

[scottclark]

I have several clients in different industries, each with their own deployment, none of which I think is ideal

I'll go as far as to identify:

• home service, 220 locations.

• health & fitness, 315 locations

• healthcare & wellness, 42 locations

[scottclark]

I really do not follow the answer.   Did you read my original question through?

[tcolling]

I like Mike's answer and it led me to wonder: I wonder whether the original poster would be willing to state what industry is this company in?

[SEOLocal92]

i will highly recommend you stay with one main site that refer to "local office" and you can also do many different maps on the sub domains.

I working on 2 sites that are the same for what you referring ( not franchise but with local offices) and they are up with all main keywords and city sub domains sample at 123locksmith.com

also as you said it will be way more easy for you to control this site and rank it up.

hope that help