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Thanks for the advice!

I represent a franchisor and we have two marketing campaigns: attracting customers to purchase our service; and attracting potential franchisees to purchase our business. We're torn between simply putting franchise-related content on our existing consumer website, or building a completely separate website for franchise recruitment. Building a completely separate site would involve a separate SEO strategy to build domain authority and backlinks... so we're thinking the better strategy would be to simply piggyback off of our already existing consumer website. Any advice?

Makes sense and this clears up a lot of our questions. Thanks Miriam!

Thanks for the response Donna! This helps!

Hi,

I represent a franchisor who does all marketing- including local seo- for our franchisees. I've read a lot about local SEO and understand the basics, but have some remaining questions.

1- If our typical territories are quite large and encompass more than one major city, should we create multiple location pages for the same franchise owner? I believe the answer should be yes from an SEO stand point, but the problem is that most of our franchisees naturally just have one business address (their home). Since PO boxes and virtual offices aren't the way to go, what's the best course of action? And when I say major cities, I'm really talking about major cities (and not just small towns/boroughs). Can they just use a friend's/relative's address?

2- There's a lot of info out there about "locations pages," but it's not really clear whether or not you should really just have ONE page for each location, or several pages with different content? For instance, it looks like a lot of businesses are creating just one, "home-page" looking landing page for their individual locations, with everything from services to testimonials on just that one page. Is this preferred over creating several different local pages for that one location? The latter is what we currently do. From the user stand-point, it looks like each franchise location has it's own "mini website" on our main website. For instance, a landing page optimized for the local business name, a local services page, a project/photo gallery page, local review page, etc. It seems like a lot less work just building one landing page for each location, but is the payoff the same?

I'm torn between the two strategies- is it really worth the extra work (in terms of traffic + local ranking) to build out the individual pages for the one location?

Thanks Moz Community!

Hi Dmitrii, 
Thanks for the response!

Our brand is quite known in our more established territories, but not where new locations are launching. Our industry is exterior painting, so we want to capture those users searching locally (example, exterior painters in (city name)). 
My thought process was to optimize the "microsite homepage" for a local keyword query since our main website's homepage already ranks for our brand-name. So if there are branded searches, users will still land on our site.

I'm new to SEO, so I'm just not 100% sure this is the best strategy.

We are launching quasi "microsites" for our franchisees within our main company website. My question is wether to optimize the homepage for the franchisee's business name OR a local keyword query? I know standard practice is to optimize the homepage for your company's brand-name, but in this case, brand awareness isn't strong for these new local businesses. Also, apart from the homepage and service page, there is not much room to create optimize content- other pages are simply reviews, projects and a contact us page.

Thanks!!