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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!
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.
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
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
Sadly, Google is not your friend when it comes to scaling this up. Especially on Google Places. Neither is Bing. It's a mess.
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.
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
I really do not follow the answer. Did you read my original question through?
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?
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!)