SEO Boost for www.franchiselocal.co.uk

There are numerous platforms in the UK that provide franchises for sale these days, meaning that this niche is highly competitive. It’s pretty expensive to run PPC campaigns for franchise retailing businesses since the price for one click may be as high as $26. That is why search engine optimization turns out to be one of the best and relatively inexpensive ways to increase organic traffic to any website in this niche.

At the onset of the SEO campaign, we’ve carried out a range of work relating to the rectification of existing technical errors, including: 

– improving the website’s PageSpeed performance according to the capabilities of the existing CMS system;
– optimizing all images by adding the keywords in alt tags;
– making changes in the robots.txt file;
– generating an up-to-date sitemap (without 404/301, canonicalized, and noindex URLs); submitting sitemap.xml file in Search Console;
– setting the correct processing of the page with 404 error;
– adding unique titles and descriptions in order to solve the problem of duplicate meta tags.

Once the SEO recommendations were implemented, we started a link building campaign within FullSEO package. 

The UK franchise retailing market is known for several major companies that remain on the leading edge for many years. With that in mind, our primary goal was to promote the client’s website for keywords related to types of franchises: low-cost, part-time, home-based, and several other types. This approach allowed us to increase the rankings of the given keywords in Google TOP-10. For example, the keyword “part-time franchises for sale” now ranks 1st as compared to its zero positions before the promotion.

At the same time, we launched a customized campaign for the keywords related to “franchises by size of investment”, for example, franchise with less than £10,000 or franchise opportunities over £100,000. We promoted a lot of low- and mid-frequency keywords that were moderately and highly competitive in Google TOP-5. This way, the keyword “franchise to buy under 10000” raised from the 6th to 1st position.

The next step was to set up a custom campaign for franchise industry-specific keywords. It included many search queries, like “beauty franchises in the UK” and “food franchise under 50000”. We aimed at promoting our client’s website while using the keywords from different industries as they accounted for the lion’s share of queries. These keywords have average search volume and high competition level. For your information: the level of competition (low, medium, or high) is determined by the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords used all over Google.

Thanks to our well-thought-out optimization campaign, most of the keywords have reached Google TOP100. We’ve managed to raise the keywords “computer-based franchise” and “events franchise for sale” from zero to the 1st position. Meanwhile, the queries “van franchise for sale” and “security franchise for sale” have taken up the 3rd and 4th positions, respectively.

As we have mentioned above, a few leading companies are operating in this niche. After we analyzed the competitors, we decided to create additional pages for local queries (franchise in [city | region | county] ). After discussing that with the client, we came up with new web pages for regions, counties, and cities in Great Britain and then launched a customized optimization campaign for them. As a result, we’ve increased some rankings for local queries. For instance, we’ve raised the keyword “franchises in Scotland” from zero to the 13th position; the keyword “franchise opportunities London” has reached the 20th position; the keyword “franchise opportunities for sale in Liverpool” has gone up to the 4th position.

What is more, we made the content gap analysis which showed the keywords competitors’ blogs rank for but our client’s website doesn’t. Thanks to it, we found out that we had to increase the number of blog posts and set up a customized link-building campaign for them. So, we selected topics which were not presented on client’s blog, prepared new blog posts, and published on the website. To fuel the progress, we also started a custom link-building campaign for the already existing blog posts. Thus, we’ve brought the website to Google TOP for information queries. We’ve raised the keyword “automotive franchise meaning” from zero to the 3rd position while the one “is it worth starting a franchise business” has gone up from 0 to the 10th position.

Results & Conclusion