When a franchise business partners with Thrive to design their website, the topic of whether to create individual landing pages or microsites for each franchise location seems to come up often. This is an important decision that should be thought through during the discovery meeting. As this decision can impact the effectiveness of your franchise SEO strategy. We take a look at the difference between landing pages and microsites and how a two-pronged approach is the most effective strategy.
Franchise Landing Page vs Microsite
What is a landing page? It is a page that would reside on the main franchisor’s website where a visitor can arrive or “land” on. The landing page would contain information about a particular local franchise location and their available services.
What is a microsite? A separate web page or a collection of related pages that reside on its own domain. The microsite would contain information for a single location or several regional franchise locations.
Creating A Franchise Landing Page and Microsite
A strategy that Thrive recommends is to first create individual landing pages for each of your franchise locations under the main franchisor domain. We recommend this strategy due to the fact that the franchisor website will most likely have a strong domain authority. Now we are not dismissing the notion of creating individual microsites for each of the franchise locations. In fact, we would also recommend creating individual microsites if your budget allows for it.
Why we recommend this two-pronged approach is that there is opportunity to successfully optimize both the franchisor’s and franchise’s websites to rank for the same keywords. This way you are cannibalizing the search results and knocking competitors off the first page. With the right local SEO strategy you could rank within the map results as well as within the organic search results. Combine this with an effective PPC campaign and you could have multiple brand impressions on the same page, thus increasing the likelihood for that user to click on your web listing.
So lets see this action. The below screenshots shows an effective franchise SEO strategy where the SERVPRO main website and the franchise website are cannibalizing the search results. Here we have two local map results, multiple pages from the franchisee site in the organic search results, and a PPC ad from the franchisor. This is how the two-pronged approach should work.
How Can Thrive Help
At Thrive Internet Marketing, we’re proud of the value that our services bring to the franchise industry, and we invite you to explore our current work portfolio. You can depend on our integrity, creativity and commitment to online strategies that work for your individual business model. Contact us online, or call our friendly Thrive staff today at 817-642-9686.
