Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: Franchise SEO tips to fix weak performance of franchisee locations. Today I’m joined with Luke Bastin, an absolute legend when it comes to franchise SEO. So Luke, this is more to do with fixing existing franchise websites. Obviously, every single week you’re coming across large franchise sites and a lot of them are doing it wrong. Let’s play brutally honest about it — what are the main things that you are going into and fixing straight away and getting good results with?

Luke Bastin: Yeah, so… hi James. I think one of the biggest things I see on a day-to-day basis is they’re either getting the technical things wrong on the website, or they’re getting the Google Business Profile — or the geographical aspect of what they’re trying to cover — wrong as well, or they’re maybe mis-targeting where they’re trying to be present.

So on the first of those — the website technical issues — again it depends on the layout of the website because we could be talking about subfolders, we could be talking about subdomains, but the thing I see the most is there’s one maybe kind of core root issue and then it’s being magnified across all of the different locations.

I’ll give you maybe two or three examples I’ve seen in the last month or two, and there could be other stuff, but that could be a good representative sample.

The first thing I’ve seen in the last couple of months is artificially creating pages that you do not need to create. So if you have a franchise and say there are 50 locations, those 50 locations could be essentially clones of each other because that’s like the essence of what a franchise business is.

But they all kind of seem to think they want their own version of service pages, but actually it’s pretty much the same service that they perform. So why would you have 50 pages saying the same thing when you really only need one, and you can reference all the 50 locations from that one?

So there’s a certain hybridity where the individual locations need to know actually it’s not important for them to have their own version of that page. But in contrast, there are other pages where they shouldn’t rely on a national page — they should absolutely have their own version of that page. So, you know, “meet the team” type pages for example, or “about us” type pages, or the geographies they serve — those types of pages. So getting that mismatched in some way is a big thing that you see in franchises quite often.

The other thing is templated pages. So very often franchise websites are quite templated in nature because they have to be. It’s a similar business — it’s just the geography that varies more often than not. So often an individual franchise will be relying on the content as it comes out of the box from a franchise website, and very often that franchise website hasn’t considered their location.

So like for example, if you were a lawn care franchise, very often they use different types of grass in different locations, but the website might generically talk about one type of grass when actually that’s not the type of grass that they do in their location.

Or it might talk about, say, winterizing your lawn, winterizing your real estate — but if you’re based in Texas, you don’t really worry too much about winterizing because it’s hot all year round.

So these are the kind of nuances that they overlook and they don’t then personalise things enough to their location — or actually they may not be able to, just because of how the website has been built and it doesn’t allow that flexibility. So these are kind of things that we often fix as well.

A third thing is being too broad in where you’re trying to cover when you’re very new as a franchise. So this is more for the kind of new startups within a franchise. They’ll get this kind of big territory — so say it’s like half of Austin in Texas or somewhere like that. They’ll think, “Okay, I need to do SEO which hammers all of my locations because that’s what I’ve bought. I’ve bought these kind of cities or I’ve bought these zip codes. Let’s just do everything and go big.”

But the problem with that is, if you have a Google Business Profile and you’re doing things by the book — which enterprise brands do, as they should do — then you’re actually using a hyper-local tool to try and do something very broad.

Google Business Profiles are hyper-local, and typically they can go to kind of 10 miles around where you’re based, depending on the competition and how well you do the SEO — but it’s usually more standard to initially aim for much lower than that, so three miles or five miles in a really competitive space, and then sort of go for 10 miles after that. But it’s never going to cover your entire location. So trying to go too broad too quickly is probably another huge thing that I see.

**James Dooley:** Yeah, for sure. I think with regards to the multi-locations — and let’s say there was 50 different locations that you had — I completely agree with you that the service might be exactly the same. So it makes the pages very, very, very similar. The only thing that’s being changed out is the specific location.

What I do love about it though is a few of your examples where initially, when they first started, they was canonicalizing all the location pages back to the main page, but then you were speaking to the franchisees to make each individual page more unique.

So where you was going out to them saying — because something that is quite unique in that area is like what case studies they might have done in that area, what testimonies they might have done with a local church, a local cathedral, a local school — which is very specific to their location — which over time then makes those location pages… yes, it’s the same service, but I love the fact that you were looking at the rare attributes in those different areas and how you try and instil that for each one of the location pages.

Can you expand on that a little bit more? How do you make those specific location pages that little bit more unique?

Luke Bastin: Yeah — it’s in a state of development at the minute because we’re in this kind of huge period of change with LLMs.

And the way I’m looking at it at the minute — and none of us have a crystal ball so this may evolve depending on when you’re watching this — but the way I’m looking at it right now is I think there are three types of content in terms of these types of unique attributes and informational content based on work you’ve done.

So at the very low level, the most common but the least effective — and it’s probably dead in the water already — is information which large language models already have in their training data. So they don’t need to kind of come to your website and examine your content to serve your results if they already know what that is.

So I think where franchises often get this wrong is they talk in generic terms about a location. You know, Dallas is known for this, that, and the other. Well, ChatGPT’s training data and all of these other large language models’ training data — they already know this. They don’t need to come to you to find out what they already know. So that’s at the bottom. So I steer clear of that, and that’s often the type of content which has done well before to individualize a page, but it’s probably a little bit too vanilla now.

Then in the middle, there’s content which is kind of partially within the training data, but partially does contain unique information. So it could be, you know, we have a plumbing business — we’re a franchisee — we’re based in Dallas, and here’s some of the neighborhoods we’ve done work in. That’s unique, because a large language model isn’t going to know that business has done work in these particular neighborhoods.

So it is going to draw some relevancy between what somebody’s typing in and your content in that situation. But again, it’s not particularly unique or valuable, and it doesn’t hugely help conversions either outside of the visibility piece — because if you’re serving Dallas, people are going to know that the neighborhoods within Dallas you cover anyway. So it’s good, but it’s not great.

And then at the very top of the pyramid — and this is what you were referring to — is one-page case studies or individual case study pages where you’re talking about a really specific problem that a very specific client had. You’re talking about the materials you used, you’re talking about the neighborhoods, you’re talking about the problems you had to fix, you’re talking about the process you used to fix those problems, you’re talking about the feedback you got from the client.

Depending on how you operate, you could be talking about price ranges as well, depending on whether you want to do that or not. You could be talking about regulatory issues that you had to abide by to get the job done.

So there are all these kind of unique nuances to a particular job, and once you have a body of those done, you can start to refer to those in your service pages. So you can say, “Look, in this particular area, we’ve done these projects,” and then you can link off to a child page which then talks about those projects in a lot more detail — like a case study page.

But you can still make reference to those case studies on the actual service pages themselves. So that’s the kind of gold standard that I’m advising franchises to work on going forward.

It’s a lot of work and it’s very difficult, but the rewards I think are going to be huge — because LLMs absolutely love that data-rich content.

James Dooley: Yeah. Yeah. And it makes it different — like LLMs or AI content can’t write that. It’s real information. It’s jobs that you’ve done. It’s not made up AI content. It’s what makes you and differentiates you from an AI article, if that makes sense.

But one last thing — because we’re talking here about fixing franchise SEO websites. Someone comes along, they want to hire Luke Bastin, they’re struggling with performance on a franchise website, you’re the franchise SEO specialist.

When you’re running a technical audit, there’s a few different people that speak about different tools like Screaming Frog, Jet Octopus, Sitebulb. Some people talk about making certain you’ve got your server logs and stuff like that.

How important is it to run a technical audit? I’m presuming on a bigger site it’s becoming much, much more important to make certain that you’re fixing all these errors. And what do you specifically yourself use the most with regards to technical SEO on fixing franchise websites?

Luke Bastin: Yeah, it’s a great question. And again, it depends on how the website is set up and the scale of it.

But yeah, the tools I use — I use Screaming Frog. I think that gives me a good kind of common-sense overview of some of the issues.

I think one of the things I’ve found over time with any tool — whether it’s Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, I’ve used Sitebulb as well before — but any tool is, at the end of the day, it’s someone else’s algorithm, an idea about what it is they think you should be checking.

And whilst those are fantastic, what I’ve tended to find is you often need your custom tooling to be able to look at the things you do find. And these tools might not necessarily cover them — or cover them in the way you want to find them.

So, for example, the last time — and I could be wrong on this because Screaming Frog might have updated — but the last time I checked, Screaming Frog, for example, didn’t look at links in the content where there wasn’t any anchor text. So an A tag where there wasn’t any anchor text — it just looks invisible in the page. You’re not going to see it visually with the naked eye, and yeah, it’s quite hard to find those.

But if you have your own custom tooling — maybe other tools… I think Sitebulb does check for this last time I checked as well — but you end up using this daisy chain of tools rather than just building your own master set.

So what I do first and foremost nowadays is I have a number of Python tools which incorporate the best bits of Screaming Frog either indirectly or directly.

So either indirectly — they take in the kind of things that Screaming Frog measures and do something similar — or directly: you’ll use Screaming Frog, take an export of the results, put that export into this Python script, and then it does other stuff that Screaming Frog maybe doesn’t do in the same way.

But that way you get the granularity, but you also get the industry standard checks that people would expect you to do anyway — and I find that that’s a best of both worlds.

The other thing I do — which tools claim to do, but I still think it’s best to do it manually — is comparing the HTML source code to the fully rendered page, which is in a Chrome browser, and then comparing those two to the fully rendered page, which is the Google Chromium version in Google Search Console.

So you have like three versions of the page, and then you can see what content is not being shown in one or more of those versions, what content is, what’s the kind of impact of JavaScript on the page — good and bad.

I’ll give you an example: just last week I was examining a location within a bigger franchise in the US, and they were using this third-party tool which did something similar to what we were talking about with case studies. It kind of loaded in all of these case studies and the page looked amazing. I was thinking, “Wow, this is such an amazing tool.”

But when you looked at the detail of how that third-party code worked, it was not in the HTML source code, and it was not in the Google version of the rendered page, but it was then in the Chrome version.

So to the human eye, you could see all of these wonderful attributes and you could see all this content, but from a search engine perspective: one, dependent on JavaScript — which means no LLMs really see that right now, they don’t execute JavaScript — and two, not being seen by Google. So therefore, not going to be in search overviews, not going to end up in search either.

So yeah, those are kind of the main ways I do it.

James Dooley: Sounds good. So if someone wants a technical audit for a franchise website and they wanted to hire a franchise SEO specialist like yourself, how can they get hold of you to get the initial audit and check — like you said there — with regards to the rendering of the site and seeing what’s performing, what’s not performing, where maybe with the server logs, what pages are not being crawled often and stuff like that. How can someone get hold of yourself, Luke?

Luke Bastin: Yeah, so the easiest way is to go to my website — **lukebastin.com** — just myname.com. I’m also pretty active on Facebook. I’m active on LinkedIn. But the website’s probably the easiest way.

James Dooley: So, if someone’s looking for a franchise SEO audit, make sure you check **Luke Bastin** out. He’s an absolute legend when it comes down to franchise SEO. He’s the most skilful person I’ve ever met that focuses deep down on franchise SEO strategies.