Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: Hi, today I'm joined with Luke Baston and today's topic of conversation is how to beat out your franchise competitors. So, you've got a franchise website, you've got one or two other franchises. Think of Starbucks beating out Costa Coffee or a pizza shop beating out another pizza shop that got the franchises or a gutter cleaning company beating out another gutter cleaning company. How do you go about beating competition when you've got a franchise website?

Luke Bastin: Hey James. Yeah. So the example you gave there first of all the coffee shops beating out coffee shops is a really great first example to give because irrespective of the industry you're in, well in virtually every single industry where there are franchises, the way the algorithms treat you at the Google business profile level is as if you are a coffee shop. So like proximity and the kind of the individual closeness that a searcher is to where that business is located is one of the biggest ranking factors. So one of the first things you can do is to focus all of your SEO efforts on the immediate vicinity of where you're based.

Typically kind of 3 to five mile radiuses around where you are in really dense cities. It could even be less than that but really dominate that local area first.

Now the way to do that is to identify all the different competitors which are in that initial target zone and first of all look at what they're doing good bad and ugly. You'll tend to find that for example competitors are using categories in their Google business profile that you may not be using but they could be super relevant for what it is you can do. So just by adding secondary categories that you hadn't thought of or maybe you hadn't thought of but you didn't think they were relevant enough. By adding those, you tend to kind of match up with the competition and you'll start to be served even more.

Things like being really really clear about your business and the different aspects of it. So, I've been working on a couple of franchise websites, national ones recently where they didn't have a clear consistency around showing their opening hours. It's been shown that Google business profiles are influenced by opening hours and they tend to show you more when you say you're open compared to when you say you're not open. So having that clearly communicated on the website and in the schema, making sure that's consistent with the Google business profile is another way that you can beat the competitors. You know, if you say you're open at 6 p.m. in the evening and your competitors are not saying that and people are searching around that time in the day, you're going to get served more often than you otherwise would do. So that's another kind of key simple win that you can do to fix that.

The third thing I found is to use more than one asset. So many entities within a franchise, many locations, they tend to use their website and they tend to use their Google business profile. So they're really kind of fighting with two individual assets. Whereas you can use a lot more than two assets and you can cover more of the market by doing so. You could be making YouTube videos that cover off specific questions people may have about your products or which showcase your business. Every single video you make is another asset that you can target to a different query that people may have.

You could use a main website and you could use an exact match domain or a partially matched branded domain, but two different websites that cover off and divide and conquer the territory for you as well. So, there are all these different tactics that you can use and you can cover more ground more consistently and therefore beat the competition.

James Dooley: Yeah, there's some great advice there. So with regards to beating out competition, I've got some quickfire kind of questions for you, right? So you touched upon there doing more things than just the Google business profile and the main website. You spoke about building a secondary website which could be like you said an exact match domain or a partial match domain. You've spoke about the videos as well. Are you a big fan of as a holistic marketer trying to rank in certain for certain industries images as well as just being trying to rank everything?

Luke Bastin: Yeah, I think the key thing behind that is different queries have different search intents and expectations behind them and in some cases people type things in which does infer they are looking for an image or for a visual. Maybe it's a video, maybe it's a still and a set of images.

And you can cover off even if it's just images, you can cover that off in a video that maybe has a slideshow of images and then the individual images. So say you've got 10 images that showcase your business and the team and the rest of it. You can have those images on the website which individually could rank for individual terms in the images section of Google and other search engines. They can also be served individually in large language model results as well. They can also come up in AI overviews as well when people sort of see rich snippets and position zero type results, knowledge panel results. So you get all of that real estate just with images.

But then you could also say you had 10 images. That's 10 potential pieces of real estate that you have. And then an 11th because you could make a video with a slideshow of those images. And then a 12th because you can also feature them on your website or websites. So it could be 13 14 and more. So you can multi-purpose images in so many different ways. I think they're wonderful.

But I think that the key thing is to match the search intent. So the queries and what people are expecting to see with the type of real estate that you are making.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, for me, I absolutely love doing for all the industries that we're in, like before and after photos, I love doing. I love doing, especially if I'm in something like we do quite a lot of playground. So like playground designs, anything with designs, I love doing obviously images, anything we do quite a bit of like in the joinery space. So anything bespoke or custom. So like media walls and stuff like that. People that want something bespoke or custom, they want ideas or anything with designs and then or ideas as well within the term the want and images.

So I think yeah I think expanding upon that as an holistic marketer being seen for doing that. But with regards to comparing against competition, what is there any specific tool that you're using? Like are you preferring Ahrefs or SEMrush when it comes to like checking keyword data like what what you using with regards to tracking competition on stuff like that?

Luke Bastin: Yeah, I do tend to use those tools as a way of looking at the types of strategies that competition is using. So it could be that a competitor is doing something with compare pages. They might be comparing their brand with a bunch of other brands and they could be using images and infographics and things to do that. And I might not even be aware that's even a thing. But then you see it, you see the search demand behind it and you think, “Wow, there are thousands of people looking for this every single month and I'm not even at the races yet.”

So from that initial ideation perspective, definitely I use those tools. But then beyond the initial phase, what I tend to do is I tend to look at what the information retrieval systems are showing about a competitor.

So I'll get a list of competitors and then I'll just look online. What is Google showing about that particular business? What is Grok, ChatGPT, what are Perplexity saying about that particular business? And I'll use — I've got a set of generic queries which I put into the five leading large language models — and I just kind of compare and contrast what they're all saying about the competition.

And it'll be things like: what are their reviews like? How many reviews do they get and how often do they get them? Are there any themes in the feedback they're getting from customers? What are they doing with images? What's their pricing like? And then from that you can start to extrapolate what content they do have but also what content they don't have because often beating the competition is maybe about seeing what they're not doing as opposed to what they are doing.

So I kind of have that holistic thing where I look at what they are doing, look at what they're not doing, and then build a strategy based on those two sets of findings.

James Dooley: Yeah, I love that and what they're not doing to try to get the information gain. But going back to comparing against competition. So, as a professional franchise SEO specialist like yourself, you're trying to beat out competition. Are you a believer — now obviously I know you're a believer in information gain, seeing what they're not doing — but what about mainly locals like the BM25 algorithms?

So, because it's the BM25 algorithms, are you a believer that initially you need to reflect the SERP and correlation? And if so, are you using any tools like Surfer SEO, ClearScope, Page Generator Pro, MarketMuse? Are you doing any correlation tools or now with AI have you got your own tools, your own Python scripts? Like how are you extracting the most important entities, attributes, and all that when you're trying to beat out that competition?

Luke Bastin: Yeah, it's a great question and my strategy has changed a lot over the last couple of years and I've done different things. But what I'm doing at the moment is — to answer your question — I think the algorithm type which operates depends on the page type rather than just the site type.

So if you take a franchise, they're quite a complex website because they have the national part of a website which could be something that BM25 doesn't operate on at all. It could be the more advanced algorithms that do operate on detailed content pages, on detailed companywide brochure web pages. So you've got to factor that in at that level and that's a really important part of the website.

But then you've got the local level as you say. You've got these individual local SEO type pages — location pages, geo pages — and the evidence I see is that it is the case you don't need to go into the same level of content detail that you do at the national level. You just need to describe all of the business attributes in comprehensive detail so that any query anyone might have about that local franchise business is covered in the content. And if you do that, that's generally the gold standard for that local piece.

So, what tools do I use? I used to use Surfer, and I think it's a really, really good tool. I've never used Page Optimizer Pro. What I do is I use — I've done this process manually a number of times on local franchises — a technique called sharding. I call it sharding. I think it's something I picked up from a cryptocurrency blog years ago.

But what it is is: if you have the perfect example of a local SEO set of pages for a service and a geography, what you do is you take that set of pages and you take all of the content from them, put them in like a zipped file or a collection of files, and then you give that to a large language model and you say, “Hey, here's an example of a really really good local SEO set of content and pages. It's for plumbing and it's for Chicago. What I want you to do is to give me the equivalent using all the same attributes or equivalent attributes, but I want you to do it now for roofing. I want you to do it for Denver.”

And you're just kind of sharding the process from one industry and location to another industry and location. And large language models are fantastic at that. They know way more than any human or any analysis tool is going to know. And they give you the raw materials that you can then work with.

So, I find if I do the sharding technique, often you don't need tools like Surfer to dial in those local pages because the raw material is always there. You're just making sure it makes sense. You know, maybe the regulatory regime is different between Chicago and Denver for example. There might be differences there. But in general, that's how I do it.

James Dooley: Yeah, I think that's a great way. I think the issue is with that is that you're a very advanced franchise SEO specialist and you've got that information. Without having that initial template, it's going to be very very difficult for in-house franchise SEO marketers to try and be able to do that.

So, moving on to that then, how can someone look to hire you to look at how you can reverse engineer to beat out competition? So, or maybe even get that template from you. They're a franchise SEO website. They're saying, “Luke, I really like the sound of that template. I want that template. How can I get that template? How can I hire Luke Bastin to help me beat out my competition?”

Luke Bastin: Yeah, so I'm pretty active online. The easiest ways to get in touch with me are through my website, which is lukebaston.com, and then I'm also active on socials. I'm active on LinkedIn. I'm active on Facebook, active on Instagram as well. So, any of those methods would be great to get in touch.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. Anyone who's watching this, Luke Baston's an absolute legend when it comes to franchise SEO. I'm a massive believer at looking at your competition to reflect what they're doing and then try and move on from it. Get that information gain. So, reflect the SERP and then you can then go on to set the SERP. I think it's very important.

Luke's got all the big templates that is needed. So, make sure you reach out and hopefully he can help you with your franchise SEO.