A website for a franchise location

Read the agreement first

Franchise agreements differ enormously on what a location may publish. Some prohibit separate sites entirely, some permit them with brand rules, and some require approval for anything public.

Find out before building rather than after. A site taken down by the franchisor after launch costs the build, the addresses and any visibility it had accumulated.

Ask specifically about the domain, the brand assets, the wording of claims and whether a local page can carry its own contact route. Nothing here is legal advice.

What the brand site cannot do

Rank locally for a service in your town. A national site with a location finder is competing nationally, and the local searches that produce work go to pages built for that place.

Say anything specific about your location. The people, the actual premises, the local conditions and the work you have done there are invisible in a corporate template.

And respond quickly. Local information on a brand site often requires a request to head office, which means it is usually out of date by the time anybody notices.

It also cannot carry your reviews. Customers leave feedback about your location, your staff and your work, and a national site has nowhere sensible to show it even when the franchisor collects it centrally.

What a local page should carry

Everything a customer needs that is true of your location specifically. This is the material that distinguishes the page from every other location of the same brand.

• The actual address and how to find it
• Who works there, with real photographs
• The towns and neighborhoods you cover
• Local hours, including seasonal changes
• Work done in the area, with photographs
• A contact route that reaches your location
• Anything local that changes how the service runs

Avoiding the duplicate problem

Franchise networks produce hundreds of near-identical pages, which is the pattern our page on doorway pages describes and which quality systems handle by picking one and ignoring the rest.

Copying the brand copy onto a local site makes it worse, because the page is then duplicating a stronger source. Our page on duplicate content covers what happens next.

So the local page has to be locally written. The brand describes the service, and you describe doing it here, which is a genuinely different page rather than a copy with a town swapped in.

The practical test is the same one we use on our own pages. Remove the town name and the brand name, and ask whether what remains could belong to any other location in the network. If it could, rewrite it.

If a separate site is not allowed

Work on what you can control. A business profile for the location, local directory entries with consistent details, and whatever local content the brand platform permits.

Push for a real location page on the brand site rather than a template entry. Photographs, staff names and local coverage improve it enormously and are usually permitted.

Our page on consistent business details covers the off-site work, which becomes the main lever when the website itself is out of your hands.

Where the two sites should point

The local page should link to the brand site for anything corporate, and the brand location finder should link to the local page. That relationship makes the local page part of the network rather than a competitor to it.

Never compete with the brand for the brand name. That search is already answered, and trying to intercept it irritates the franchisor and gains nothing.

Compete instead for the service plus the place, whether the question reaches a search engine or an answer engine, because that is what the brand site is worst at answering and where the work actually comes from.

Keep the details identical in both places as well. A phone number that differs between the brand location finder and your own page is the most common source of a customer reaching the wrong office entirely.

When the franchise ends

Plan for it. A local site built on the brand name transfers to nobody, and franchisees who leave frequently find that everything they built went with the agreement.

Where permitted, register a domain you control and keep the customer relationships in a system you own. Those are the assets that survive a change of brand.

And keep your own records of the work, the photographs and the reviews. Our page on one business, one domain covers why the address itself is the asset worth protecting.