Episode 4: Navigating Local SEO for Franchises with Andrew Shotland

Key Takeaways

• Consolidating franchise websites onto a single national domain consistently improves SEO performance
• The page you link to from your Google Business Profile directly affects your map pack ranking
• Getting franchisee buy-in and alignment is the number-one prerequisite for any SEO program
• Stop reporting on vanity metrics like domain authority and rankings — focus on clicks, calls, form fills, and conversions that connect to revenue
• SEO should not operate in a silo — coordinate with PPC, social, and PR teams to share learnings, amortize content costs, and drive links to priority pages

Franchise SEO is not just regular SEO with a Google Business Profile (GBP) tacked on. It requires a fundamentally different approach — one that balances corporate consistency with local relevance, navigates the politics of franchisee relationships, and connects marketing activity to real business outcomes rather than vanity metrics.

In this episode of the Local Marketing Beat podcast, host Christian Hustle sits down with Andrew Shotland, Founder and CEO of Local SEO Guide, to explore the biggest mistakes franchises make with local SEO, why consolidating onto one domain wins every time, how the page you link from your GBP changes your rankings, and why getting organizational alignment matters more than any technical optimization.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction and the local SEO landscape for franchises

01:44 Andrew’s last local search: nurseries, closed stores, and inaccurate hours

03:00 Why franchise SEO budgets are under more pressure than ever

06:00 Best practice #1: Claimed, verified, and fully optimized Google Business Profile

08:27 Best practice #2: Link your GBP to the most relevant page, not the homepage

09:09 Best practice #3: Service area pages for ranking outside your physical location

11:00 Why consolidating franchise websites onto one domain always wins

15:00 The biggest pitfall: organizational alignment and franchisee buy-in

19:40 How to connect SEO with PPC, social, and PR for maximum impact

22:40 Measuring success: stop looking at rankings, start tracking conversions

25:00 The problem with vanity metrics and unrealistic forecasts

Consolidate Franchise Websites onto One National Domain

“We’ve done a lot of research and a lot of projects for franchises where we figured out that if you consolidate all of your location websites into a single national domain, your SEO tends to do better. Every time we’ve done it, it’s worked that way.” — Andrew Shotland

Andrew shares one of his firmest recommendations for franchise brands: Consolidate all location websites onto a single domain.

Many franchises allow individual franchisees to operate their own websites, which fragments link authority, creates inconsistent brand messaging, and makes it nearly impossible to implement SEO best practices at scale.

Every time Local SEO Guide has executed this consolidation for a client, the result has been improved SEO performance across the board. A single domain accumulates link equity, enables consistent technical optimization, and gives the corporate team control over local landing pages that can be optimized systematically. For franchise brands still operating on fragmented domains, this is likely the single highest-impact structural change available.

The Page You Link From Your GBP Directly Affects Rankings

“I set up a fake moving business in Los Angeles. It ranked number two for Santa Monica movers. I just changed the link on our Google Business Profile from my site to the Meathead Movers site, and instantly my profile became number one because Google thought that page was much more relevant or stronger.” — Andrew Shotland

Andrew describes a striking experiment that demonstrates how much the Google Business Profile landing page URL affects map pack rankings. By changing the GBP link from his own site to a stronger competitor’s page, his profile immediately jumped from position two to position one — proving that Google uses the linked page’s authority and relevance as a direct ranking signal.

The practical implication: If you want to rank for a specific service like dishwasher repair rather than general appliance repair, link your GBP to your dishwasher repair page, not your homepage.

You may lose rankings for the broader term but gain them for the specific service that drives more qualified leads. For multi-location brands managing listings at scale, this means every location’s GBP should link to its most strategically important page — not a default homepage URL.

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The Biggest Franchise SEO Pitfall Is Organizational, Not Technical

“When we start with a client, they ask what’s the number one thing we can do to improve our ranking in Google. Our first answer is: get your act together. Get everyone aligned. That’ll be the most important thing you do — everything else can’t happen until you do that.” — Andrew Shotland

Andrew identifies organizational alignment as the single biggest obstacle to franchise SEO success.

The most common scenario: Corporate hires an SEO agency, but implementation requires franchisee cooperation — providing photos, approving content, updating hours — and that cooperation never materializes. He shares the example of asking a client for a single image for a Google Business post and waiting a month without receiving it.

For franchise brands, the lesson is that no SEO strategy can succeed without buy-in from the people who control the locations. Andrew’s advice: Start with minimum viable best practices that every location can realistically implement, get agreement on those before attempting anything advanced, and be honest about bandwidth. As one franchise client told him: “We can do anything, but we can’t do everything.”

Break SEO Out of Its Silo — Coordinate with PPC, Social, and PR

“We had a client that accidentally turned off their pay-per-click campaign for a day and their organic traffic went through the roof because it was all targeting brand queries. Paid media people and SEO people should be connecting on a regular basis.” — Andrew Shotland

Andrew makes a strong case for cross-channel coordination.

PPC can quickly test which keywords and pages convert, providing intelligence that SEO teams can use to prioritize their efforts. Social media teams can repurpose SEO content into posts, amortizing the content investment across channels. And PR campaigns can drive links to pages that SEO has identified as priorities.

He shares a cautionary tale: A thousand-location retailer accidentally turned off their PPC campaign for a day and saw organic traffic surge — because the paid campaigns were bidding heavily on brand queries that would have converted organically anyway. For brands managing both local SEO and paid search, the takeaway is to audit whether PPC is cannibalizing organic brand traffic before assuming paid is driving incremental value.

Stop Reporting Vanity Metrics — Track What Connects to Revenue

“Rankings change by the mile. I can rank number one for something and then walk a mile and I’re no longer number one because it’s relying on my location. Checking your rankings all the time is a fool’s errand. All you should be looking at is clicks, calls, form fills, and conversions.” — Andrew Shotland

Andrew pushes back hard on the metrics that many SEO agencies use to demonstrate progress.

Domain authority, raw ranking positions, and traffic from nonlocal queries are all misleading indicators for local businesses. Local rankings change based on the searcher’s physical location, making position tracking inherently unreliable as a primary KPI.

His recommended measurement framework is simple: Track clicks, calls, form fills, and conversions — the metrics that connect directly to revenue. Rankings can be tracked in aggregate for competitive analysis, but they should not be the headline metric in any report.

For franchise brands using analytics and optimizing for location performance, Andrew’s advice aligns perfectly: Measure what your boss will ask you for, not what makes a report look impressive.