Franchisees owning their own profiles personally
The network cannot fix anything, and a departing franchisee keeps the reviews the brand paid for.
Guide
Local SEO for franchises
A franchise network has the multi-location problem plus a governance problem, and the governance problem is the one that usually does the damage. Somebody has to own the Google Business Profiles. If each franchisee claims their own with a personal account, the network loses the ability to fix a suspended listing, correct a wrong address or stop a departing franchisee from walking off with the profile and its reviews.
By Hamza Rivera
Short answer: A franchise network should decide who owns each Google profile before it grows, usually the brand with manager access for the franchisee. Location pages then use a fixed frame with sections each franchisee fills in locally, naming stays identical across the network, and two franchisees should not target the same city.
8 steps
Free to read, in the order it pays to do it. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to download.
At the same time, corporate control taken too far produces the other failure: fifty location pages that are the brand page with a town name substituted, which rank for nothing and give franchisees no reason to believe head office is helping.
The workable arrangement is a narrow one, and it is worth writing down before the network grows.
What franchises are actually competing for
These are the shapes the searches take. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher puts there, which is usually a town, a neighbourhood or a brand.
- [brand] [town]
- [brand] near me
- [service] [town]
- [brand] franchise [area] reviews
- is [brand] any good
The work, in the order it pays to do it
- 1
Decide who owns the profiles, and write it into the agreement
The usual answer is the brand owns them and grants the franchisee manager access. It survives a franchisee leaving, a suspension, and a change of ownership. Retrofitting this across an established network is painful, which is why it belongs in the agreement.
- 2
Standardise the parts that must be standard, and only those
Business name format, primary category, logo, brand photography, the services list. Everything else is local and should be.
- 3
Give each franchisee a page with room for local content
A brand-controlled frame with sections the franchisee genuinely fills: their team, their photographs, their opening hours, the services that branch offers, the neighbourhoods they cover. Without those sections the page is a duplicate.
- 4
Stop franchisees bidding for the same term
Two franchisees optimising for the same city split the brand’s own signal and each blames the other. Territory needs to be reflected in the SEO targets, not just in the contract.
- 5
Run reviews at branch level with brand-level oversight
Reviews attach to each profile and cannot be pooled. Head office can supply the request process and monitor the replies; the asking has to happen locally.
- 6
Keep name and address formatting identical across the network
"Brand Name Townsville" against "Brand Name - Townsville" against "Townsville Brand Name" is three different businesses as far as a directory is concerned. Pick one and enforce it.
- 7
Give franchisees something they could not do alone
Technical work, structured data, site speed, the page template, a review platform, reporting. It justifies the fee and it stops franchisees hiring a local agency who will undo the standardisation.
- 8
Handle openings and closures properly
A closed branch profile should be marked permanently closed, not deleted, and the page should redirect to the nearest open branch. Deleting loses the reviews and leaves the address floating.
What usually goes wrong
Location pages that are brand copy with the town changed
Ranks for nothing and convinces franchisees that head office marketing does not work.
Two franchisees targeting one city
They compete with each other, split the signal, and both lose to an independent.
Inconsistent business naming across the network
Makes every directory treat the branches as unrelated businesses, which is exactly the opposite of what a brand is for.
How to tell whether it is working
Rankings are not the measure. These are, and all of them come from accounts in your own name rather than from a report you have to take on trust.
- Profile performance per franchisee, ranked, so the weak ones are visible to head office
- Whether any two franchisees rank for the same term
- Review volume and recency per branch against the network average
- Enquiries per branch from the branch page rather than the brand home page
Protecting what you build
Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether franchises still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
For a franchise network the specific risk is who owns the profiles. A franchisee who claimed their own listing on a personal account takes it with them when they leave, along with every review the brand paid to generate, and there is no route to get it back. This is the one to fix before the network grows rather than after.
What actually breaks a business in search
Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.
A redesign or a platform move
By a distance the most common cause of a real collapse. URLs change and nothing redirects, or the new site ships with the staging robots.txt still in it. Both are entirely preventable and both are usually discovered weeks later.
A plugin or a setting nobody audited
One checkbox marked "discourage search engines", one SEO plugin defaulting to noindex on a template, one caching layer serving a stale page. Small change, total effect.
Losing control of an account
The Business Profile owned by a former agency, Search Console verified to somebody who has left, the domain registered to a developer. None of this hurts until the relationship ends, and then all of it does at once.
A suspended Google Business Profile
For a business that serves an area this is worse than any algorithm update, because it removes you from the map entirely and on the same day.
Letting the work stop
Nothing dramatic happens. Reviews stop, hours drift, a competitor keeps going, and a year later the position has quietly gone. This is the most common ending and the least noticed.
What to refuse, however it is sold to you
Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.
-
Bought links, in any packaging
Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.
-
Reviews you did not earn
Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.
-
Keywords stuffed into the business name
It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.
-
Pages written to have pages
A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.
-
Anybody who guarantees a position
Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.
The monthly discipline
Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.
- Check Search Console coverage once a month and look at the Excluded reasons, not just the errors.
- Watch impressions rather than clicks. Impressions fall first, usually weeks before anybody notices the phone is quieter.
- Open the Business Profile and look for edits the public has suggested and Google has accepted without telling you.
- Reply to every review that arrived since last month, and keep asking, steadily rather than in bursts.
- Before any site change, write down what the URLs are now. After it, check they still resolve.
- Keep one note of what changed and when. Almost every traffic mystery is solved by a change nobody wrote down.
- Re-run the audit checklist once a year, and the first two sections after any redesign, host move or new plugin.
Own your own accounts
The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.
If you would rather not do it yourself
Everything above is work you can do without hiring anybody, and the profile half of it is worth doing whatever else you decide. If you want it done for you, this is the service that covers it, and we scope it on a call before anything starts.
Other guides
Questions about local SEO for franchises
Who should own the Google Business Profiles?
The brand, with manager access granted to each franchisee. It is the only arrangement that survives a franchisee leaving, a listing suspension or a change of ownership, and it is far easier to set as policy than to retrofit.
How much freedom should franchisees have on their page?
Enough to make it genuinely local: their team, their photographs, their hours, their services, their neighbourhoods. The frame, the naming and the categories should be fixed.
Two of our franchisees cover the same city. What now?
Differentiate the targets by neighbourhood or by service, or agree which one owns the city term. Left alone they split the signal and an independent takes it.
What happens when a branch closes?
Mark the profile permanently closed rather than deleting it, and redirect the page to the nearest open branch. Deleting throws away the reviews and leaves the address unaccounted for.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.