Most franchise brands hit a point where their SEO starts working against them—locations competing with each other, location pages that all say the same thing, and KPIs that no longer reflect what’s actually happening.
Our Head of SEO, Marko Arsić, recently sat down with Austin Willman on Digital Web Solutions’ E-Coffee with Experts to share how he approaches these problems and what franchise brands should actually be doing instead.
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube:
Table of Contents
The Franchise SEO Problem Nobody Fixes
Franchise SEO breaks in a predictable way. As a brand scales to new cities, individual locations start fighting each other for the same local keywords and fighting corporate too.
Nobody wins.
Marko has seen this pattern across dozens of franchise clients, and his diagnosis is consistent: the architecture wasn’t built to scale.
The solution isn’t more content or more links, but more structure. Specifically, it’s a clear hierarchy—state, city, location—where each level has a defined job.
The city/metro page is almost always the missing piece: it’s the one that should funnel traffic fairly to every nearby location, and it’s the one most brands either skip or build poorly.
“A lot of franchises make the same mistakes as they scale up, and they rarely fix it. Individual locations start fighting each other for rankings and nobody wins. The fix is a structure that gives every location a fair playing ground.”
— Marko Arsić, Head of SEO
Marko also digs into something most franchise SEOs overlook: the connection between AI search visibility, authorship signals, and what Google actually rewards with rankings today. All of it comes back to the same idea: structure and substance, not shortcuts.
5 Franchise SEO Principles (Episode Takeaways)
Some of Marko’s highlights include:
1. Build a clear location hierarchy — state → city → individual
The metro/city-level page is the most underutilized asset in franchise SEO. It should funnel traffic fairly to all nearby locations while also ranking on its own for high-intent city searches.
Without it, individual franchisees end up competing against each other and against corporate for the same keywords.
2. Layer locations on a map before doing keyword research
Spreadsheets hide patterns that maps reveal instantly.
Plotting all locations visually uncovers density clusters and proximity to relevant points of interest, which is the kind of insight that generates genuinely useful page ideas (e.g. “hotels near [stadium]”) that no keyword tool will surface on its own.
3. Collect local intelligence directly from franchisees
No amount of keyword research replaces what the people on the ground know.
A simple questionnaire, or a recorded call with an AI transcript, can surface the real reasons customers visit a specific location. That detail is exactly what differentiates location pages from programmatic duplicates that Google ignores.
4. Give AI something concrete to cite — numbers and data points
LLMs are hungry for citations with specifics.
Brands that publish growth stats, location counts, or operational milestones in a findable, quotable format get referenced in AI-generated answers far more often than those that keep everything internal.
Even a single well-placed case study with real figures can become the default source for a brand query.
5. Anchor content to real authors with connected social profiles
Since the 2023 Google leak, authorship signals have become increasingly important.
A thought leader who has been with the organization for years, posts regularly on LinkedIn, and is listed as the author on relevant site content creates a trust chain that generic AI-generated content simply cannot replicate.
The KPI Shift Every Franchise Marketer Should Know
Marko broke down how KPIs have changed since 2024, and they changed significantly. Organic clicks have been declining for years as Google serves more answers directly on the results page.
His team shifted attention to impressions as a top-of-funnel proxy, then Google pulled the rug: they disabled the parameter that showed rankings beyond position 10, which had been inflating impression counts across the board.
For one hotel franchise client, impressions dropped over 50% overnight. Not because rankings fell. Because the ruler changed.
Marko’s point is direct: if you’re still optimizing primarily for click volume, you’re chasing a metric that’s been in structural decline for years.
| Metric | Key Insight |
| ↑ Conversions & Revenue | AI traffic converts well when users arrive with clear intent |
| ↑ Conversion Rate | Fewer clicks means UX quality matters more than ever |
| ~ Impressions (post-Oct ’24) | More precise now, but YoY comparisons need ~9 months to stabilize |
| ↓ Organic Click Volume | Expect continued decline as zero-click searches increase |
The bottom line, in Marko’s words: more traffic is no longer the goal. More qualified traffic—landing on a site that’s actually built to convert it—is.
Is Your Franchise Architecture Holding You Back?
We work with franchise brands to build the site structure, local content, and measurement frameworks that turn hundreds of locations into a coherent SEO engine. If you’re seeing cannibalization, flat local traffic, or unclear KPIs, let’s talk.
