A big part of any business’s marketing strategy is driving traffic to the brand’s website. As a future garage franchise owner, the internet is where you demonstrate your product and service superiority, attract new investors, and expand your reach. To do that, you must employ franchise marketing tools that elevate your message above the chatter of other garage businesses.
The goal is to become the highest-ranking result for keyword searches on the most used internet browsers, like Google and Bing. When your site is the top search result, customers and investors come to you more than your competitors.
In this article, we’ll talk about marketing strategies for garage franchise businesses that will help you tailor your web content to achieve better search engine results and build your rankings.
Keywords—the specific words people input into the search bar on their browsers to find answers to their questions—are the building blocks of how search engines rank pages. Employing keywords, even those that seemingly boost competitors, is a top franchise marketing strategy to expand the reach of the garage business.
Understanding Franchise Marketing: Using Keywords
Now that we know what keywords are, how can we deploy them in our franchise marketing strategies to differentiate our garage franchise business from others?
Differentiating Business Types
Let’s take the garage franchise business itself. Keywords can help us tell customers and potential franchise investors what type of garage business we’re operating. Some of the keywords that specify types of garage business are:
- Best Garage remodeling company
- Overhead garage door repair franchise
- Top Garage door installation
- Garage remodeling business
- Garage construction franchise
- Commercial garage services franchise
These keywords describe distinct types of garage businesses that potentially do very different things. Where one may only do door repairs, another may do new door sales and repairs. The third may remodel existing garages, while the fourth may build new garages and transform outdated garages. Some may distinguish between commercial or residential only, and others may do it tall.
The keywords for which you rank on a search engine’s results may ensure the right people find your website for their needs.
Franchise Marketing Strategy: Harnessing Competitor Keywords
What people often overlook in their marketing efforts is that they may be able to rank even for categories that pertain to competitor businesses or keywords adjacent to their business model.
For example, let’s assume you’re a garage remodeling franchise owner, and you can repair garage doors. However, your bread and butter is whole garage remodeling, and you’re quite skilled at persuading people with broken garage doors to go all in on a remodeling project rather than just fixing their door. You want to drive business to your website for people seeking repairs, so you’ll try to rank for garage door repair keywords, even though that’s not the only thing your business does.
You employ this franchise marketing strategy to compete with garage repair businesses for search engine optimization—to rank higher than garage door repair businesses, even if you’re not the best fit for that keyword because you do more.
Benefits of Competitor Keyword Franchise Marketing
By strategizing many competitor keywords, you can drive more web traffic to your site and ultimately bring more customers and investors to your brand.
It’s more than just co-opting your competition’s audience, however. The benefits of this type of franchise marketing are helpful for your brand in the long run in many ways, including:
- Understand your audience’s journey. If you’re speaking to your consumer or targeting your franchise investor, tailor your message more specifically to what answers they need to take the next step in working with your garage franchise.
- Choosing strategic keywords brings in a healthy mix of readers. You’re not just getting new customers visiting your site—you’re entertaining your competitors, too. Franchise marketing tactics like using competitor keywords without linking to those brands will bring readers who’ve searched for your competition, and they can compare your brand to the others. Competitors will see what you’ve got to offer and how they match up. You’ll be able to analyze what’s driving traffic to your website and taking from theirs, which boosts your site’s performance.
- Fill in the gaps. When researching competitor’s keywords, you can find holes in the story and fill those spaces with answers. Anything the competition has overlooked is an opportunity for you to bring organic traffic to your website. You never know if that’s your next converted sale or franchise investor!
- Position as a subject matter expert. The more you know about your overall industry, the more knowledge you can impart to your audience. The more expertise you build, the more people want to read your content. Expertise is a valuable commodity and brings with it high rankings and trust. When people trust you they’re more likely to convert into sales and investors because they believe in your knowledge, products, and services.
Steps to Keyword Franchise Marketing
How do you get started? You likely already know your competition, so you can start researching right away. A quick browser search of your industry’s top keywords can yield some basic answers.
However, manually monitoring your search engine strategies is time-consuming and inefficient. The best franchise marketing strategies use keyword analysis tools to target the best keywords, compare the competition’s SEO performance with yours, highlight potential gaps in keyword strategy, and more.
There are even some franchise marketing analysis tools that help brands plan out a content strategy around specific keywords, incorporate advertising, and include social media in the campaign.
It may seem like a good idea to hit all the keywords so all your franchise marketing bases are covered. That’s not always the best idea. As part of your strategy, you’ll want to consider the keywords that will be easier to rank for and those that will be more difficult.
For example, if you’re the only garage remodeling franchise in your city, ranking for “garage remodeling franchises in Anytown, USA” could be immediately beneficial. “Garage remodeling franchises in Los Angeles” might be a different story.
It’s perfectly reasonable to mention how your garage business compares to your competition. Even with keywords you don’t quite fit, you can position yourself as the “better alternative” to attract customers and investors.
After all, you’re the garage expert, and if their broken door is the gateway to a whole new garage, you’ve got them covered with the right keywords.
