Because of the rapid expansion of the franchise across the United States, the local SEO strategy was ad hoc, without a coordinated plan.

Many of the franchisees had their own websites and the useful content was very thin across these domains.

Dozens of franchisee websites had poor or no rankings, minimal authority and relevance, and lacked essential on-page optimizations.

An audit of all 170+ Google Business listings revealed more challenges. No Google Maps optimization had been completed, many had wrong primary categories and lacked secondary categories needed to rank in the 3 Pack.

They were posting rarely and without regard to leveraging the posts to create traffic and were not using automation to manage the GBP listings scale.

Compared to established competitors, the website had low authority as there had never been a concerted effort to gain links and rank in search, and the few links there were had poor anchor text ratios.

Every competitor analyzed had established SEO strategies, extensive link graphs, and robust site content.