Many blog posts and podcasts on the topic of local SEO often target their advice at small local businesses. However, enterprises and franchises also have a strong incentive to rank well for local search queries. Read on to get important insights on the problems and challenges, both internal and external, faced by enterprises and franchises in excelling at local SEO. 

Related: 

• 7 Easy Ways To Manage Local SEO At Scale
• The Local SEO Firehose | The State of Local Search in 2022
• Webinar Insights | Improving Your On-Page SEO

The Challenge of Convincing Stakeholders

When a small local IT company or restaurant considers its online marketing strategy, it’s obvious from the owner’s perspective why to invest in local SEO. Without a strong presence in search results, small local businesses can lose out on many potential customers to the extent that the sustainability of the business comes under threat. 

For enterprises and franchises, there is a group of stakeholders who need to become convinced that local SEO provides value to the business. These companies are well-known names whose survivability is unlikely to be threatened if they don’t allocate resources to local SEO. Managers, executives, and other decision-makers often have multiple other business concerns vying for their attention—building a compelling case for local search optimization is one of the biggest challenges.

When trying to get initial buy-in for a franchise or enterprise local SEO project, discuss the process thoroughly, including:

• 
  Do you need to hire additional team members for the project, what roles are needed, and is it best to hire in-house, use staff at the SEO agency, or outsource?
• How much is each new team member going to cost? 
• How much is needed for local SEO SaaS tools; do you go for the cheapest or look to more innovative platforms?
• Who is in charge of the respective teams, tools, and reporting in the process?

The most important step in persuading stakeholders to get on board with a strategic local SEO roadmap is education. The aim is to explain this roadmap to the CMO and other decision-makers in a way that reduces potential friction points. You can break down this goal into smaller actionable mini-goals that include:

Agreeing on KPIs

Stakeholders often have a narrow view of what constitutes a good KPI or return on their investment. From their perspective, they’ll want to know how these different local search improvements are going to bring more revenue, and how can you, the person, agency, or department proposing the project, prove this?

Discussing costs

It can get expensive rather quickly to scale a local SEO strategy when you’ve got hundreds or even thousands of business locations as enterprises and franchises often do.  It’s important to be transparent about the potential costs involved. 

Overviewing different areas of focus

Breaking down the different areas of focus for improving local search performance. These areas include but aren’t limited to data distribution, reviews and reputation, local pages, and business listings. Getting stakeholders to understand these facets is crucial for buy-in. 

Teaching the right questions to ask

Inside a large organization, it’s a given that there is some degree of politics to navigate. To reduce potential pain points down the line, it’s a good idea from the outset to give stakeholders an idea of what questions to ask at ongoing project meetings. Given that the stakeholder you’re dealing with has someone else to answer to, try to arm them with useful insights from every project sprint or monthly meeting.

Getting stakeholders to care about location pages and local subpages for specific services or business offerings can seem daunting. But using tools like Google Analytics, you can capture some crucial metrics highlighting the power of these pages. In particular, focus on traffic and revenue metrics for existing local pages that perform well. Try to communicate the opportunity cost of not investing in these pages. 

A local landing page is a standalone web page created for a specific business location. Since such pages require stellar design and unique copy, stakeholders need to understand why to pour resources into creating additional pages and how to optimize them. You can link each local landing page to a separate Google My Business listing. 

Steve Wiideman’s, Wiideman Consulting Group, company conducted a study on local SEO pages that uncovered some great insights you can use:

• 
  Customers spend 74% of their viewing time in the first two screenfuls, so pay close attention to what’s above the fold
• Include hyper-local content, location photos, Google Maps embeds, location opening hours, and local social media profiles if you want to maximize the ranking potential of these pages
• Remember that 84% of local searches are made on mobile devices, so a mobile-responsive design is non-negotiable for success
• Add trust signals such as client logos, security seals, and business awards

The reputation of an enterprise or franchise is large enough that some bad reviews in a particular location might seem like they don’t matter much. In fact, getting stakeholders to prioritize a review or rating program can prove difficult. 

Even if the overall review scores are solid, it’s helpful to provide screenshots of three important aspects of reviews:

1. 
   The quality of reviews—what reviews do customers see straight away when they click on the branch’s profile?
2. The velocity of reviews—how often do customers post new reviews compared to competitors?
3. The quantity of reviews—how many reviews does each branch location have?

Cite some statistics that show all of these aspects are important contributors to the success of any local business. Emphasize the importance of responding to recent reviews, whether they are positive or negative.

Local SEO shouldn't just be an afterthought for franchises and enterprises. These organizations can see surprising improvements to important business metrics with a well-structured roadmap for local search.