SEO planning: Franchise/multiple local sites

[EdwardoUK]

I am in the planning stages of franchising a cleaning business and was wondering if anyone had some ideas on SEO strategy. If money were no object and I had a team of hundreds of copywriters at my disposal, would the ultimate solution be to have the following sort of URL structure www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city within which there are numerous www.cleanbiz.co.uk/city/local-town pages?

If this is the best strategy then is it worthwhile to begin work towards ranking for cities and local towns within them prior to actually operating there? I understand that lack of physical presence will penalize me in terms of local search but would a lack of physical address and phone number render any foundation work pointless (for example, prior to having any franchises in say London, would it be worth while building quality content and links on a www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london page, and then www.cleaningbiz.co.uk/london/notting-hill, alongside a blog and so on?)

Interested to understand the best way to go about this given the enormity of the campaign!

Thanks

[jkosarek]

All of the sites you mentioned seem to do this primarily through user generated content (ie reviews). This path makes sense as it is "unique and providing value." It looks like reviews may just be the table stakes to play this game at scale.

I do like how thumbtack created some localized content here http://www.thumbtack.com/tx/houston/#/2014/1. That looks like something I could use for inspiration.

[David-Mihm]

If that content is unique and providing value to searchers, then that's exactly what's working well in the Hummingbird/Pigeon SERPs these days.  Many national directories with trusted brands are outranking individual small businesses.  Check Yelp, Avvo, TripAdvisor, Thumbtack, Angie's List, etc.

[jkosarek]

We're talking about something along the lines of http://www.searshomeservices.com/pa/philadelphia-air-conditioning-repair? The way this site does it seems quite redundant - creating lots of duplicate content that I can't imagine Google likes. Have you ever seen someone do this at scale properly? If so can you show an example?

Thank you for the help David!

[David-Mihm]

No, I'd strongly recommend a page (or set of pages) about the location that lives on your primary domain.  Non-physical locations can only rank organically, and you're much more likely to rank organically using the strength of a parent domain.

[jkosarek]

Would you recommend creating the dedicated website, even if there is no physical local location? Thanks David!

[David-Mihm]

I generally agree with Matt about the two pronged approach.  If money is no object, build out a completely dedicated www.cleaningbiznottinghill.co.uk website for Local results, but for organic results, a directory like

cleaningbiz.co.uk/locations/london/nottinghill

is likely to rank better, at least in the current Hummingbird iteration.

[MattAntonino]

"If money were no object" then the best plan would be a two-prong approach.  Your prong would be #1.  And cleanbizCITY.co.uk would be the second prong.

• cleanbizlondon.co.uk
• cleanbiznottinghill.co.uk

This would give you the possibility of not only multiple results in each page 1 but a dedicated landing page to build maps/NAP and local SEO to as well.