Branded Search for Franchises – The First Adwords You Should Buy

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with one of the advertisers on our site, and we were having a conversation about what we call “Step 2: Turning Visitor to Leads” or in other words, how he should design his webpage such that he can maximize his conversion rate once people land on his site.

It was a productive conversation, but eventually he asked the obvious question, “Eli, it all makes sense to me, but how do I get people to come to my site in the first place?”

Other than recommending a visit to the Lead Generation Resource Center (obviously), I started to think to myself what the first step is to building out a paid media campaign.

As I thought about it, I Googled his franchise and was met with a very troubling finding. When you searched for “fresh u franchise,” you weren’t met with any results relative to Fresh U.

In fact, you were met with franchises that were in DIRECT COMPETITION with Fresh U. Take a look:

Look at all the different people who Google displayed to the user (when they were spcifcally looking for information on a Fresh U franchise) –

• Franchise Lead Generators – FranchiseGator.com, Franchise.com, FranchiseSolutions.com, and us FranchiseHelp.com
• Rival Food Franchise – Jamba Juice looks like they’re doing a franchise roadshow and wants to capture our attention
• Other Franchises – The UPS Store seems to be bidding on any “franchise” search and is trying to grab this searcher
• License Opportunities – Townlaw-licensing.com is the website of a lawyer that helps a business become a licensor rather than a franchisor

As the owner of Fresh U, it should be mind numbing that a searcher would visit ANY of these other websites given that they searched for Fresh U specifically.

So what should be done?

The short answer is a branded campaign on Adwords. As soon as possible, Fresh U should get an Adwords campaign set up where they bid on all the different iterations of their brand e.g. “Fresh U” “Fresh-U” “Fresh-U Franchise” “Fresh U Franchise” “Fresh Franchise” etc.

CPC on branded campaigns are usually very low as the likelihood that a searcher clicks your ad given that they make one of those searches.

Ultimately, you want to capture as close to 100% of the people who search for your franchise onto your site.

Good looks something like this

Because a searcher is so likely to click that top ad, Google doesn’t even show any ads above the search results!

Want to learn more about branded search terms, shoot us a note.