Keyword Planner, Google's free keyword tool, will build a keyword list from any website you hand it. For a franchise location, the obvious website to hand it is the brand's. It's polished, it's big, and it describes the service in detail.
That instinct produces the wrong list. A brand site describes the brand, so the tool comes back with the brand's name, its national products and searches from people anywhere. A franchise location needs the searches people type within driving distance of its door.
This chapter walks through keyword research for a franchise location the way we do it: see who is bidding, seed Keyword Planner with the right pages, sort the results into small ad groups and screen out the searches that don't belong. The numbers come from Keyword Planner pulls for nine franchise locations in one example market, Orlando, each seeded two ways, plus one local competitor. Your market's searches will differ. The method won't.
A Franchise Brand's Website Teaches Keyword Planner About the Brand, Not the Neighborhood
We seeded Keyword Planner with each brand's whole website, set to the example market, and read what came back.
For the fitness brand and the math-and-reading brand, the brand name swallowed the list. Of 738 ideas from the math-and-reading brand's site, 701 contained the brand name. The fitness studio's brand site returned 602 brand-name ideas out of 675. The wax brand's site and a tutoring-center brand's site came back close to half brand searches.
The home-services brand went a different way. Seeded with the electrician brand's whole site, Keyword Planner returned 1,907 ideas and not one named a city or town in the example market. The top of the list was national product searches, led by "ev charging stations" at 14,800 searches a month.
Neither list is useless. The brand searches belong somewhere, and the brand-name section below covers where. But neither one is a location's keyword list.
The Location Page Turned Up More Near Me Searches Than the Brand Site at 8 of 9 Franchise Locations
Then we seeded Keyword Planner with each location's own page, set to read that single page instead of crawling the whole site.
The lists changed character. At eight of the nine locations, the location page returned more "near me" searches than the brand site did. The fitness studio's page returned 411 near-me ideas against 16 from the brand site. The early-education academy's page returned 516 against 141. The electrician's location page returned 329 against 26, and 39 of its ideas named a city or area in the market. The one exception was the smallest location page we checked, which gave the tool very little to read.
City names were less consistent. Two brand sites returned more area names than their location pages, likely because those brand sites list locations across many towns. So run both seeds, keep the local searches from each, and drop the rest.
That raises a question no single-location business faces: whose town is it? A brand site that lists every town the system serves will hand one location keywords for towns that belong to a neighboring franchisee. Before an area-named keyword goes into a location's list, check it against the territory map. A town inside the neighbor's territory moves to the neighbor's keyword list and onto this location's negatives. That way two owners of the same brand aren't paying Google to outbid each other for one town. Chapter 9 covers drawing those territories inside Google Ads.
A Local Competitor's Website Gave Keyword Planner 222 Near Me Searches. The Brand Site Gave 26.
The most useful seed usually isn't your own site at all. It's a competitor's: the local business already winning the searches you want.
Start by seeing who shows up. Type the search into Google's Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool with the location's town selected, and it lists the advertisers showing there while leaving your visit out of their impression counts. Run the location's main service searches through it. Skip clicking rivals' ads from your own phone: it costs them money, skews your own view of the results, and the preview already showed you who's there. Note the local businesses that appear, then hand their websites to Keyword Planner with the location set to your market.
In the example market, an independent electrician's ad appeared on a search for a franchise brand's own name in the area. Seeded with that electrician's website, Keyword Planner returned 1,317 ideas: 222 near-me searches and 34 naming an area in the market. The top of the list read like a list of customers: "electricians near me" at 6,600 searches a month, "electrician orlando" at 720, "electrical company near me" at 720.
One caution when reading these lists. Keyword Planner groups close variants, so "electricians near me," "electrician near me" and "electrician closest to me" can all show the same 6,600. That is one pool of searchers, not three. Count it once.
Electrician Job Searches Show Up in a Franchise's Keyword List. They Belong on the Negative List.
Every seed brings back searches you don't want, and franchise lists have their own kinds.
The electrician locations' page seeds were full of people looking for work, not an electrician. Reading one location's list by hand, more than 30 of its ideas were about jobs, licenses and training: "electrician license florida," "electrical companies hiring near me," "electrician school." The other electrician location's list held more than a dozen job searches of its own. Those searchers want a paycheck, not a repair, so their phrases go on a negative keyword list: "electrician job," "electrician jobs," "hiring electricians," "electrician license," "electrician school." Be specific. Negative keywords don't stretch to cover close variants, so a bare "jobs" misses "electrician job," and a bare "job" would block real customers searching "small job electrician near me."
The other electrician location's list turned up searches for a rival electrical franchise's name. Competitor names are negatives too. Bidding on a competitor's name is a deliberate decision that, if it happens at all, gets its own campaign. It never sneaks in through a location's service keywords.
A franchise has one advantage here. When a franchisor manages locations from a manager account, Google lets it build a negative keyword list once, and the list appears in every location's account, ready to apply. Chapter 14 covers how that account setup works.
Negatives matter most later. At launch the location runs exact match, which keeps strangers out on its own. The real work starts with Exploration, our name for the broad match stage, when Google starts matching searches you never typed in. From then on, someone reads that location's search terms report daily and adds negatives as the junk appears.
An Ad Group of Five or Six Keywords About One Service Beats a Grab Bag of Everything the Location Sells
With a clean list, sort it. Each location's campaign gets small ad groups, each about one service, with five or six close keywords apiece. The electrician location gets an emergency group, a panel replacement group and an outlet group, not one group holding every electrical search. The tutoring center gets a math group and a reading group.
At launch, the keywords go live in exact match. That keeps each location's budget on the searches you chose, and it gives each ad group the clean data it needs before anything broader is added.
Small groups also make the numbers readable. When the emergency group books calls at one cost and the outlet group at another, you can see it and adjust each one. In a single group holding every service, the cheap jobs and the expensive ones blur into one average, and nobody can tell which searches are paying for the location and which are just spending its money. For a franchise system, the same structure repeated across locations has one more payoff: the franchisor can compare the emergency groups of twenty locations side by side and spot the one that's out of line. Chapter 4 showed why each group should land on that service's page.
Searches for the Brand's Own Name Belong in the Brand Campaign, Not Each Location's List
Remember all those brand-name ideas from the brand site seeds. They don't vanish; they go to one place. One campaign handles the franchise's own name for the whole system, usually the franchisor's, funded from the brand fund as Chapter 2 described.
A location that copies the brand terms into its own list ends up bidding on searches the brand already covers, and in some systems against neighboring locations doing the same thing. Many franchise agreements forbid it outright. Chapter 15 covers what Google allows and what the agreement decides.
Keyword Planner's Bid Ranges Come From Past Auctions. They're Estimates, Not Prices.
Keyword Planner shows a low and high top-of-page bid for each idea. Google draws those from past auctions. In our experience, they're a reasonable guide to plan with if you treat them as plus or minus 30%, not as a price the location will pay.
That margin matters most for the near-me searches at the top of the list, which usually carry the highest ranges. Use the ranges to see which ad groups will be expensive and to set a sensible starting bid, then let the location's own results take over.
Next: Near Me Searches Are a Franchise Location's Closest Customers
With a clean, local keyword list sorted into tight groups, Chapter 6 turns to which of those searches to buy first, starting with the near-me searches closest to each location.
All sixteen chapters, from tracking and territories to who runs the ads and franchise development, are on the guide's home page.
When we build keyword lists for franchise locations in our Google Ads management, we seed with each location's page and the strongest local competitors, never the brand home page alone. Own a location? Hand Keyword Planner your location page and one local rival's site this week, and compare what comes back with what you're bidding on now.
