At Click2Rank, we plan SEO as one shared account for multi-location businesses, including franchisors with a brand-wide marketing fund. Our audits sort each location’s SEO efforts into needed work and duplicate charges before your next contract.
Below, you’ll see which costs pooling cuts, what hourly rates mean for your total, and how to sort your current invoices.
Why Funding Each Location’s SEO Separately Wastes Franchise Budget
Separate location budgets waste money because every location pays for strategy and research that the whole network could share. Multi-location businesses lose money to split funding in four ways:
- Duplicate Keyword Research: A franchise with 10 locations can buy the same keyword research checklist 10 times. Shared local keyword research covers all 10 locations for roughly the SEO cost of one list. Each location still keeps its own pages and listings.
- Scattered Location Reports: With split funding, each consultant sends a separate report (you end up with 10 logins and no single ranking view). You lose any fair way to compare SEO performance across locations. Budgets then follow whichever consultant writes the best report.
- Hidden Ranking Gaps: If the Seattle location tops Google Maps while Lacey trails three competitors, split reports will hide the ranking gap. A shared local SEO strategy puts Seattle and Lacey local search results in one report. Your consultant can then compare the two profiles.
- Competing City Pages: Two locations in one metro area may target the same keywords and compete for identical organic search results. A coordinated plan assigns each location page its own neighborhoods. Neither page then has to outrank the other for the same searches.
All four problems trace back to paying for shared work more than once. Shared work makes up only part of each quote, though, and the per-location work below explains most of the price difference between two locations.
What Drives Local SEO Costs From One Franchise Location to the Next
Why would two locations under the same franchise brand get completely different SEO quotes from the same consultant? Quotes differ because each location’s profile, pages, and market need different amounts of work.
Three line items set local SEO pricing at every franchise location:
- Google Business Profile Cleanup: Cleanup starts with duplicate listings or an outdated address and phone number before any ranking work begins. Google Business Profile optimization repeats for every profile, so a 10-location franchise pays for 10 cleanups. After the first cleanup, monthly upkeep covers only changes like new hours or photos.
- Location Page Creation: Each location needs its own page to compete for local keyword rankings in its city. A useful page includes location-specific content like staff names, services, and driving directions. Content creation and on-page optimization happen once per page, and each page needs updates when hours, staff, or services change.
- Local Link Building: Seattle-area locations face intense market competition and need more outreach than a location in Olympia. Link-building services are billed by the outreach hours a city requires. A separate link estimate for each local market lets you compare costs city by city.
All three line items repeat at every location, and pooling won’t remove per-location work. The savings from pooling come from shared research, strategy, and reporting.
Quotes that look too low also deserve a second look. A cheap quote may come from copying one location page and swapping the town name. Near-duplicate pages give each city little unique content, and Google picks one version as the main page when pages look alike.
Original location pages cost more to write than template pages, since a writer researches each city first. A properly built location page looks different. For instance, neighborhood names, service areas, and nearby landmarks give each page local relevance for nearby customers.
Once you know which line items each location needs, you can estimate the monthly hours and check the estimate against current hourly rates.
What Do Hourly Consulting Rates Mean for Your Total Franchise Budget?
According to Ahrefs’ 2024 SEO pricing survey, hourly consulting rates for local SEO services most often fall between $75 and $100. For SEO work overall, 66.7% of providers in the U.S. and Canada charged $75 to $200 an hour.
The survey also put the average monthly retainer for local SEO at $1,557.
In this example, each of 10 locations needs five hours of its own work each month, plus three hours of research, strategy, and reporting.
We assume the network plan takes eight hours because one keyword list, one strategy, and one report replace 10 of each. At $85 an hour, a rate inside the $75 to $100 band, the two approaches compare like this:
| Approach | Monthly Hours | Monthly Cost |
| Split budgets | 80 (10 × 8) | $6,800 |
| Pooled budget | 58 (50 + 8) | $4,930 |
| Savings | 22 | $1,870 |
For scale, the survey’s $1,557 average retainer covers one account, and 10 separate retainers would cost about $15,570 a month. A full pooled retainer adds content and links to the $4,930 shown in the example. With shared work billed once, the pooled total may still land below $15,570.
Large franchise networks with hundreds of location pages may need an enterprise SEO audit, and the audit carries a one-time fee. Smaller networks with clean sites can skip the audit and start a local SEO campaign right away.
Four factors set local SEO services pricing, and the table shows what to ask about each one:
| Factor | How It Affects Hours | What to Ask |
| Location count | Each added location repeats every per-location task. | What’s the monthly hour estimate per location? |
| Market competition | Industry competition in crowded markets adds link-building hours. | How do hours differ between your busiest and quietest markets? |
| Shared work | Strategy, keyword research, and monthly reporting cover the whole network. | Do your local SEO packages bill shared hours once? |
| Audit needs | Large networks may owe a one-time audit fee before monthly work. | Is the audit priced separately? |
A quote that skips one of the four factors should explain why the factor doesn’t apply to your network. If a quote bills shared work per location, the Shared Work question will expose the extra charge.
We’ve reviewed franchise quotes that leave out a study of local competitors entirely. Because the study shows which markets need extra outreach, your quote should name the study in writing before you sign. Strategic SEO audits cover the competitor study and the factors blocking local search rankings at every location.
With that covered, a pooled budget also affects your listings.
One Pooled Budget Keeps Your Locations Consistent on Search Engines
Under split budgets, each consultant only sees the listings for one location. A mismatch between the Seattle and Lacey local listings can then sit unnoticed until a customer complains.
A pooled budget gives one consultant the Google Business Profile, directory listings, and website details for all your business locations at once. A single task list handles brand consistency across the network.
Holiday hours show the risk. A location might update its website for Thanksgiving but forget its Google Business Profile. A customer who trusts the outdated Google listing and finds a locked door may stop trusting both the listing and your website.
Google’s help page on local ranking says complete, accurate business details help its systems match a profile with relevant local searches. A consultant who manages every location can compare each profile against the others and fill in missing details.
Next Steps for Budgeting Franchise SEO Services
Your current invoices show how much of your spend is shared work. The first step is to sort every charge into two columns, shared work and per-location work. The shared column shows what pooling can cut. Every per-location dollar should map to profile cleanup, a location page, or link building that reaches local customers.
Franchisors with a brand-wide fund can often pool shared work directly. As a franchisee, you’ll need your franchisor to confirm whether the digital marketing fund covers shared SEO work before you pool budgets with other locations.
If you want a second opinion on the split, our franchise SEO consultants at Click2Rank will review your quotes. We can also map a pooled franchise SEO strategy that separates shared and per-location hours.
