TruPresence Helps Multi-Location Marketers Audit SEO Across Locations

Let’s say you’re looking for your nearest Whole Foods, and, like me, you type in “Whole Foods near me.” You might find a URL that looks something like https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/thirdand3rd.

Now, let’s say you’re a marketer at Whole Foods corporate who is responsible for auditing SEO performance across hundreds or thousands of locations nationwide. How do you audit the performance of this given URL, which looks like just a part of Whole Foods’ website but essentially functions like the independent website of a local business? How do you swiftly audit hundreds or thousands of those pages?

TruPresence is solving that exact problem. The company has built a product called WooRank that helps multi-location and franchise marketers assess the performance of individual location websites at scale. This helps corporate quickly assess the effectiveness of each location’s search setup, ascertain best practices by evaluating high performers, and help out those who are falling behind.

“We did this with one of our customers,” said Jeremy LaDuque, EVP, Franchise, at TruPresence. “We launched 275 websites, and they were all the same. But over a year and a half later, franchisees are getting in there and updating their websites. Some do a better job than others. We now have the tools to be able to work with our customers and tell them who’s doing well and who’s not.”

For example, WooRank might show that corporate’s website is performing at a score of 80 out of 100, whereas locations are widely performing at 70 or below. With the tool, corporate can spot this gap and tackle it. Similarly, it would be typical for a client to discover that its locations vary widely in performance. Some may be scoring in the 70s and some in the 40s. With WooRank, corporate can expeditiously expand best practices to lower-performing locations.

Businesses often conduct SEO audits based on a number of tools, using business intelligence software in an attempt to aggregate the data and make sense of it, LaDuque said. They may also rely on Google Analytics, which tells marketers how their sites are performing but not necessarily why. With TruPresence, marketers can dig deeper without resorting to a slew of tools to do so.

It may challenge credulity that the multi-location marketing tech industry and behemoths like Google have not yet solved this problem. But LaDuque contends that the industry, while making a lot of progress over the years, has simply not solved for the specific issue of auditing performance for individual-location URLs at scale and recognizing that a URL like https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/thirdand3rd is, in essence, an independent site.

“Tools just don’t understand what franchises want to do,” said LaDuque, who in addition to being a franchise marketing veteran, also runs multiple franchise locations. “Reporting and analytics don’t understand franchising yet. You’ll buy an analytics tool, but you’ll need to hack it with exception rules.”

With WooRank, TruPresence hopes to have moved multi-location and franchise reporting and analytics one step in the right direction.