Recently I’ve encountered franchise marketing articles favoring DIY digital marketing in order to increase search engine traffic to franchisors’ lead generation web sites over leads from franchise portals.

One such article appeared recently on industry consultant Joe Mathews’ web site.

I’m sharing my rebuttal below for its general educational value. I believe that you’ll find at least a few benefits to franchise portal advertising that you were not aware of, regardless of how experienced you may be at franchise marketing.

Go ahead; take my friendly challenge, read the article below:

Good Morning, Joe

I’d like to challenge one of your key assumptions about organic search in this article and others you’ve penned.

I recognize you as a franchise industry expert, I’ve read your book and I appreciate your contribution to our shared space.

However, I think you’ve made an incomplete and thus incorrect assumption about the value of franchise portals to the current state of online marketing for franchise organizations. Specifically my input here relates to organic traffic from search engines.

For the folks that read this that don’t know me, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer for FranchiseOpportunities.com. That indicates that I’m biased toward portals of course, but I wanted to take the opportunity to make an earnest, fact-based rebuttal to your assertion Joe that “Portals are ‘out’ and SEO is in.”

My responsibilities at FranchiseOpportunities.com include all things marketing and we’re nearly 100% on the web. That means that I don’t know much at all about print, radio or television, but this digital space I do know.

I believe that my insights as a C-level digital marketer in the franchise lead generation space can be valuable to you and to the people who follow your advice.

First let me state that you and I agree on many key changes taking place in the world of franchising. I believe also that both of us share a common enthusiasm and a bias toward building others’ success.

I’m electing on this forum to keep my thoughts succinct but I am very willing to discuss anything digital marketing with you at length perhaps on a phone call.

Over one year ago we implemented an optional tool for our advertisers we call the Free Prospect Counting Tool (FPCT).

We wanted to be able to communicate to our advertisers with concrete evidence that franchise prospects visit franchise portals such as ours then go directly to the franchisor’s site by guessing their domain name or by going first to a search engine such as Google.

We implemented publicly available, off-the-shelf technology commonly used to track visitors from one participating site to another.

What we found was frankly astounding.

We found that thousands, yes, thousands of individuals every month first visit our site, then a search engine, then a participating franchisor’s web site.

This technology is cutting edge and it is possible that many people including your team were not aware of its use. That’s why I thought I’d take the time to share it with you.

We consider this irrefutable proof that some of the organic traffic that you are rightly encouraging franchisors to get more of does in fact begin with the franchise concept first being discovered on franchise portal type sites.

We have proven, along with many other franchise portals that also conduct the same program under different names, that advertising on a franchise portal significantly increases visitors who arrive on a franchisor’s web site that are attributed to “organic” in their web site analytics programs.

The data set includes over 100 franchise companies, over one year of implementation, thousands of visitors each month from portals directly to or via Google and Yahoo to web sites owned by franchisors. The data includes date and time stamps, URLs of web pages on both our site and individual participating franchise sites as well as I.P. addresses.

Another very interesting fact is that there is almost no overlap between people that completed our lead collecting web forms and the visitors that went directly to the franchisors’ web sites, so it is incremental to the leads that we get paid to generate and deliver.

As you described in your article, there are many people that are “web form phobic.” So in the end, we’re providing leads via our forms and via organic search as well as direct traffic hitting the franchisor’s web site.

Frankly, we can’t stop this behavior and we can’t charge any extra for it. It is what it is. People that use the Internet today are sophisticated searchers and some of our visitors simply view our directory and head over to Google to locate the web site of the franchise.

This web visitor behavior validates your advice that franchise companies should maintain web content. It is this content that Google displays to visitors that have just left our site.

It’s not a stretch to understand that since most franchisors are local or regional players, that somehow they must get their brand and their general concept in front of ready, willing and able franchise prospects. It is only on portals that proactive entrepreneurship seekers can find a large list of franchises that they can filter by investment level, industry and by location and conduct their research.

By way of example, at the most recent Franchise Update conference a very large and successful franchisor told our company president, Garth Snider, that when it dropped its portal advertising the number of leads that it received via its own web site dropped by 50%.

In your writings you laud the quality of visitors from Google, and portals are the ones sending people into Google for both brand specific as well as industry terms. So by extension, shouldn’t your view of the quality of visitors to portals be at a minimum held with the same high level of regard as you hold for those visitors from Google?

Your writings don’t mention directly the amount of time and effort and the related costs of having a franchise organization’s staff generate content, place that content, optimize that content for specific and material keywords – even if eventually the visitor that sees and acts on that content comes from what is perceived as a “free” traffic source. An axiom in digital marketing is “SEO (search engine optimization) ain’t free”.

If the franchise company hires professional digital marketing staff for the same purposes the costs go even higher as expert level digital marketing expert commands wages that can exceed six figures.

Hiring a consultant to help has a cost that varies by project.

When you do the math, advertising on a portal is a far less expensive way to get traffic to a franchisor’s web site.

Since your article concludes with a recommendation of a marketing consultant, I thought that you wouldn’t mind me pointing out similar services that portals offer to franchise companies, and some are offered at no extra charge. Some of these services even yield the content that you’re encouraging as well.

We offer hosted and recorded telephone interviews with the principals of franchise organizations.

We offer webinars of the same nature where the franchise sales team can educate new prospects about their concept.

Both the above-mentioned interviews yield recorded media (.mp3 files and/or video presentations) that can be placed on the franchise company’s web site and/or linked to in their social media activity such as YouTube, Facebook and even Twitter.

Since I conduct these interviews myself in a kind of “Larry King” style, the content isn’t from a self-indulgent “we’re great” point of view and this adds to the trust factor that you rightly encourage.

We offer email campaigns that reach our lists of entrepreneurship seekers. What you aren’t aware of is that we utilize an enterprise level email tool and the highest level of list cleaning and maintenance that gives our emails a consistent 99% deliverability rate. Recipients of these email blasts can jump directly to the franchisor’s web site and some jump into Google the same way visitors to our web site do.

In addition to the general email deployment, we offer A/B copy testing and subject line testing at no additional charge. Why go to market with ad copy that isn’t the highest yielding? We’ve done this for years for our clients and the results differential between subject lines would astound you.

We actually write copy when requested both for brochures for use on our site as well as the email campaigns.

Once ad or email copy is actually A/B tested by use on our site and in our emails, some of our franchisors will take the resulting optimized copy and use it on their franchise web site. Why use un-optimized copy when you have us to help you determine winning copy?

We also place franchisors’ press releases on our site at no extra cost for additional exposure. Google crawls our site each and every day and has for years. Want to get your press release indexed by Google? Send it to us.

We even have a new advertorial product that creates new content and propels it into the sphere of influence that is well beyond our own web site.

Again, when you do the math, hiring a portal is far less expensive way to get traffic to a franchisor’s web site.

In addition to the many methods that you recommend I respectfully request that you consider further this technology-proven web visitor behavior and how it demonstrates the heretofore unknown additional value of franchise portal advertising.

It is our view that franchise portals and franchisors work together to contribute to the end we’re all seeking, and that of course is more franchises being sold.