A franchise network sells locally but markets nationally, and websites are bad at holding both ideas at once. Someone searching for a cat sitter wants the person who covers their street, not a national brand page. Yet the brand needs one site, one standard of presentation, and one route into a network of independent territories.
That creates two problems at once. The first is scale: dozens of territories each need a page with enough substance to rank for their own town, and a national homepage cannot do that work for them. The second is routing. If a visitor lands on the wrong territory page, or has to guess which one covers them, the enquiry is lost.
There is a third audience most franchise sites underserve. Alongside customers, the site has to recruit franchisees, and that is an entirely different pitch: investment, territory availability, training, and earning potential. Those visitors need their own journey rather than a page buried in the footer.
Underneath all of it sits the platform. When a network adds territories, changes coverage, or updates sitter details, a CMS that requires developer help causes the site to drift out of step with the business. Getting that right is a website development decision as much as a design one.
“A franchise site has to do two jobs at once,” says Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree. “Win the customer searching for a cat sitter three streets away, and win the person thinking about running their own business. Those are different pages, different journeys and different arguments, and most franchise websites only ever build one of them properly.”
Home Loving Cats provides professional in-home cat sitting across the UK as an alternative to catteries. Its sitters visit cats in their own homes, keeping them in familiar surroundings rather than moving them to unfamiliar ones. The network is built on vetted, fully insured local sitters operating their own territories, with a franchise model that recruits cat lovers into running their own businesses.
The commercial logic is straightforward, and the reviews reflect it: the service depends on trust, because a customer is handing over house keys and the care of an animal. The previous website was not carrying that trust, had lost visibility across the location searches that drive enquiries, and sat on a CMS the team found difficult to work with.
The objectives set at the outset were specific: a new WordPress build on a modern drag and drop page builder, a redesign that looked contemporary and trustworthy, recovery of lost location-based visibility, a proper structure for franchise enquiries with a dedicated postcode checker, higher conversion through clearer layouts and navigation, and a platform simple enough for the team to run themselves.
The design leads with photography of real cats in real homes, clear statements of what the service includes, and the trust signals that matter in this category are placed high on the page: UK-wide coverage, fully insured, vetted sitters. Customer testimonials name the individual sitter and their town, because in a franchise network, the person is the product, and a review that names Philip in Exeter or Rose in Stirling does more for conversion than a generic five-star rating.
The core functional piece is a postcode lookup that lets a visitor enter their full postcode and reach their nearest sitter directly, replacing the guesswork of navigating a national site to find local coverage. It is available from the header, the hero section and the footer, so the primary action is never more than one click away, regardless of where a visitor lands.
For a network operating across dozens of territories, this is the single highest value piece of functionality on the site. Every step between a visitor deciding to enquire and reaching the right sitter is a point at which the enquiry can be lost.
A territory page was built for each area the network serves, more than forty in total, each targeting the searches its own area generates rather than repeating a national template with the town name swapped. That structure is what allows a single national domain to compete in dozens of separate local search markets at once, and it is the difference between a franchise site that ranks and one that does not. It is also where search engine optimisation work pays back hardest for a multi-location business, because every territory page earns its own visibility rather than borrowing the homepage’s.
Franchise enquiries were given a dedicated route with a persistent call to action across the site, a full franchise opportunity page, and supporting articles addressing what prospective franchisees actually research before they enquire: what the investment involves, how territories work, what support and training come with the model.
The build uses WordPress with a drag and drop page builder, so adding a territory, updating coverage or editing content no longer requires developer involvement. Training was included at handover, which matters for a growing network where new territories need publishing as they are signed rather than whenever a developer is available.
Home Loving Cats now has a website that reflects the quality of the service and, more importantly, one that reaches customers at the point they are looking for a sitter.
The clearest result is that the site competes on demand rather than on brand recognition. The overwhelming majority of the traffic Google attributes to specific searches comes from people who were not looking for the company by name. They were looking for a cat sitter in their town, and they found this network. For a service franchise, that is the whole objective.
Local visibility has recovered and then some. Hundreds of non-branded searches now return the site on the first page, and in a substantial number of towns the territory pages rank in the top three. Stirling, Exeter, Wolverhampton, Blackpool, Sutton, Swindon, Chester and Cardiff all sit at or near the top of local results for cat sitting searches. The objective set at the outset was to regain location-based visibility, and the territory architecture has delivered it.
The territory pages carry the site. They generate the large majority of its search visibility and the majority of its traffic, well ahead of the homepage, which is exactly the distribution a multi-location business should want. A national homepage that outperforms its own location pages is usually a sign the local pages are too thin to rank.
The highest value national terms are also in play. Searches along the lines of cat sitter near me now return the site on the first page, which is the most commercially valuable position in this category because the intent is immediate and local.
Content is pulling significant additional reach. The advice articles bring in a large volume of visibility from people researching cat care rather than searching for a sitter, and the strongest performing article draws traffic comparable to the homepage. That audience is earlier in the cycle, but it builds the topical authority the service pages benefit from.
Mobile is the audience, outperforming desktop on both ranking position and engagement by a wide margin, which is what you would expect from people searching for a local service on the move.
The positions are the achievement, and converting them is the opportunity. Click-through rates on the location pages are lower than the rankings would suggest, and there is a structural reason for it. Local service searches are dominated by map results, so a page ranking third in the standard listings still sits below a local pack. That makes titles, meta descriptions, review signals and Google Business Profile consistency for each territory the highest value next phase, rather than more ranking work.
Franchise recruitment is the second area with room to move. The franchise section is earning visibility but has not yet reached the positions the customer-facing pages hold. The structure and content are in place, so this is a matter of building depth and authority on pages that have not yet had time to mature.
Franchise projects start with the routing question: how does a visitor reach the territory that covers them, in as few steps as possible? A postcode lookup usually answers it better than a menu ever will.
From there, every territory needs a page with enough genuine local content to rank on its own, because thin duplicated location pages do not rank and can drag the rest of the site down with them. Franchise recruitment needs its own journey rather than a footer link, since it is a different audience making a completely different decision. And the platform has to be simple enough that head office can add territories as the network grows, without a developer in the loop.
For franchise networks and multi-location service businesses considering a rebuild, our web design services for businesses across the UK and Ireland cover the process from strategy and architecture through to launch, training and ongoing support.
Each territory needs its own page with content specific to that area rather than a duplicated template. Home Loving Cats has more than forty, and a substantial share of them rank on the first page for their own town. Thin duplicated location pages do not rank, and Google may treat large volumes of near identical content as a quality problem across the whole domain, so building forty weak pages is worse than building twenty strong ones.
Because customers know their postcode and do not always know which territory name covers them. A lookup removes the guesswork and sends the enquiry to the right sitter first time. On a national network with dozens of territories, that single step prevents a substantial share of lost enquiries, and it is far quicker on a phone than working through a dropdown list of area names.
Yes, provided it has its own clear route. Both audiences arrive through search and both need to see the brand operating credibly, so a separate recruitment site usually starts from zero authority for no good reason. What matters is that the franchise journey is signposted persistently and lands on a page written for someone evaluating a business opportunity rather than someone booking a service.
Local service searches usually show map results above the standard listings, so a page ranking third still sits below a local pack. The fix is rarely more ranking work. It is stronger titles and meta descriptions, review volume, and Google Business Profile consistency for each territory, so the business appears in both the map results and the standard listings rather than only one.
Where the architecture is the problem, and it usually is, the first movement tends to come within three to six months of the new territory pages being indexed. Positions arrive before traffic does, because click-through rates rise steeply as a page moves up the first page. The pattern to look for early on is a growing number of local searches returning the site at all, then those positions improving.
Yes, with the right build. Adding a territory should mean creating a page and updating the postcode routing, not commissioning development work. That is how this site was configured, with training at handover. The alternative, where every new franchisee waits on a developer to appear on the website, becomes a real constraint on growth once a network reaches any scale.
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