Somebody at your office can tell you what the brand publishes. Almost nobody can tell you what a customer three miles from one of your units actually finds on a Tuesday night, or whether that unit turns up at all. This is a review of exactly that, location by location: profiles, map results, local pages, reviews, and what the assistants say, in one sheet you can sort.
Book a free consultation →Ask what a customer sees in a given market and the answer usually arrives as a deck. The brand site is consistent. The locator is current. A vendor dashboard shows the line going the right direction. All of that can be true while one unit is missing from the map for the service it sells most, because the profile is a duplicate, the hours never got fixed after a transfer, or the location exists online as one row on a locator.
That is not a competence problem and not usually anybody's fault. It is a looking problem. Field consultants see the units they visit, the marketing team sees rollups, operators see their own phone and assume the quiet weeks are normal, and vendors report on the slice they were hired for, which is the slice that looks fine. Nothing in that arrangement is built to surface the handful of markets where something ordinary has quietly broken.
An audit is the missing act of looking, done the same way everywhere so the results compare. Not a strategy document and not a pitch deck: a record of what is live in each market right now, what is wrong with it, and what order to fix it in. None of it is exotic. It is ordinary local hygiene, which is why it drifts across a few hundred units without anyone noticing. The brand level view of that work sits on franchises, and why one location ranks while its neighbor does not is on how franchise locations rank in the map pack.
Every unit gets the same pass in the same order, so the sheet sorts. Read down one column and you should see which markets are fine, which are one fix away, and which have nothing at all.
All of it is what a customer can see from outside, a deliberate limit: the first pass needs no logins, no vendor cooperation, no announcement to the field. Longer versions of two of these passes are in the franchise local SEO playbook and the franchise Google Business Profile playbook.
Below a certain unit count we look at all of them. Above it, a sample does the same job for less: your strongest markets, your weakest, the newest openings, and a random slice, so the picture is not built only from units somebody already worried about. A census is scoped separately, since the work scales with locations rather than with complexity.
Sector changes what we check first. In home service, restoration, cleaning, lawn care, pest control, and painting systems, the search is usually urgent and the map result settles it. In restaurant, fitness, childcare, senior care, pet care, and automotive systems, more of the decision happens on reviews and on the page before anyone dials.
Two things vary too much between systems to assume, so the audit records them instead of guessing. First, latitude. What a location may do on its own is set by its franchise agreement and your current brand standards, and those differ by system and sometimes by cohort inside one. Where a finding depends on latitude a unit may or may not have, the sheet says so and the fix gets written against your rules: brand consistency and local marketing. Second, profile access. Some systems hold every listing in one corporate account, some hand each operator their own, some inherited a mix from whoever set each location up: who owns the profile for a franchise location.
One point is worth stating plainly. The brand site and the locator are usually good at what they were built for: consistency, trust the system spent years earning, and one dependable place for somebody who already knows the name. They are not built to win one city, because a page serving every market cannot carry the address, hours, reviews, and streets that decide a local result. That is a structural limit rather than a failure, and the fix is layered rather than either or: national to local franchise SEO, with the background on whether a corporate website helps a location rank locally.
Four things, and nothing you have to translate.
Timing depends on unit count: a sample read across a few markets is days rather than weeks, a census across a large system takes longer, and the estimate comes before you commit rather than after. Then the honest part. It is your document. Hand it to your current agency and have them work the list if that is the right answer. We would rather be right than hired.
You can also start smaller and free today. Run one unit's site through the website report card, then check one market with the AI visibility checker. Neither asks for an email: we publish more than 50 free tools at kellywm.com/tools, no email wall. When the rollup a system needs does not exist off the shelf, it is a small piece of software rather than a mystery: custom tools, built the way how we build describes.
The sample read is free and comes out of the consult. That is the fastest way for both sides to learn whether there is anything here worth paying to fix. A census is quoted once we know unit count and how much is already in place.
The work that follows is priced per location, because that is the unit it gets bought in. A custom website build runs $3,500 to $12,000+ one time depending on page count and custom function. Ongoing SEO for franchises runs $1,500 to $3,500 a month for most businesses, and $3,500 to $7,500 a month in competitive metros or for multi location work, which is where system engagements land. Custom software goes by scope: calculators from $600, most workhorse tools $1,500 to $4,000, online ordering or a small store from $3,500, and Tool Care at $75 a month per tool. Google Ads management has no published fee here. The industry usually charges a flat monthly fee or a percentage of ad spend, and we quote flat after a free consult, with the spend itself going to Google. To pressure test any quote, ours or anyone else's, run it through what should you pay, or read how much SEO costs for a franchise and how much a website costs for a franchise.
Who pays is your question rather than ours, and it usually splits three ways: brand fund, co-op, or an expense the operator carries. Start with what a brand fund is, what a co-op advertising fund is, and what franchisees typically pay for, with the longer version in the franchise marketing budget guide.
Where an audit can lead: one vendor running the same work in every market, which is a program rather than a project (a franchise marketing program for franchisors), a repeatable checklist for openings (franchise opening and launch marketing), or nothing at all, because you already knew and now it is written down. Everything is month-to-month with no long-term contract, and the client owns the site, the content, and the accounts. That last point matters more in franchising than anywhere else, because units transfer and vendors change.
Skip it if you already know what is broken and the real blocker is funding the fixes. Skip it if the document will be read once and filed, which is the most common ending for any audit ever written. And skip it if the plan is to hand the field a scorecard and let them feel it. Plenty of what the sheet names turns out to be central rather than local: a template that cannot carry local detail, a feed nobody owns, an approval loop built when the system was a third of its size. An audit written as evidence against operators produces defensiveness and no repairs.
The disclosure that matters most: we do not have a franchise system on our books today. What we do constantly is the underlying work, local sites, profiles, review workflows, tracking, and reporting for local service businesses, Orlando based and working nationwide since 2008. If your requirement is a vendor who has already run this across a system your size, that is fair and we are not it yet. Raise it before the proposal and you will get a straight answer.
We also stay out of franchise sales entirely: no disclosure documents, no earnings or financial performance language, no advice on whether anybody should buy a franchise. That is a separate and regulated profession. If the candidate side is what worries you, that is a different read, covered on franchise development marketing and franchise development SEO. The same argument written for the operator inside one territory lives on franchise marketing, and we will not audit your system behind your back or pitch your operators without you.
If it is still worth a look: call (407) 694-2055, send a text, or request the audit. Tell us your unit count, your sector, and three or four markets you already suspect. We read those first. If a new territory is the real question, start with how to market a new franchise territory.
Not for the first pass. Everything in it is what a customer can see from outside, which is the point: no access requests, no announcement to the field, no waiting on a vendor who would rather not help. Deeper findings do need access, and access models vary by system, so we ask location by location instead of assuming. Without it the audit still runs, it just says less about what happens behind the login.
Depends on unit count. Smaller systems get all of them. Larger ones get a stratified sample: strongest markets, weakest, newest openings, and a random slice, so the read is not built only from units somebody already flagged. A census is quoted separately. The sample is built to be enough to decide what to fund, with a census of the rest later if the fixes prove worth it.
Not by default. We report what is live, and sometimes the cause is a vendor. More often it is structural: a template that cannot carry local detail, a data feed nobody owns, an approval loop too slow for local speed. Those follow you to the next agency. If your incumbent can work the list, that is cheaper and faster than switching, and we will say so.
Your call, and it depends on how your system talks to the field. If you plan to share it, tell us before we write it, because a document meant for operators reads differently from one meant for a leadership meeting. Either way the fix list separates central items from local ones, so nobody gets handed a task that is not theirs to do.
No, and be careful with anyone who hands you that number before doing the work. It depends on category, market size, competitors, review histories, how well known the brand is locally, and conditions nobody controls. What the audit gives you is what is broken, what it costs to fix, and which items are cheap enough to do regardless. Forecasting we leave alone.
It covers what assistants say today about each market, and whether your location is named, described wrong, or missing. Ads now run in and around those answers the same as everywhere else in search. What no budget buys is the body of the organic answer: which businesses it names depends on what those systems can read and confirm about a location, which is most of what the audit checks.
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Call or text (407) 694-2055, or request a free consult and bring your unit list and your sector. We will read a few of your markets first and tell you whether there is anything here worth paying to fix.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.