Wins

New demo is live! A clickable franchise platform, 13 screens covering pipeline, territories, openings, training, support and royalties, all running on a sample brand.

My favorite part is the branding screen - swap the name, logo and color and the whole thing re-skins live. It's behind a password, so ask me if you want a look.

Published two long-form guides for readers who aren't searching for a franchise yet. Each one is built guide-first (comparison tables and FAQ markup), with ownership as one option among several.

The search results for both topics are all guides, so a sales page would never rank there. Meaning the site now shows up earlier in the decision, before the word "franchise" even gets typed.

Hardened the franchise site's WordPress install with a small plugin I wrote myself (no third-party security plugin to babysit): user enumeration closed off, pingbacks disabled, security headers on, and file editing from the dashboard switched off.

Every one of those is a door bots try daily, and I don't like leaving doors unlocked on something I built.

Every "Book a Call" button on the site used to drop people onto the long general contact form. Built a dedicated booking page instead: live open times pulled straight from the calendar and a 5-field form. Then repointed every booking button sitewide the same day.

Meaning the person who's ready to talk picks a time right there, instead of filling out a form built for everyone else.

The brand's consumer site is a monster next to the franchising site, and it was swallowing the franchise-intent searches too. Someone researching the investment would land on pages built for booking a service, and their buyer questions dead-ended there.

So I built the franchising site its own answer for every buyer question and pointed that intent where it belongs. It now holds 3 of the top 4 results for its money keyword, #1 included.

Found 56 URLs on one site competing for the same money keyword (average position 24, ouch). Consolidated the cluster, shipped the 301 redirects, repointed 8 internal links, and registered the topic so future posts can't fragment it again.

Cannibalization is sneaky, every page looks "fine" on its own. Now Google gets one clear answer for that search instead of 56 competing ones.

Shipped e-signature built right into a client's sales portal: the document renders on the page, the signature pad stays locked until the last page has been read, and every signature stores a hash (a fingerprint of the exact file that was signed, so nobody can swap it later). Imported the historical signatures too, so the record was useful on day one.

One more SaaS subscription off the books.

Flipped the switch: franchise development now runs entirely on the CRM I built (candidate records, pipeline, tasks, a daily routine view, forecasting), and the old all-in-one platform is retired.

Nothing in it we don't use, and no ticket or waiting when something needs to change.

Ran a full access audit ahead of a platform cutover: every admin seat, API token and integration mapped to a named owner.

Cleared out what was stale, locked the new system to named seats, and documented who holds every key. I sleep better.

Retired the brand's enterprise franchise management platform. Archived its data, imported what the team needs into the portal I built, and rebuilt the documents it used to generate.

Same jobs done, minus the license fee.

Found out why the ad platform's conversion feed looked dead: the CRM sync wasn't writing attribution at all. I rebuilt the mapping and recovered 68 Google click IDs, every one still inside the 90-day conversion window.

Meaning when a deal closes, Google's bidding finally gets told which click started it. Before this fix, that data just disappeared.

Seven weeks after the migration: Domain Rating (Ahrefs' authority score) up 6 points, three more top-3 rankings, organic traffic up 21%.

The backlinks were already there, the old site just gave Google nothing to rank. Built it real pages and the score started climbing within weeks.

Monthly franchise inquiries are up 4.6x from April to July, and every month beat the one before it.

Ad spend only rose about 45% in that window, so the growth didn't come from throwing money at it. Four months of tightening keywords, killing junk placements, and reworking landing pages, all stacking up (my favorite kind of chart).

Wired up attribution for inquiries that start inside ChatGPT or Perplexity. When someone asks an AI about the brand and then fills out the form, the record now says which engine sent them.

AI search traffic had been invisible in the reporting, a whole channel with no column. Now it's in there with the rest (I check it daily, nerd problems).

Finished the conversion tracking rebuild and verified every layer in production: tag manager, first-party attribution capture, UTM and click-ID persistence on every form, spam filtering, and AI-referral tagging.

Meaning every inquiry now arrives with its receipts - where it came from, what it clicked, what it searched.

Cost per qualified franchise inquiry is down 39% from the Q2 average over the last 30 days - same budget, just less of it wasted.

(Qualified means a completed qualification call with a real candidate, not a form fill. I only count the real ones.)

Traced a flood of junk inquiries back to one Google Ads recommendation card that had opted the account into the Search Partners network (syndicated search boxes on parked domains, not Google.com). Nearly all of the tracked search spend was going there.

Shut the network off and built a negative keyword blocklist behind it. Junk inquiries dropped more than 80% by the weekend.

Every FAQ answer on a franchise site can end up in Google's rich results, word for word, with no disclaimer riding along. So I audited the site's structured data (the markup that feeds those results) against franchise advertising rules and tightened it up the same day.

In franchising, compliance applies to your search snippets too.

Tore down and rebuilt the brand's Google Ads account: new campaign structure, honest conversion actions, a customer match list, and negative keywords that keep job seekers and "make money from home" searches out of a franchise pipeline.

This restructure is what surfaced the junk-network problem five days later. Messy accounts hide that stuff.

Rebuilt the sales team's franchise webinar deck from a tired PowerPoint into an HTML presentation system - video slides, brand fonts, and a launcher the presenter just double-clicks.

No more "which file is current" emails either. There's one version now and it's always the latest.

Rebuilt every door an inquiry can walk through (site forms, directory listings, social lead forms, inbound calls, email) on automation I wrote from scratch.

The old stack was rented automation nobody could see inside. Now when something breaks, I open it up and fix it the same day.

First 19 days on the new site vs the final 19 on the old one: search impressions up 63%.

Google is "seeing" way more of the site and showing it for a wider set of searches. Clicks trail impressions after a rebuild, usually by a few weeks, so impressions are the number I watch first.

Launch day! I moved a home services franchise's development site off an all-in-one CRM page builder and onto a WordPress build I wrote from scratch. Desktop PageSpeed went from 71 to 98, LCP (largest contentful paint, Google's main load speed metric) hit 0.42 seconds, and not a single ranking dropped in the cutover.

That one took weeks of planning - the whole goal was for nobody to notice anything changed.

The audit that opened this engagement! I scored the brand's franchise recruitment site 35 out of 100: slow pages, thin content, no schema markup, and an all-in-one page builder fighting every fix.

I could've patched it for months. I recommended a rebuild instead, and the audit became the punch list.