Case Study · Franchise Marketplace SEO
The pages Google ignored are now Franzy’s traffic engine.
Franzy had thousands of franchise profile pages, and Google decided there wasn’t enough on them worth ranking.
Organic lift in six months
From a few hundred visits a month to roughly 10,000.
The Client
A Charlotte startup making franchises easier to buy.
Franzy is a Charlotte startup building the “Zillow for franchises,” where you shop concepts and filter by vertical, unit count, location and budget.
Alex Smereczniak, the CEO, built a laundry business in Charlotte first, and that’s where he saw the broker industry up close, and how much it costs somebody just to find out what they’d be buying. We’ve known Alex since before Franzy launched.
They launched about eighteen months ago with an ambitious content strategy: blitz content, podcasts, social, SEO, paid, and a giant data system behind it. But they’d started on a freshly bought domain, with every challenger problem at once: build the site, get the content, get the links.
First Win · Best-of Roundups
What we shipped first.
Our first deal was roundups, the best-of pieces, made extremely data-driven: best franchises, best pizza franchises, best franchise you can buy for $100,000. Fifty or sixty custom-built categories, built on their own data.
These are competitive searches, and the pages ranked anyway on a brand-new domain with almost nothing pointing at it. An upstart was out-ranking big incumbents on content quality, and we loved getting them off to a fast start.
The Problem · Pages Google Wouldn’t Rank
Why the core pages weren’t ranking.
Then came the bigger challenge, in the core of the site. Franzy carries thousands of franchise concepts, plenty of them in verticals nobody thinks of as franchises, and the plan was a rich profile page for each one, deep enough to run the filters underneath.
It was a chicken-and-egg problem. They wanted some of that information behind a sign-up wall, and a page needs enough unique content up front for Google to rank it at all. By mid-2025 Google had read what it could see on thousands of these pages, found it generic, and left them out.
We’d stayed close after the first content deployed, in their meetings once or twice a month, so we caught it early. What we told them was that every block on those pages needed real information, across thousands of profiles, quickly.
The most important pages on the site were going nowhere.
The Solution · The Engine
What we built.
So we did a very custom engagement. First we got their databases up to production quality, because none of the rest works if the data underneath isn’t good. Then we built an engine that goes block by block and pulls real, descriptive information for each brand: reviews, Franchise Disclosure Document filings, third-party research.
The engine took about thirty days, which gave everybody the confidence to overhaul every directory page rather than patch a few. We read the franchise content on big sites like entrepreneur.com and figured we could build better. Franzy already had better information than those sites, and the engine could get it onto the page. Then a two-month engagement to rewrite and resubmit them.
01
Enhance
Get the databases up to production quality.
02
Build
An engine that reimagines every block.
03
Overhaul
Every directory page rewritten end to end.
04
Resubmit
Back to Google, with something to read.
The Results
First results in two months.
We launched in July. A few of those pages had snuck into Google before that, doing a few hundred visits a month between them, which is close enough to nothing. When we resubmitted, Google read the new content and started ranking it, with some breakaway franchises landing at number one.
Curve is illustrative of the shape, not the monthly series. Source: A2 Analytics engagement reporting, Franzy directory folder, 2025–2026.
Organic lift
~20×
on the directory pages.
Engine build
~30 days
to a working content engine.
First results
~2 months
to the first new rankings.
Domain authority
+10 pts
over the year, an industry measure of a site’s weight in search.
With thousands of custom-built pages, most people assume nothing happens for a year. They saw results in two months. From there it compounded: internal links picked up, the core of the site came back to life, and the lift spilled into reviews, comparisons and roundups. Those earn links, and the whole site moves with them.
We shared in the risk and the upside on that deal, and they put a lot of trust in us.
In Their Words
“The most concrete thing A2 did for Franzy was reframe how we think about building high-quality, first-party content, the kind that’s genuinely valuable to our readers AND helps us show up in search. They built out custom, high impact content for our brand profile pages and best-of articles that actually ranked, and they went above and beyond on bespoke solutions for our business without ever trying to spin it into separate scope. They’re founders themselves, so they understand where you’re coming from. If you need real SEO and content expertise built for your specific business instead of boilerplate, A2 is the team.”
Alex Smereczniak
CEO, Franzy
Written by
Austin Shrum
Co-founder, A2 Analytics
Running a large content or SEO program?
The pitch is the same one we make to private equity firms: deploy fast, get stuff done, show results quickly. If that’s what you need, we’d love to talk.