Assess your SEO agency or franchise portal: why they rarely move your locations forward online

Why do agencies and portals do so little for your locations online?

A general online agency is built around campaigns, creative, the website and the brand. A portal, directory or fair is built around reach among candidates. Both are valuable. But a chain with dozens of locations needs something else: visibility per address, on Google, Apple Maps, Bing and in AI assistants. That is a separate discipline with its own measurement methods.

So what follows is not an accusation but a test. In part A you look at your current agency and account manager. In part B at portals, directories and fairs. After that you get ten questions to put to both. Prefer to read more widely first? Browse more practical articles in the knowledge base.

Part A: how do you assess a local SEO agency and your account manager?

Start with what you receive every month. It quickly shows whether your agency looks at the brand or at each location separately.

Reporting on the domain rather than on the location

Many monthly reports show traffic and rankings for the website as a whole. For a chain that says little. Whether a location appears in Google Maps depends on where someone searches: two streets away the result can already differ. A geo-grid lays a grid of measuring points over the catchment area, for example 5x5 or 7x7, and measures the ranking at every point. Standard rank tracking tools give one figure per town. So ask whether you get a map per location, or a single average.

The account manager as relationship manager, not specialist

Account managers are often strong at planning, meetings and keeping track of agreements. That is something other than being a Local SEO specialist. A simple check: open your contact's LinkedIn profile and see what training or certification is listed in local search and GEO. Watch out for turnover too. With every new contact, part of the knowledge about your chain is lost, and you start explaining all over again.

Keeping up takes hours an agency model struggles to carry

An observation by Gijs Bodenstaff, not research, based on more than 15 years of Local SEO: anyone who really wants to keep up with this field easily spends 15 hours a week on it. Testing, reading updates, trying new features. In an agency where staff must bill most of their time, there is rarely room for that. On top of that, a lot of local search news comes from the United States. Not all of it works the same way in Europe, so translating it into Dutch practice is an extra step.

What the benchmark shows

In the Local SEO Benchmark Franchise Ketens 2026 we tracked the 100 largest Dutch chains; the method is described alongside Gijs's books on franchise chains. 40% of the profiles were complete. Only 6 of the 100 chains responded to reviews within 24 hours. Those figures concern chains that nearly all have help already. That points to a gap in specialism, not a lack of effort.

Part B: why does a franchise portal not help your visibility?

Anyone who reads through the public vacancies, contact pages and service pages of the large Dutch franchise portals (reference date October 2026) sees roles such as recruiter, customer success, marketing manager and editorial staff, and services such as a magazine, newsletter, fair, lead generation and recruitment and selection. We did not come across specialists in Local SEO, Google Business Profiles or GEO there, and they do not offer those services either.

That makes sense. A portal is a media and recruitment business. It earns from attention on its own platform, not from how well your locations are found per postcode. For reach among candidates that can work well. It does not solve your own online visibility. How to weigh up those two roles is covered in the drawbacks of the classic portal model.

Feel free to check it yourself. Look at the team page, the open vacancies and the services of the partner you work with. If you see nobody there who works with Business Profiles and AI visibility every day, you know what you can and cannot expect. Want to recruit candidates without paying for space on someone else's platform? Look at recruitment without an advertising package.

Which test questions should you put to your agency or franchise portal?

Send these questions in advance and ask for written answers. They work for an agency and for a portal. A partner that is open about them deserves trust, even if the answer is that something falls outside their field.

Looking specifically for a GEO agency? First check who compiled the ranking: in many lists of 'the best GEO agencies' the agency that wrote the list is itself at number 1. Compare instead on testable criteria, such as fixed test prompts and measurement per location; you will find an overview at bestgeobureau.nl.

Agency, portal or franchise marketing agency: what is each set up for?

This comparison is about models, not about specific companies. Within each model there are better and weaker providers.

What do we set up differently from a regular agency?

We deliberately chose a team that focuses solely on local and AI visibility for chains. You can see that in who does the work and how we keep up. More background is available under why choose Franchise Marketing Bureau.

Should you cancel your current agency, then?

No, not necessarily. If the partnership is going well and you get clear answers to the ten questions, stay. A trusted partner who knows your brand is worth a lot. Often a combination works best: your agency keeps the brand and campaigns, we take on the locations. Read how that works under Local SEO and GEO for marketing agencies.

Want to know where you stand first? You can request a scan free of charge; we then measure how visible you are per address. You can also make a start yourself with the local SEO checklist per location.