195. SEO and SEM Tips for Coworking Spaces with Reuben Lau

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195. SEO and SEM Tips for Coworking Spaces with Reuben Lau

00:00:02 Thank you for joining us today. I am always excited about my guests, but I feel like SEO and SEM has been a very hot topic for many of my program members and students lately. And I was introduced to Ruben Lau, who is an online marketing strategist. He is in Richmond in British Columbia, Canada, and one of my flight group members.

00:00:26 Jeff actually mentioned that he was running a Google ads campaign, and Jeff has a digital marketing background. And when digital marketers outsource, I always think, Oh, this is a good lead because they know how to evaluate the process and the results. Many of us who run small businesses have no idea how to evaluate the people that we work with, which is always a struggle for me because I know,

00:00:53 you know, what we should be doing, but I don't always have the right people to refer folks to. So I immediately set up a call with Ruben and got him roped into talking to my community manager group and our flight group. And so I wanted to have him on the podcast and get him introduced to you and have him share some of his insights into SEO and SEM for the co-working world.

00:01:17 Although Ruben will do a further intro here. You work with folks in the coworking industry, which is the other reason I, you know, wanted to connect with you because a, you know, Jeff lecture work and that was a good endorsement, but B you understand the business model, which is, you know, you can learn it, but I love it when people have experienced it,

00:01:38 but it's not your sole focus you have done. You've been doing development and online strategy and marketing for years. So tell us, I'll stop talking and tell us about you a little bit about your background and about the work that you do. And then, then we'll dive into our questions. Yeah, absolutely. So I've been doing web design and development for a little over 15 years now.

00:02:00 I started out as a really small business, just doing websites for local businesses and local connections, and slowly built that up to a place where now, where I'm driving a little bit more business from the coworking side, as well as doing more on the SEO and SEM side. So our core services are web design and development followed by search engine optimization and paid search.

00:02:24 So just driving more traffic to the website, which will help convert more leads typically. Yeah. I have been kind of obsessing over websites recently. So I started a new mentorship program and I've been kind of diving into websites and then looking at examples, and there are a lot of ways to go astray with website development. And it's, I think it's not that simple to get it all right.

00:02:51 And it's so critical because for local businesses, right. Website and our Google, my business are top of the funnel, right. That, I mean, yeah. You know, referrals and some word of mouth, but really your leads are coming from search. And so they're going to your website and they're going to your Google, my business listing. So it's,

00:03:13 it's super critical. So the challenge with Ruben is narrowing down what to talk about because we get Dago out website design, we get talk about, you know, all sorts of things, but so Rubin, yeah. Let's dive in, in, you know, kind of weave in your experiences with, for coworking spaces. And you mentioned, you know,

00:03:37 kind of weighing towards, so we're using acronyms, which I realize we should define for folks so well, I'll let you do it cause you're the professional. Can you define SCO and SCM for folks? Yeah. So SEO stands for search engine optimization and essentially the goal of SEO is to increase your exposure on search engine result pages. So whenever you're doing a search within Google,

00:04:01 those top 10 Results followed by ads and Google, my business listings, those are all a part of search engine marketing. And those comprise of SEO, as we mentioned, search engine optimization, which is the organic side. And then se M which stands for search engine marketing is for the paid side. So this is where you're going to be paying Google an advertising fee to be able to list above other people or other businesses.

00:04:28 So we'll let's so I have my list of questions. I'm tempted to jump around, but I'll, I'll start, I'll try to stay in order. So in terms of search engine optimization, how do I know if I'm doing that? And how do I know if my website has been optimized for search engine optimization? For sure. So let's stick to the search engine optimization side first.

00:04:55 So it's important to know that it's just one tool in many tools in digital marketing. So the reason why I like it more these days is because people are using Google search. Whenever they're looking for something, right. If you're looking for a product, a service, a local business, you're going to jump on your phone or on Google. So that's going to be the primary place.

00:05:14 People are going to search. And especially for co-working spaces, I found like being Google's a lot of times the number one driver of new business, just simply because those people that are searching for coworking spaces are going to be doing it on Google. And these people are typically more ready to act or further down the sales process than say something like Facebook, where you're kind of pushing the marketing,

00:05:37 or there's a lot more emphasis on education there because they may not know what coworking spaces are. They may not even care. So just going on Facebook and pushing those ads to people it's gonna, it may work, but it's going to take a lot more impressions for that person to actually pick up on what it is you're doing. So yeah, whenever performing SEO,

00:05:57 hundreds of different tactics that you can use, and these are ever changing and evolving, but it's really hard to start and important to choose the ones that will have the largest impact on your business. And that can be quite challenging. So we always start to, we always like to start with your goals in mind first. So understanding the goals of the space,

00:06:17 then determining the strategies and then going into the tactics to implement, to hit those strategies. So say, for example, your goal is to sign up 10 coworking members in the next 30 days. That's great, but it's also good to be more specific. So what types of members are they possibly like e-commerce members, what's the radius, maybe they're a 20 to 30 minute driving distance from your location.

00:06:40 From there, you might determine like, based on that goal, our strategy is to create content, to drive more tourists. So that could be coming in the form of things like publishing weekly blog posts to spotlight members within the e-commerce industry, or maybe creating something fun, like an infographic or a map to show nearby, like shipping depots, shipping supplies,

00:07:00 stores, or freelance packaging designers. So yeah, there's a lot of opportunities, but making sure that you have that goal in mind means that whatever strategies you decide on and whatever tactics you're implementing or acting on feedback into the goal, Ruben, you're forcing people to be strategic and think about, yeah, I was talking to somebody yesterday and I said, you know,

00:07:23 I think one of the challenges in bigger markets is that so many spaces are really generic, you know, in quotes. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but I said, you should, what? This may be bad advice, but I said, you should consider to your point, like pick a target audience and speak directly to them because you're going to have this segment of people who will find you and show up because you're the closest space,

00:07:50 right. You don't really need to talk to them. It's like right. Who, to your point, what other audiences can you be compelling to that are more specific? And so write the blog posts and the social media can be a way to do that. Yeah, absolutely. And like when you mentioned the, the website from an SEO perspective, it's good to be able to do that because you're actually targeting a smaller group of people and often that will be much more effective and also cost you less to reach those people.

00:08:19 So, yeah, From a website optimization standpoint. So one thing I often see is that co-working space owners will get a website done. Maybe they've, they're new to owning a business and have never had a website built before. So they get one built that kind of, you know, shares their services and whatnot. They're new. And so the copy may not speak,

00:08:51 you know, may not use the same keywords that the customer might use and they have not done. They have not actually requested sort of SEO optimization from their website developer. Is that, do you see that as being kind of common? Like how would you recommend if somebody's maybe been open for a year and they're realizing, okay, I need to invest in,

00:09:17 you know, I'm not getting the search results or I had a, a member of flight group member. We were, I can't remember exactly what we were looking at, but she's like, you know, I'm looking at my Google analytics and Asia to high bounce rate and B she's like, people are finding me from these like strange keywords and we were looking at our website and we're like,

00:09:35 well, you use the word in your copy. And I think that must be why. And she was just like, so she updated her copy, but do you have some advice for people who are saying, okay, I right. Okay. So I need to, I want more organic traffic to my site. What's sort of the, the process to go through,

00:09:55 to think about how do I get better at SEO on my website and in particular. Yeah. So yeah, I agree so much of SEO is so foundational setting up your website properly is so important and can save you a lot of time and effort in the future. So just making sure that it's structured properly from a, not only a technical perspective, but also how your pages are organized,

00:10:19 can really help your SEO rankings down the road. So the best way to determine if you're ranking well is just to pick up your phone and do a quick search. So look for like co-working spaces near me, or co-working spaces followed by the name of the city. And if you're ranked number one, that's fantastic. That's a great start because typically if you're ranked number one,

00:10:39 that's going to yield about 30% of the clicks from the search engine result page. Whereas if you're position number two, that's only 15%. So it cuts it down by half. So if you're not number one you're losing out on potentially half of the traffic, traffic versus position. Number one, if you're not ranked number one, it's important. I feel to remember what Google is trying to achieve here,

00:11:01 which is to present the best content to the searcher. So what I like to say is just put yourself in Google shoes. Those are big shoes to fill, but there's a ton of ranking signals that Google uses. Some of them for example, is like relevance of content. So if you're number two, does the number one position is, is that content answering the user's questions or their concerns better?

00:11:24 What is the quality of content like, is there content longer or well-written or more readable or include synonyms or like terms what's the format of their content? Are they putting in videos like infographics, video tours, better images, how many websites are linking to there's as a huge factor as well? So are these links from local stores or are they from highly credible sources,

00:11:50 such as like newspapers or associations? And then the big one these days is user experience like, is their website loading faster? Is it going to be a better mobile overall experience? So there's a lot of these factors that come into play, but these are just some that you can start to benchmark your site versus those other competitors to see if there's maybe some opportunities to improve.

00:12:12 And if I'm looking for my rank order, I do it on a phone. If I do it on my computer, I need to open an incognito browser. Is that right? Like, because, and also what if I'm in this space, does that matter we'll will live Results be skewed. Okay. Absolutely. So, yeah, we always recommend trying it at your space at your home,

00:12:36 maybe a friend's home, just to see where you rank this that'll change. Google knows where you're located and we'll tailor those results to you. So similarly for the ranking signal of relevance, they're going to find that if, if you're looking for something and there's some sort of local aspect to it, they're going to serve you businesses that are closer to you to promote that relevancy.

00:12:58 So again, just thinking of it from Google's perspective, if you're looking for like a plumber near me, they're going to try to serve plumbers that are close to you because that's going to be more relevant to you. So Google tries to identify these based on the way that you search. So it is useful to look at your ranking from various different areas.

00:13:17 Okay. Got it. So, so if I'm thinking about, again, I feel like we could do like a whole class on this. So maybe we'll, we'll skip to this question. If I'm thinking about an 80, 20 rule for search engine optimization, kind of what are the 20% of the SEO related activities that will get me most of the results?

00:13:46 Like, so again, if I'm that operator, maybe I've been open for a year and my head's kind of, you know, above water now and I'm saying, okay, I'm going to start putting some processes in place in my business. That really helped me focus on the things that drive leads. You know, I'm going to spend some time on investing in search engine optimization.

00:14:06 Maybe I'm going to start to run ads, which we can talk about what are kind of the core things that I want to start with that will probably get me the most Results. Yeah. So what's interesting about the 80 20 rule is it as also applies to your traffic typically. So 80% of your traffic is going to come from 20% of your pages.

00:14:26 So if you haven't focused on SEO or you're new to SEO, I would say focus on those. And those pages typically include your homepage and your service pages. So that's probably where I would recommend beginning the other, which is, is, is going to be your technical and what I call scalable on-site SEO. So SEO is broken up typically by on-site SEO,

00:14:49 meaning things that you can impact on your website and offsite SEO, which is going to be things like getting links or driving in tactical social media. So the onsite technical SEO is fairly important. It's, it's understanding the way to communicate your content to Google. So it could be very simple things like structuring your content. So having the proper headings. So Google recommends you use like H ones,

00:15:14 which is your primary heading, and then<inaudible> as a tag for your secondary headings and so on and so forth. So just having those in place means you're communicating to Google your priorities and how your content is structured. Another one that is often automatically generated is like a site map. So a site map is a page on your website, which serves as a roadmap to Google telling it where to go to find all your pages.

00:15:39 So not only does it provide a roadmap to index your site the first time, but anytime you publish new content that gets added to your site map automatically. So that Google knows that it's new and knows to crawl it. So having those in place means that you're just communicating better to Google. And these are all well-known best practices from Google and the last,

00:16:00 which is going to be a little bit more advanced. So it might be better for a larger spaces or spaces that have multiple locations is conversion rate optimization, or another acronym is CRO. And so this goes a little bit above and beyond SEO, but I think it's worth mentioning because is the ability to run experiments, to improve conversion rates. So say for example,

00:16:24 your website gets like a hundred visitors and your website converts at 2%, meaning you get two tours booked, right? And so you want to double that. So using SEO, you would need to double your traffic to 200 visitors per month to get four tourist books. Right? So another way to do that, and it's a little bit less common is to try and increase your conversion rate.

00:16:47 So taking that original hundred visitors and now doubling your conversion rate to 4%, we'll give you the same for tours book, but what's really interesting and fun about it is if you do both now, you get 200 visitors had 4%. Now you get eight tours books. So combining SEO with CRO or conversion rate optimization is hugely important because you're getting more from the traffic you're receiving.

00:17:13 So I love that I get that it's advanced, but I suspect a lot of operators. And to your point until they really invest, but it's still hard to find the right people who really understand the business and web design. I think most operators probably have challenges on their website that are preventing, that are not optimized for conversions. So I think maybe it's more advanced because you have to kind of di you have to have the right resources to do those experiments and make that those updates and even know,

00:17:48 like, what am I looking for to change Exactly your Experience better. Yeah. But I, I think that's a huge, there's so much, that's why I've been thinking a lot about the website, because I feel like most operators have a lot of room to improve their website. And we can talk about paid ads in a bit, but really you want to optimize your website before you're running paid ads.

00:18:13 Right. Cause if you're driving traffic and not converting it that's a waste of money. Absolutely. Yeah. So they should be optimized from both ends from both the SEO and SEM side, but also on your website, you just get more out of the users that you're getting. So yeah, the CRO is a little bit more complex just simply because of what's required to set it up.

00:18:36 A true split test should be done simultaneously. So if you're doing, like if today you're using book tour and then two more using book tour now, like understanding the statistical benefit or advantages of either will be very difficult if you're running them one after the other, how a true split test should work is you're going to be sending visitors sometimes to version a and another time to version P but during the same timeframe,

00:19:07 because if you're spanning like multiple months to do these tests, then things like seasonality might play a factor into your results. And then so your results and your confidence gets diluted. Yup. That makes sense. So we need to bring it, bring in the professionals for that and make sure we're, we're doing that. Right. So before we do that,

00:19:26 I mean, what are a couple of basic things that folks could be doing internally? And then, you know, at what point do they need to outsource? I suspect we lost half of our audience at H one. Maybe not, but you know what I mean? Cause I think that's, I don't even know enough. So your keyword should be in your,

00:19:49 in your H one headers, right? The nuances of like, well, we can't put coworking in every header of every blog post. So how do people do keyword research in order to know, you know, kind of what to put in their H one and H twos, and then I'm gonna make this a two-part question. You gave a blog post example at the beginning that would be relevant to potential members are all of my blog posts relevant to members or are some of them just to get authority with Google?

00:20:25 Like Felicia who you, you, I think have talked to Felicia was noting that she gets a lot of traffic to this blog post that talks about the differences. You know, what is shared workspace versus flex office versus coworking, which is sort of a, we can, you know, something people might search for, but that might be someone in her market.

00:20:46 It might be someone in another market who comes across it because it's a really good art, you know, it's a really good blog post and it's informative and it's the right length. So is she getting like SEO juice from folks in other markets visiting that post or not? Yeah, she is. She is because that's a, it's a highly ranked article or blog posts and it is generating traffic.

00:21:11 So that means Google themes. It has quality in terms of contents. So yes, it is driving traffic. It is getting SEO or what we like to call us domain authority because now Google is serving this page high for a lot of different search terms. It's a well-written article and it's fairly good in terms of its links. So I feel like that's a large contributing factor.

00:21:33 However, whenever we are doing SEO again, we want to relate this back to the goals, right? Like, are these people that are searching or finding this article from other countries or other places around the world, are they potential members? So it's important to keep that goal in mind while I think it's beneficial to have these hugely popular blog posts. It's you got to make sure that you're also putting in the strategy and the techniques and tactics to attract the local members,

00:22:03 if that's your goal. Okay. So there's a little bit of a combination there because if you only have sort of the popular articles, but nobody converts from them then who cares. Yeah. Yeah. So, but if they help to draw in local people who are also interested in that topic because of the authority and some of those people convert them good strategy.

00:22:26 Exactly. Yeah. To leverage both. And even when you do have a highly visible piece like that blog post, it's interesting to be able to try and tie that into various services of your business. So whether that's internal linking, so linking various keywords within that. So if that space, sorry, if that article says coworking spaces in your city, you can tag that or link that to your S your coworking space URL.

00:22:57 And that will really help. And just trying to figure out who that audience is. And one of the tools that you can use is like Google search console, which is a free tool offered by Google. So that's search dot, google.com. And essentially that is like a little free ranking tracker, but it also tells you like what positions you ranked for,

00:23:15 for various keywords and key phrases. So going back to that blog post, you can see where are these people are coming from? Like, what countries, what search terms are they using? And then be able to adapt the article possibly in the future to almost recycle it, to get it highly ranking and driving traffic, but not only that, getting it into,

00:23:36 getting the people that are reading it to go further into your website to see if there are potential possible like members there. Yeah. Okay. Got that makes sense. So, okay. The what, what are SEO tactics? So this will vary probably between to your point, single location, folks who are doing a lot of this stuff on their own versus multi location folks who probably have a centralized marketing team that are managing blog posts and the website and that kind of thing.

00:24:14 So for our single location folks, what are things that they can do on their own? Like what are a couple, a couple of things that they should be thinking about in terms of SEO or that their community manager might do, which might be, you know, blog, post related. And sometimes we delegate the blog post writing to our community manager.

00:24:34 What can I do internally? And then what? So I think I started this question with the H one tag, and then let us, let us astray, what can I do on my own and what should I think about, okay, I need to invest in outsourcing to an expert to really kind of take it to the next level. Yeah, absolutely.

00:24:50 So if you're single location, you're going to be targeting local or hyper-local as we call. So as owner operators, I feel, you know, you're captain of the ship. So you want to understand your goals, your KPIs, and possibly identify trends in the business or in the industry. So just staying more on that macro view, instead of that micro view for community managers,

00:25:13 I say they're great for creating things like content based on local awareness. So whether that be things like event announcements or member spotlights, or community collaboration, content, that's, that's going to be really easy for them because they're in the space day to day. And we can also help owners and operators by reporting on KPIs too. So since they're typically the ones that are going to be running the tourists,

00:25:37 it's great to have that feedback since they have their finger on the pulse. When it comes to outsourcing, I would say comes down to things like strategy techniques and also implementation because SEO and SEM can be hugely technical. So understanding the technical aspects of it, which continuously change is going to be really a huge advantage for you in the long run, doing things like keyword research,

00:26:04 setting up analytics, which we know can be really messy as well, setting up KPI, monitoring dashboards, and prioritization, like understanding what's going to, what actions are going to give you the hugest results with the least effort upfront will get you to where you want to go quicker. And then lastly, just integrating software. So you might be using like office R and D or Exodus or Calendly or HubSpot,

00:26:28 just making sure all of these tools speak to each other just means your data is going to be cleaner. And then as a result, your decisions will be clear. Yeah. I mean, the software is a great point, cause I know some folks have reached out because they're trying to, they're trying to track their conversions and look at the right KPIs.

00:26:45 And even that can be a real challenge to get everything, to talk and figure out, okay, am I really tracking the right numbers? And is this really a conversion number? I think folks get really frustrated and this is more SCM related about not actually being able to track. Okay. Where do leads come from? I mean, to your point,

00:27:05 a good baseline is just make sure the community manager is asking every single tour. You know, if you can't tell from the, you know, book a tour and where they came from on your website and even that is not, you know, a hundred percent of the time going to be accurate, right. Somebody saw an ad somewhere and then later they went to your website and it's not a direct connection,

00:27:24 but having the community manager asking so that they at least know and keeping an eye on the right, the right metrics. And to your point, it's probably hard to give out really broad advice because it can be really goal-based in market market specific. Right. Are you in a smaller market where, yeah, you're number one, right. You're already number one.

00:27:45 Cause you're the only one in town. And so then what, right. What are the activities that you do that will help people discover you and find you and maybe it's right. Facebook ads, not Google ads, or if you're in a really competitive market, then, you know, what is your strategy? What do you tackle first? What makes the most sense for your budget?

00:28:03 So totally get it. So yeah, so actually actually, well, the, it related to the smaller market where there's not a lot of search volume and I, this is I think becoming more relevant because with the work from home, I see coworking spaces popping up just all over the place, right. Or even in towns that are, you know,

00:28:30 larger, but don't have a lot of competition. How do people think about the interplay between search engine optimization, which can require investment and it's, you know, it's, I sort of think of SEO and I think this is not exactly right as being free that's right now. Right. It's not really, I mean, it's time, it's, it's education,

00:28:54 it's understanding and it could be outsourcing because it's technical and you ha you know, to focus on the right things. So it's not totally free, but it's not running ads. And then search engine marketing is when you're actually paying Google to send you people. So SEO can be seen as an investment, right. To get more sort of free traffic, but SCM,

00:29:12 you're paying Google to send traffic to you. How do you think about the interplay of those two things in a market that is somewhat new to coworking and maybe you are the only, you know, the only coworking space in town or one of a few. Yeah. So more and more these days, even for smaller markets, SCM is becoming a huge player because as we know,

00:29:36 as we understand people are doing their searches on Google nowadays the three or even four positions are going to be paid ads, which is part of the SCM department, not only that below the paid ads, typically you also have the map listings. So even though you're number one on organic or SEO, you're pretty much like the seventh or eighth or a few scrolls down,

00:29:58 at least. So that's why I feel STM is becoming more and more important. And that's, Google's goal of sort of satisfying their shareholders. They need to generate that revenue through their, through their advertising, which accounts for 80 or 90% of their revenues. So that's why we use SCM quite often, regardless of market size. Because if somebody, if,

00:30:18 or if your competitor is using SEM, you should probably be as well because they're are now better above you. Right? And now we know that such a huge percentage clicks on that first position. If you're now second, that means you're cutting your traffic potentially in house. So that's why it's becoming more and more important to use SCM. And the main benefits of SEM to me over SEO,

00:30:40 although they can be used together is that esteem is a lot quicker. Yeah. SEO typically takes a couple of months for Google to start indexing and start seeing those improvements and to start measuring those improvements. Whereas SCM typically you can get up and running within a few days or a few weeks. So it's just a lot quicker. And then control is another one.

00:31:01 So with SEM or paid search ads, you get to throttle based on your occupancy. So if your, your private offices are full or there's a waiting list, turn that off, right. Divert your money to something like virtual office or meeting rooms. Whereas SEO, the leads just come in had Google's mercy, right? Like if it feels you're number one you're today,

00:31:20 you're number one. If you're number two tomorrow, you're number two. The next is that testing ability or that CRO that we talked about. So whenever we run SEM ads, we create custom landing pages for our clients. So you might have a custom landing page for meeting spaces, or we might have custom landing pages for private offices. So doing that allows us to control also,

00:31:46 or test multiple versions of those landing pages. So simple tests could be things like imagery. So we might swap out the banner to see how that impacts conversions. We might swap out headlines or even offers sometimes. So a lot of times things like buyer behavior doesn't really change that quickly. So do billing things that build trust or shows off your social proof testimonials,

00:32:09 things like that can go a really long way. But knowing what that magic combination requires continuous testing, where on the SEO side, you can do that sort of test. But the feedback loop is typically a lot slower because you're, you're not really able to control the amount of traffic that you're receiving. And then last is targeting. So SEO, again,

00:32:32 you're a bit at Google's mercy in terms of what you rank for Google will determine where you should rank when you should rank and what you should report on the SCM side. You get to decide what keywords you want to bid for. So whether it's by location targeting, so you can target a certain radius around your space or a time of day, you might find that people from 12:00 AM to 6:00 AM,

00:32:54 don't really search for coworking spaces. So you can turn off your heads at that time. Another thing is like audience targeting. This is a little bit more advanced too, but you can even target people that frequent coffee shops, if that's your yeah. And also like things like parents of grade schoolers, six to 12 years old. So you can really get really specific with that,

00:33:16 Which is again about knowing your goals and your audience. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And we've been figured that out too, because as you start to run ads, you'll, you'll be able to see where the conversions are coming from. So maybe it's parents of grade school or six to 12, maybe it's parents of kids, you know, 13 and up,

00:33:36 you'll be able to see those. And then you can almost weed out certain audiences that you feel aren't a great fit based on the results you're seeing. So targeting is super beneficial in that regard, but it's also really beneficial from an exclusion standpoint. So if you want to exclude people, let's say a common one that we implement is exclude people that have gone on a tour.

00:33:58 So if they've already signed up, you know, to go on a tour, don't continuously waste ad spend on reaching that same audience. And other one is excluding people like existing members. So if you're using like a member portal of some sort, we can put a tag on there, which shows that because really only members should be going to a member portal or logging into the member portal,

00:34:19 then you can identify those users. So you're not again wasting ad spend on existing members. So these are some ways to conserve budget. And another one that's very popular is setting up like branded campaigns. So like bidding on your own name can be a very common strategy, but if you're running a lot of the events that can actually work against you, because a lot of those events attendees may be just looking for your address.

00:34:43 So not paying for that traffic like Google my business would be a much more cost-effective way to do that or free way to do that and, or using organic cause most likely you're going to be served. Number one for your name anyway. So we really try to conserve budgets so that it's, hyper-focused on generating new leads for your business, Which can be important because a cost per lead out of context can be high.

00:35:08 And you certainly don't want to pay, you know, if whatever that dollar amount is for somebody who's already a member. So in, in a smaller market, it may be more likely that they're being served your ads. Right? So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So Rubin should, is there a case when folks should run their own Google ads or is that never,

00:35:35 I mean, you can, again, I'm circling it back To your goals, but my general rule of thumb is, and I wanted to try and quantify this better. So it's a clearer decision, but I would say if you're looking to generate more than five leads per month, you're probably better off finding a professional or an agency to help you manage it for a couple of reasons,

00:35:55 with an expert, you're going to get their Google ads experience. It's a very complex tool. It takes years to master and it's always changing that's right, exactly. Always evolving. They're always testing new ways to be able to serve better ads to a wider audience. And if you just let Google run on its own, it's going to target a lot of keywords that you don't want to be ranked for by default.

00:36:20 Like if you're targeting coworking space or coworking space or meeting room space for wrench, you're going to be included for terms like apartments for rent. And that's not what coworking space include, right? Coworking is completely different. So again, if you just let Google just have it's way, it's going to spend a lot of budget in ways that's not going to be effective for your business.

00:36:43 Another benefit of working with an agency is hopefully they have some co-working industry experience. So they know already in advance, what's working and what's not. So that's going to take, save you a lot of like trial and error and wasted money potentially. And the last is like tools and software, because with two to-do like split testing properly, or to have proper tracking in place,

00:37:06 it requires a lot of tools and software that gives us a lot more insight and data that we can feed back into things like analytics. So just having access to those tools is going to be hugely beneficial and to go out and subscribe to those tools is much costlier because we're buying likes to learn them, to learn them and pay back. Yeah, yeah,

00:37:25 yeah. So those are typically the, the main reasons. And I always feel like a well-managed Google ads campaign should be like making you money, saving you money, not really costing you money. So I'm curious. So my understanding around Facebook ads is that the Facebook algorithm really likes consistency in the account. And I know you're not a big Facebook guy,

00:37:49 but that you should be running engagement ads. You know, your account needs more activity than what you're going to get organically because they don't favor people who run ads sporadically. Is that the case with Google or does Google not care? I would say it doesn't care as much. There's definitely a ramp up period. So you're, if you're toggling your campaigns on and off every day,

00:38:13 that's not going to work. There's a learning period as we make changes to various settings. So it's good to be consistent, but you can still turn it off for like a month or two and turn it back on and start to see those results come back in again, there will be a build up before you see it working at that same pace, but it's,

00:38:32 it's doable. Yeah. So I would say it's less from the Google Google ads. Yep. We used to run them and we Mo we ran them most of the time, but we would turn them off occasionally or to your point really throttled them back. If offices were full, I'm curious to folks who would say, well, I've hired somebody. And I simply can't tell if the,

00:38:56 if the spend is worth the money, what would you say to that, to that concern? Yeah. It's to make sure you have your tracking and they should be able to report on this. So a lot of the tracking methods that we use are things like call tracking or even form tracking. So whether you're using like a tour booking software, you can,

00:39:22 you should be able to see all of that come through in terms of conversions. So You're going to acuity or a Calendly. And I ha I ha I can't resist saying this because I see so many websites you don't have that they have a form and probably you could track form submission. I, I, it's gotta be harder. I suspect. And I really think it's a terrible user experience to have a form.

00:39:46 Yeah, I agree. So there's a lot of things that you should be tracking through your Google ads. So I would say to be able to properly measure the return on investment for your Google ads is you need to be able to segment your leads by service first, because ROI as a calculation in general terms is not that it's not going to be that applicable to your space because five meeting room leads is not equivalent to five office space or five office space leads is any equivalent to five day pass leads,

00:40:18 right? So you really need to be able to separate your leads by service. So the way that we do that typically, or we recommend is by just making sure you have the right architecture of your campaigns in place. So having a separate budget for each of those services is going to be key. And again, creating those custom landing pages per service gives you that insight to now know,

00:40:38 Oh, this budget that we spent on meeting rooms is actually delivering meeting relieves. And then secondly is just know your cost per lead. So you should be tracking things like phone calls. So whether that's just number of calls or duration of call or even call recording, or what we've been experimenting with recently is called whispering. So basically when your community manager picks up the phone,

00:41:00 it says, this call is from Google ads. So it gets interesting. Yep. Yeah. And that way, if you're logging the manually onto a spreadsheet or into your CRM, you'll get to say this call was from this lead was from Google. Yeah, exactly. Without even needing to ask another thing you should be tracking is tours booked. So that's like Calendly,

00:41:20 Calendly, or acuity, a website form submissions. Like you said, sometimes that can be relevant if it's like information requests and other things like chats and signups. So, yeah. So I guess to sum all up your ads team, or you should be able to say, like this month as a result of Google ads, we received 10 office space leads specifically,

00:41:41 and those comprised of five tourists booked three phone calls and two website form submissions. So being that specific allows you to have a much clearer ROI, because again, if you're counting like a date past lead as a lead, it's going to be very diluted in terms of what you're actually learning from this ROI metric. Yep, absolutely. Right. The, yes,

00:42:08 sorry. I jumped ahead on my, on my questions here. So Ruben, I've been kind of, you know, asking the questions that I think are important or it might be useful to the audience and kind of an, you know, an introduction I'm guessing most of the audience is aware of SEO and SEM, but like many of us just kind of struggling with,

00:42:28 you know, where do I start? You know, what do I do? How do I measure this? And, you know, you mentioned the, the outsourcing piece. I think one, one of the biggest reasons that I can think of for outsourcing is the accountability, because all of the things that you describe, you know, even if you could learn how to do them or figure them out,

00:42:51 I feel like a lot of operators and I'll put myself in that boat, just get impatient, right. And, and the things that you described that need to be done and over time require patience and testing and data. And this is like process and not all, you know, operators are great at that diligent, ongoing process oriented activity. We're more like,

00:43:18 you know, idea people and what's next. And, and so for me, it's like that accountability of just like, okay, I'm going to commit to this process and someone's going to help me run that process. And then I know it's getting done. I certainly, you know, am I, I call myself a chronic DIY or I'll try to do things on my own.

00:43:40 And I run into that challenge all the time. Right? I mean, even basic things like getting your website updated and getting those blogs posted, you know, oftentimes we just have to turn that over to someone else in order to make sure that it's actually getting done, you know, or to even force yourself to think through your goals and you know,

00:43:59 who are you trying to attract? But even the back to the technical thing, the landing page piece, I am super comfortable with landing pages now. So I talk about them. You know, I think there are folks who probably also don't really know the function of a landing page. I remember when I first started my coworking space in 2012, one of my first members was a digital marketer.

00:44:21 And I remember him sitting and I may have told you this story, but I'll say it for everyone's benefit him, sitting down with me and saying the things that you've said, okay, we're going to run Google ads. We're going to do call tracking, need landing pages. In my mind, I was just like, head explosion, what landing? What's a landing page.

00:44:37 Why do I need a landing page that makes no sense to me, like really sort of pushing back. And I didn't at the time do anything with it. Cause there's just like, I don't think so call tracking, like that seems unnecessary all up. It's made with all up and now I totally get it. But I think when you're new to all of that,

00:44:55 it seems like kind of overwhelming and a lot of work and it's hard to get to it. And so, again, not that I'm a big, what I think what I'm concerned about for folks listening is that the website is so critical. And so having a highly functioning website that converts well, and then also getting the right amount of traffic to it.

00:45:16 Right? So we have a lot of folks who are opening. Coworking is becoming more popular and people are expanding or opening new spaces and they're not getting the leads that they need. Right. And so, you know, what are the levers to pull to get more leads and really, you know, we won't, I need, we need to, I need to let you get back to your day,

00:45:36 but like just, you, you mentioned a couple of examples of like, look, if you need to get five leads a week, you know, what does that mean in terms of your website, traffic and the conversion on that website? And it's really a numbers game. And so, you know, and there are creative sort of grassroots things. You can do a lot of folks get members from having events in the space,

00:45:57 but those are all really, you know, people intensive, right? That's not kind of a machine that's running in the background to get you the right lead. So I get nervous for folks who aren't thinking hard about SEO and SEM who really need the leads because those are the levers. Right. That's right. Yeah. So is there, what, are there any questions that you want to cover that I haven't asked?

00:46:22 And I know you have a resource that you want to share for folks that we'll put in the show notes. So yeah. Anything else you want to add to our conversation, which could go on for days, because there's so much to cover here, but in the spirit of, of wrapping up, what else would you Just that that SCM can be run isolated from the website?

00:46:43 So you don't have to get your website to a perfect position before you start running ads with landing pages and especially with service oriented landing pages that are specific. We can start with just meeting rooms and your ads, your landing pages will all be separate from your website. And so you can start generating meeting room leads on its own. So it's, it doesn't have to be as scary as it sounds like you can really get started at a smaller level.

00:47:08 And then once we start to drive those leads and those conversions in that business, through the door, then you can consider things like ramping up budgets. So it's a, it's a gradual process. And we always like to start smaller and then build it up from there once we show Results. No, I'm so glad you mentioned that because I'm sure I've made people a little bit nervous about their website because it can be overwhelming to feel like,

00:47:29 Oh, I need to make a lot of changes to your point. You can really isolate the experience for the end user with a landing page, which is why I'm so bought into landing pages. Now I totally totally get that. I'm glad you mentioned that. Perfect. Right. We might like to make things feel approachable to folks. Okay. So you mentioned a resource that you wanted to share,

00:47:51 let us know about that and how to find it. Yeah, so we have a free marketing ROI tracker, and this is designed for owners and operators to be able to track their return on investment on their marketing efforts. So this can be done on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending on how much marketing that you have ongoing. And it's meant to track not only paid forms of marketing,

00:48:16 but also unpaid from some marketing. And it's a great tool to have your community managers help out with. And it comes complete with instructions and examples, and that can be found@spacefully.com forward slash game. And then the other, if for those spaces that are looking to probably like to get started on Google ads, whether they've run it before they have never run ads for them,

00:48:39 we have a blueprint that we do with you to help demystify a lot of the questions that you might have such as like what your budget being, what should your campaign structure be? What services should I start with and also how to convert these visitors into members. So typically we offer our blueprints at $400, but for your listeners, we're going to do that at $200 and it can be found on the same page space,

00:49:04 fully.com forward slash Jamie. Awesome. Thank you, Ruben. I'm excited to check out that tool. We, the link will be in the show notes, would you confined right off of the homepage of everything, coworking.com if you're driving or walking the dog and can't write that down, but space flea is also very easy to remember. I liked that name a lot.

00:49:25 So Rubin, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and some specific tips today. Again, I feel like I could ask a million more questions has been really top of mind and I've roped you into doing a session for our community manager group next to tomorrow. Is that tomorrow? That is tomorrow. And yes, I have so many questions for Ruben.

00:49:47 I was like, okay, we've been, you do the podcast and the community manager group and for our flight group members that are listening, you will have an invitation for a special session with Rubin as well. So more questions can get answered on a zoom call. So thank you for, for being a part of our industry, because they're not a lot of folks that,

00:50:07 you know, have at least a little, a little vertical of specialty and it makes me more comfortable that you understand the business model so that I can ask you my millions of questions. And thank you for making the time today to, to walk through this with us. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Jamie and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow and again in a couple of weeks.

00:50:26 Great. Likewise. Thanks Jamie.

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