Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
- Creating a carefully planned website can improve your Google rank, attract new leads, and increase your conversion rate.
- Great websites are never a done-deal; they require constant and regular updates and revisions.
- A website shouldn’t just be informational, it should also be an expansion of your brand and your brand voice.
Is a website more than just strokes of brilliant colors directing our eyes to big blue buttons that read, “Buy Now?” Is being mobile first really the secret to dominating Google? Am I going to pen this entire article with questions? No.
Today, I’d like you to consider me as your digital website doctor. By the end of our visit, it is my full intent to reshape the way you look at your site and provide you with actionable items you can use to amplify your brand by creating a perfect coworking website.
A brief disclaimer: all of the below tips have the potential to work wonders for your website. However, in order for you to truly reap the benefits of your online presence, you will need to meet each of the below points consistently.
TOP 10 ELEMENTS TO CREATE THE PERFECT COWORKING WEBSITE
1. A Coworking Website Must Speak The Lingo Beyond Images
Given that you’re hoping to attract people to your space, it makes sense for you to have a website that showcases your space and your community through pictures and images. However, in order to make your online presence more powerful and impactful, you need to spend marketing dollars.
This doesn’t necessarily mean spending your revenue in ads. In fact, one of the most overlooked marketing channels coworking operators can leverage are blogs.
In order for your blog to have an impact, you need to build it right and update it regularly.
Suggested Reading: “Why Content Marketing Should be a Priority for Coworking Operators: a Q&A with Content Expert Cat Johnson”
The perfect coworking website understands the value of consistent content creation. Think of writing blogs like going to the gym — you won’t see results after one three hour workout — you need to hit the treadmill regularly.
If you need some inspiration and blog ideas, check out these 20 article ideas for workspace blogs.
If you think you haven’t got the necessary amount of time and resources to begin posting regular blogs on your site, there’s still a lot you can do. Start by looking at your static pages (e.g. home, memberships, about us, and contact us pages). Do these pages have industry keywords incorporated into them? Remember that Google uses keywords to rank websites that appear in user searches.
If you haven’t done so already, review your website content and whether you’re using the right keywords (we suggest you check out this complete list of virtual office terms). You should revisit your static pages content regularly to make sure you’re still in sync with current industry keywords and trends.
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2. Not Every Sale Is About Money
When is the last time you gave something of value away for free? And I mean 100% free, no strings attached and I’m not talking about free wifi or a cup of Joe in the snack room. I mean something truly free that has significant value.
I was recently published in Forbes where I breakdown different strategies your brand can leverage when using the power of free. In it, I argue that when you give something away for free, like a 14-day trial period, you open the doors to capture new leads that you can build trust with and eventually upsell.
Let’s connect this to your website. What are you offering for free?
Some ideas for you to consider:
- Promote A Client On Your Social Media Channels
- Host A Free Event Where Your Members Can Network
- Offer A Free Trial Period So New Members Get A Sense Of Your Community
When you put money aside, you can see different ways to make a sale and build your business. I think this is the key to my point. Your website is a building block for your business, and it’s also a great engine through which you can spread the word about your space and how you add value.
3. Test Your Coworking Site Regularly For Flaws
I’ve lost count of how many websites I’ve worked on. One thing I’ve learned is that a perfect website is never truly done; they require constant care and reinvention. There’s always a new thing to test, core updates to make, keywords to change, and layouts to refine.
With websites, it’s not just about it being live; they need to be constantly updated and checked to make sure your ranking is not affected.
Which is why I recommend you set some time aside each month to test for bugs. Have someone click around the site, poke at it with a stick and see what breaks. If you’re not sure where to begin testing your software this article does a deep dive into the top 10 types of software testing you should be doing.
Let’s say you aren’t 110% confident in managing these bugs – I have a solution for that too. Check out the free trial on The Bug Squasher. With it you can add a simple bug tracking tool on your site and get a detailed bug report at your own pace via video, screenshots and more. Easy, right?
4. Understand Your Website’s Analytics
This part is about understanding your website traffic by using Google Analytics. Understanding your traffic is important because it can help you build a customer persona and, when analyzed and used correctly, it can provide valuable insights that can strengthen your brand and your product or service.
Pay close attention to the data — without it you are flying blind. What I usually do when I get access to a new site is review how users engage with the top performing pages: what’s the bounce rate, how many user clicks, how much time people spend on the site, etc. This is rich data that I then put to the “dumb test” to see which next steps I should take.
The Dumb Test:
D is for doable.
U is for understandable.
M is for measurable.
B is for beneficial.
To better understand how to use this test, check out this article where I breakdown the “dumb” formula. The formula can help you pinpoint the actions that you need to take in order to improve your website’s performance and conversion rate.
5. Above The Fold Is Gold
This is an image of Treehouse 51’s website homepage. You’ll notice at the very top we have a contact form to collect information. This is because we know the very first thing customers see when they land on our (and any) website is this top section known as the “above the fold” section.
If you haven’t done so already, do an audit on the above the fold section of your website. Do you have key information and strong call to actions that push leads further into your funnel? Do your images represent your target buyers? Is there a way to contact you and learn more?
These are all key elements your website should include in its above the fold section. Here are some quick recommendations to get you started: include a way for visitors to contact you (by email, chat, calls) and have a strong call to action button (schedule a tour, get a quote, take a virtual tour).
6. Testimonials Are Good, Video Testimonials Are Great
I can tell you all day and night Treehouse 51 rocks. We know what we’re talking about. We know how to make websites that convert. We love building marketing campaigns that bring in revenue.
But let’s be real, even though I say this, what worth does it really have? You don’t know me. We haven’t met. So why should you believe me?
This is why client and customer testimonials are important. They help establish a sense of trust between your brand, your website, and your visitors. At Treehouse 51, we recommend websites have at least three testimonials showcased on the homepage.
Bonus tip: Recorded testimonials are priceless to your business. But don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.
7. Coworking Websites Should Promote Community, Not Barriers
Coworking is about networking. It’s about unity. It’s about community. However, a lot of coworking websites do not represent that messaging in their site build.
When traffic comes your way, you don’t want them jumping through hoops to schedule a tour. You want to keep things simple. You want to review each page and ask yourself what the key goal of that page is.
For example, if you’re leasing office space, your main goal might be to schedule a tour of the space. If that is the case, you should consider the following tactics:
- Have a call to action button to schedule a tour
- Include a phone number and email to contact you
- Make it easy for leads to learn more about the space via images and copy on the site
- Leverage a pop up to capture email addresses of site visitors so you can market to them later.
8. Choose the Right Server
I once met with a lead that spent thousands of dollars building their website but decided to use a shared server space when going live. You’ve seen these offers online. They are the ones that say, “Pay only $9.99 /Month for one year hosting.”
However, it’s important to keep in mind that when it comes to hosting, you get what you pay for. Cheap hosting leads to cheap support and slow sites. So when choosing your server, don’t go for the cheapest option; do your research, evaluate your options, and invest in the best option available.
One of the huge ranking factors Google loves to look at is speed. I see so many websites hurting on the SEO front and don’t understand why – a huge reason is because they went with the cheap hosting provider.
Before you go and buy a new server let me stop you. Not every server is built equally, and not everyone comes with a secret special deal. If you are reading this article and want us to share with you a hosting bundle featuring social media posts, an easy to understand Google Analytics Report and more – well today is your lucky day.
The rules are simple, share this article on Facebook and tag us @Treehouse51inc – after reach out to me via our website and let me know when it’s done and we will tell you about an exclusive secret special deal as a thank you to the Allwork.Space community.
9. Stop Stressing Over “Likes” And Start Creating Champions
Don’t revamp your website thinking people will “like it.” Build upon your brand so that the competition will want to follow you. So, how exactly can you do this?
It’s simple.
Establish your brand voice and create unique valuable content around your brand (blogs, videos, social media posts). Keep in mind that the best websites are those that provide value and insights to visitors, when you successfully do this, visitors naturally turn into “champions” or ambassadors that support and share your brand.
10. Convert Process Revenue Online
Is your website even a “real website” if it can’t process payment online? There’s no right or wrong answer here, though websites that process online payments tend to perform best.
Though on the surface it might not make sense for you to sell your coworking services online, you should consider the option of allowing people to book meeting rooms, hire virtual offices, or pay for a coworking pass through your website. It makes it easy for visitors to follow on a call to action and it can generate some additional revenue for you.
If you use WordPress and are interested in starting to generate revenue online, we recommend you research WooCommerce. WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce plugin for WordPress built for small and large sites (click here to watch Treehouse 51’s WooCommerce Tutorials series).
If, however, you think online payment processing is not the right choice for you, you can use what we are about to cover here as a way to curate your membership and vet people who use your space.
Bonus Tip:
Okay, if you’ve gotten this far, congrats. You are ten steps closer to revamping your website into a conversion machine. If you want to go deeper into this topic, read this guide on 10 conversion tips that work on any website.
