How WeWork Increased Blog Traffic by 127% with Conductor

About WeWork

Headquarters

New York, NY

Company Size

10,000

Industry

Technology

WeWork provides more than 590,000 members worldwide with space, community, and services through physical and virtual offerings.

WeWork’s marketing team understood the importance of SEO, and saw the opportunity to drive real growth in that area. Investing in SEO would allow the WeWork team to better understand the demand for their services across markets, while also building audience trust and increasing brand awareness by identifying and answering FAQs from prospects and members.

The key element needed to secure these investments was SEO buy-in from key stakeholders and executives. SEO is a long game, and business leaders tend to focus instead on investing in channels like paid that provide immediate, short-term wins. Conductor’s ability to track and tie the impact of SEO efforts to core KPIs was able to help WeWork’s marketing team prove to leadership that SEO was a necessary investment to continue to fuel business growth.

The Challenge

Despite being one of the world’s fastest-growing companies, the WeWork team recognized that it had a huge opportunity to fuel additional growth by expanding the organization’s digital presence. The problem was that they were missing a critical pillar to implementing a robust SEO strategy: buy-in from leadership.

Without an enterprise SEO platform or internal SEO champion, the marketing team struggled to convey the potential value SEO would have on their organic marketing efforts to leadership.

There was an internal sentiment that SEO did not provide enough value to warrant an investment. That was a huge hurdle that my team had to overcome.

The absence of an internal SEO champion opened up another critical challenge for WeWork: the organization had very little internal SEO expertise. As WeWork continued to expand as a global network of workspaces, communities, and services, it became clear that they not only needed an enterprise SEO platform, but one that also provided a dedicated team of experts to offer full support and help maximize their SEO investments.

At the start of our partnership, the WeWork team had implemented a website strategy to use one landing page for each of their top two product categories: “coworking space” and “office space.” By contrast, most of WeWork’s competitors used different product pages to target each term individually. This led WeWork to rank well for terms related to their brand, but, they ranked low for non-branded keywords related to their product offerings, which hurt their traffic and overall presence.

WeWork also saw an opportunity to boost the content and visibility of its blog. The two main blockers to this goal for WeWork were misaligned priorities and a lack of buy-in for producing data-driven SEO content. Without this buy-in, competitors were pumping out new data-driven content, while WeWork’s blog fell behind and failed to drive the organic traffic they needed to compete.

How Conductor Helped

The Conductor team worked closely with the marketing team at WeWork to strategize getting buy-in on SEO from the top down. The goal was to help everyone, from executives to content writers, understand the vital importance of SEO and the best ways to drive impact in their roles. The Conductor team explained that SEO is a true team effort—only by collaborating across departments could WeWork achieve results.

At first, Conductor worked with just WeWork’s Digital Product team, but as the tangible benefits of SEO became clear across the org, the partnership grew to encompass many other teams, helping secure additional buy-in for SEO throughout the organization.

I had to break down internal silos between Technology and Marketing to implement a strong SEO strategy, and Conductor was a vital partner in this collaboration effort.

Conductor’s dedicated Customer Success team helped key stakeholders get the most out of the platform with ongoing support and trainings tailored to their specific needs. Together, our teams worked to evangelize SEO to the WeWork leadership team, using the metaphor of SEO being a marathon, not a sprint.

Implementing a proper SEO strategy and displaying value would take time, resources, and effort, but the results would have a massive impact on WeWork’s lead and revenue generation. After all, SEO is about exponential growth, and compounding quality leads over time by producing consistent intent-driven content and optimizing key website pages.

Building audience trust and brand authority are central to driving the quality leads WeWork was after, and Conductor helped WeWork align their content with the customer’s voice and search intent. Conductor’s platform provided strategic and tactical recommendations to improve search engine crawls and indexation. This culminated in WeWork successfully optimizing over 300 core transactional location pages within the first two months of the partnership, ensuring that WeWork appeared in relevant local markets on Google SERPs, a key driver of transactions and revenue onsite.

Conductor helps us understand the language that our customers are using, what they’re looking for, where they are, what they need, and what interests them. We’ve made huge strides and improved our online presence so that we’re there with the right message when people are searching.

The Results

SEO efforts quickly drove huge gains in traffic, generating significant ROI for WeWork. From 2017 to mid-2018, WeWork’s Page 1 visibility doubled, helping them meet and surpass their organic traffic goals. The content and SEO workflows Conductor helped WeWork build continue to increase WeWork teams’ efficiency and improve their execution. The content they have created continues to drive long-term value.

WeWork has seen significant growth since we began working with Conductor about 18 months ago. The results have been off the charts.

Conductor worked with WeWork to implement a robust content marketing calendar. The goal of the calendar was to use data to help decide what projects to prioritze, align the team on goals, and make an agile and repeatable process for quality content creation. With Conductor’s help, WeWork was able increase blog traffic by 127% in one year.

In addition, Conductor helped drive Page 1 rank visibility across all regions. Specifically, WeWork saw U.S. Page 1 coverage increase by 61% and U.K. Page 1 coverage by 75%. The benefits here are not limited simply to traffic or impressions either; ranking on Page 1 helped to improve overall brand awareness, which, in turn, widened WeWork’s audience and boosted its authority in the market. All of these combined to help drive more quality leads and conversions to WeWork’s site.

As major wins accumulated, content marketing and organic visibility growth became a regular topic of discussion at WeWork executive meetings, solidifying the new prioritization of SEO from the top down.

Request a demo today or talk to one of our SEO experts to learn more about the day-to-day impact that Conductor can have on your marketing presence.