Croud and Regus: Making global work locally - across 3,000+ locations

Leading workspace provider Regus boasts an impressive international network of over 3,000 locations in 110+ markets. However, with such extensive reach comes a challenge - keeping a localised presence and ensuring visibility in each individual location across the globe.

Wherever in the world they may be based, Regus’ target audience is any business of any size looking for a place to work - from virtual offices to office for over 100 people. Despite Regus’ huge global scale, local SEO still plays a vital role in attracting the most relevant visitors to Regus’ websites. This is because searches on local listings are generally of a higher quality, since the user is specifically searching for a location, showing a clear intent - for instance, ‘Office space in Frankfurt’.

Having worked with Regus since 2015, Croud was tasked with rolling out Google My Business (GMB) local listings across all 3,000+ locations worldwide. GMB listings, formerly known as Google Places, are a great way for companies of any size to increase their local search visibility through Google Search and Maps.

Given Regus’ huge global presence, Croud needed to find an innovative way of implementing GMB listings at scale. The overall objectives were to:

• Increase Regus’ website traffic from GMB listings
• Increase the number of leads generated

The strategy

In order to deliver against these objectives, the Croud team developed a bespoke tool that was able to check GMB listing accuracy against the website and push the required amendments through to GMB. To build this tool, the in-house team enlisted the support of Croud’s extensive network of ‘Croudies’, over 1,600 on-demand digital experts based across the globe. This included both highly experienced technical experts and in-market local SEO and outreach specialists.

Together, the in-house and Croudie network team built the tool, which cleansed and updated listings and pushed this information via API to GMB. Croud then worked with a data partner to push this information to key business directories around the world.

The directory push was supported by local link building across Regus’ top 12 markets, using in-market Croudies. This involved manually building local directory listings for centres in key cities across the most important markets, as well as carrying out local SEO outreach to further grow the number of citations accrued.

Once near-full coverage on GMB had been achieved for all 3,000+ of Regus’ centres, the focus turned to expanding the directory information over time, to include pictures, logos, and additional centre information. Through Croud’s extensive Croudie network, updates can now take place on an ongoing basis, at the request of Regus’ in-location staff around the world.

The results

Once the bespoke tool development and preparatory work was complete, the campaign went live and saw overnight success, with highlights including:

• A 78% increase in website sessions from GMB - equating to approximately 4,600 extra visits per week, or a huge 240,000 additional visits per year
• More than double the amount of leads generated from GMB

This strategy enabled Croud to create a unique solution for Regus, which can be used again and again to keep Regus’ GMB listings up to date; a long-term solution with very immediate results.