How Easy Offices and Croud used SEO and PPC to smooth the path for international expansion

Established in 1999, Easy Offices is one of the UK's leading specialist advisers on serviced offices. They partner with office companies in London and throughout the UK to provide temporary offices for businesses needing short-term, flexible choices.

Easy Offices turned to Croud with the goal of becoming the biggest office space broker globally. This would be the first time the company would create brand awareness and reach outside of the UK through SEO.

The strategy

As Easy Offices’ long-standing search marketing partner, Croud had seen success with various SEO and PPC tactics across the UK account. Dynamic search ads (DSA) had proven particularly successful in the UK, driving a 7% month-on-month uplift in leads and 5% increase in enquiries for Easy Offices in that market, by allowing the office broker to tap into audiences looking for their services.

However, DSA relies on a well-developed website with lots of relevant content, and the Easy Offices site had little to no content for rest of the world and was noindex nofollow. This meant that Google couldn’t crawl the site to run DSA, nor did we have content in place to support the domain becoming visible across international market SERPs.

As such, Croud’s PPC and SEO teams worked closely together to come up with a data-driven strategy for driving visibility and conversions outside of the UK.

We needed to make sure that their global PPC budget was being used efficiently, while boosting organic traffic to their website in markets outside of the UK. Through an integrated, data-driven approach, the team aimed to find a way to optimise paid and organic search activity, in order to drive more impressions, clicks and conversions, while reducing cost.

The campaign

The first step was to understand how to prioritise which markets should have content produced and opened up for Google to index, to support Easy Offices in their global expansion ambitions.

We combined organic and paid data to understand which markets should be prioritised in terms of global content production. To determine the phased roll-out of SEO across markets, the Croud team conducted a search landscape analysis to better understand the current competition (using PPC competitors) and the commercial value of each market.

This analysis involved looking at metrics such as:

• Total search volume for ranking keywords per market
• Competition levels in each market
• Average cost-per-click (CPC) of each market
• Total cost to capture all of the search volume in each market via PPC (using CPC x search volume per keyword)
• Number of enquiries from PPC for each market
• Number of deals from PPC for each market
• Total revenue from PPC for each market
• Average deal value from PPC for each market

Following this analysis, we then looked at which markets over-indexed across the average values of the above metrics, giving each market an overall roll-out priority percentage score, in order to determine a top-three priority market list. This list was filtered to include only English-speaking markets to start with, which made the most sense for the business overall.

From this analysis, we determined that Australia - with a roll-out priority score of 89%, driven by under-average competition and above average CPC for PPC to attain visibility - made the most sense as our initial target market for content production.

The next step was to produce search-led content that aligned to PPC-targeted terms. We analysed a search query report from PPC conducted in the last 12 months to understand local market search behaviour. This approach meant that all content being produced was data-led, targeting key terms that had proven to deliver results for PPC in the Australian market. This data was also used to decide on four product landing pages for the highest revenue-driving queries.

We then utilised our global Croudie network, Croud’s unique network of 2,000+ on-demand digital marketing specialists across the globe, to write highly localised, unique copy for 12 Australian cities, and 83 office centres in those cities. We continually reviewed the best-performing ad copy and fed the insight back into the new pages’ metadata optimisation, encompassing page titles, meta descriptions and H1 tags.

With the newly created content published and indexed, the team were all set to launch dynamic search ads in Australia, in order to take advantage of the relevant content that was now on the Easy Offices website for the Australian market.

The results

DSA was launched in Australia in early September 2018, driving impressive results across the board for Easy Offices. Looking at the four months prior to launch (May - August 2018) versus the four months post-launch (September - December 2018), Easy Offices saw the following results across its PPC activity in Australia:

• Impressions increased by 1,321%
• A 608% uplift in clicks
• Average cost-per-click decreased by 20%
• Conversions were up 440%

With such impressive results, this strategy is now being rolled out across other international markets for Easy Offices, setting them well on their way to becoming the biggest office space broker globally.

“Croud has a truly integrated approach to digital marketing, and this campaign is a great example of the synergy between their SEO and PPC teams. By taking a smart, methodical approach to the challenge of driving international visibility and enquiries for Easy Offices, Croud has set us up well to achieve our goal of becoming the number-one office broker globally, and we’re excited to continue rolling out this approach across more markets.” - Digital Director, Easy Offices

The project as a winner at The Drum Search Awards Europe 2019. 2020’s event is now open for entries - click here to find out more.