How Cushman & Wakefield Maximises the Local Online Visibility for 400+ Locations

One of the world’s largest real estate services firms uses Uberall, the hybrid customer experience platform, to create a global-local brand across hundreds of locations.

The Overview

If you’ve ever been inside of a commercial office or retail space in a major city around the world, there’s a high chance that you’ve already had a local experience of a space managed by Cushman & Wakefield.

What started as a small family business more than 100 years ago, today Cushman & Wakefield is among the largest real estate services firms, delivering exceptional value to real estate occupiers and owners in approximately 400 offices in 60 countries.

While the brand is well known around the globe, it’s critical each office location has a local online and offline reputation to uphold.

To learn more about how Cushman & Wakefield creates a global-local brand across hundreds of locations, we sat down with Flo Guerrouani, Global SEO Manager to learn about her current local strategy.  

The Challenge

The global marketing team at Cushman & Wakefield needed a centralised management tool that could not only automatically update critical information from a single source of truth but also make a positive impact to each locations’ online visibility.  

The Solution

After careful consideration and competitor analysis, the team chose Uberall to manage 250+ locations across the globe. With Listings and Review Management, all locations can be managed from the London office — while regional team members across the globe adjust hours and to answer reviews at the local level.  

But First . . . Why Uberall?

The global marketing team at Cushman & Wakefield needed a centralised management tool that could not only automatically update critical information from a single source of truth but also make a positive impact to each locations’ online visibility.

After careful consideration and competitor analysis, the team chose Uberall to manage 250+ locations across the globe. Flo uses Listings and Review Management to monitor all the locations from the London office, while regional team members across the globe use the platform to adjust hours and to answer reviews.  

What were the biggest challenges you were facing with your local strategy?

Flo Guerrouani: Challenge Number I

The main challenge was how to manage the data for hundreds of office locations, while keeping the data up to date and accurate and uniform.

For example, when I was looking at the Google Business Profiles for our European locations, it took me a long time to actually get access to some of our Business Profiles. Because I was doing this manually, I felt that it was going to take me years to do it.

When I moved into a global role, I started looking into cleaning up and retrieving the Google data for office locations in the Americas and APAC regions—and I knew I couldn’t do this on my own. Managing 300+ online locations is impossible when done manually and I needed a tool to help me manage local online directories, reputation management and boost local SEO.

Challenge Number II

We get a huge amount of traffic through organic local search, but we weren’t leveraging our local SEO in the best way possible.

For example, when people find us, they either do branded searches: ‘Cushman & Wakefield Brisbane,’ or ‘Cushman & Wakefield, London’ or discovery searches, such as ‘office spaces to rent in Sydney.’

I noticed that the majority of our traffic was coming through our office pages, as well as our Google Business Profile pages.

So that's when I knew we would need to start optimising for local SEO, and focus on our online listings.  

How do you manage local reviews at scale?

FG: For the commercial real estate side of the brand, we’ve given marketing teams across the globe access to Uberall Review Management. This means they can manage reviews themselves — and communicate in a more personal way with their local customers.  

To ensure consistency with our brand tone of voice from one country to another, we set up review templates within Review Management to help our teams at the local level respond to both negative and positive reviews quickly and easily.

Say there’s a one-star review rating that came in by an ex-employee. In the templates, there is a proposed response that could be tailored for this situation. We tried to think about all the different scenarios that could come in place — making it easier for our local teams to respond straight away.

The same goes for our property services division. Due to the sheer volume of inquiries coming from residents as reviews, we came up with a set of responses for these ones for our building managers to use and respond quickly.  

How has the Uberall helped you improve your KPIs?

FG: In a short time, we've noticed a big increase in local search queries.

Our organic search impressions have increased by 40% and non-branded queries increased by 97%. These are huge improvements that we would have not been able to achieve without Uberall.  

* January 1, 2021 to June 30, 2021— vs. the same period in 2020