The challenge
Empty desks, no measurement, no strategy
CreativeCubes had just launched its Richmond co-working space. The desks were empty and needed to be filled urgently. SEO and paid search were being managed from the United States, with limited understanding of the Australian market and no real strategic input. There was no conversion tracking in place — which meant no way to know whether any of the existing spend was actually working.
The business had a strong product and two founders — Tobi and Gawen — who were deeply invested in building something good. What it needed was a search strategy that matched the quality of what they’d built.
The approach
Getting inside the business
To understand what CreativeCubes was actually offering and who it was offering it to, I moved into the Richmond office. Working alongside the founders directly, seeing how members used the space, understanding the community they were building — this informed every strategic decision that followed in ways that a brief or a call never could.
The first task was measurement. Cross-domain conversion tracking was implemented across every channel, giving the business a clear picture of what was actually generating leads for the first time.
Owning the category — flex space
People searching for a co-working space or serviced office aren’t making an impulsive decision. They’re researching carefully, checking multiple sources, and forming a view over time. We knew that if someone encountered CreativeCubes once, that probably wasn’t enough. But if they saw it everywhere they looked — on Google, on every relevant listicle, in local map results, in paid ads — then CreativeCubes must be worth considering.
We moved deliberately to own the term “flex space” in Melbourne — integrating it into the content and positioning before it had become a standard industry term, so that CreativeCubes became synonymous with it as it grew.
Local SEO was rebuilt from the ground up: location-specific landing pages with optimised content and structured data for each space, enhanced Google Business Profile listings, and a campaign to get CreativeCubes listed on every high-ranking third-party listicle for queries like “office space Melbourne” and “co-working Melbourne”. The logic was simple: if someone checked six different sources while deciding where to base their team, and CreativeCubes appeared on all six, the decision becomes much easier to make.
We also made a deliberate move away from “book a tour” as the primary CTA — replacing it with “enquire”. This wasn’t just a semantic change. People looking for office space have specific questions about availability, configuration, pricing, and terms. They want a conversation, not a scheduled visit. Matching the CTA to what people actually wanted at that stage of the decision made a material difference to conversion rates.
Adapting through COVID
COVID fundamentally disrupted demand for co-working. We ran multiple weekly calls to track keyword trends and impression data in real time as the situation evolved. The shift was clear — searches for co-working dropped sharply while demand for private office space increased. We adjusted messaging and product positioning accordingly, and used those search insights to help the team think about how to configure their existing spaces and plan for new ones.
A broader collaboration on paid search
Alongside the organic work, I collaborated with paid search specialist Francesco Greco to restructure the paid campaigns. Reducing cost per lead while increasing lead volume, and using paid data to sharpen organic targeting decisions, made the two channels genuinely complementary rather than operating in isolation.
The outcome
100% occupancy — and a playbook for expansion
Richmond reached 100% occupancy within 12 months. The success at Richmond — and the visibility infrastructure we’d built around it — gave CreativeCubes a proven playbook for expansion. The business now operates across 15+ locations around Australia, consistently ranking in the top three search results across all of them through a combination of organic, local, and paid presence.
A huge part of why this worked is Tobi. From the very first conversation, he put search first — he believed in the approach, trusted me to help fill the space, and backed every recommendation fully. Being part of that journey from a single location to a national business is something I’m genuinely proud of. That kind of buy-in from a founder — the willingness to commit, to change the CTA, to invest in the groundwork — is what makes the difference between a strategy that gets presented and one that actually gets executed.