🤓 7 Technical SEO Mistakes Coworking Spaces Often Make:
* All tools listed in this section are free and will be linked at the end of it.
1. Non-indexable Pages
Some of your pages might not be appearing on Google because you “forbid” them to.
Common fix: Check your
robots.txt file and
meta tags to ensure important pages are allowed for indexing. Use
Google Search Console to inspect and request indexing (usually by submitting a
sitemap).
If your website is built on WordPress, make sure you have not ticked the boxes, forbidding the website (and pages) to be indexed by search engines.
2. Slow Page Speed
Page speed has been one of the most important ranking factors for SEO for many years.
Common fix: Check the speed of your website with the PageSpeed Insights tool and see what is slowing it down. Usually it's very large images (make them smaller with TinyPNG) or excessive code.
3. Not Optimized for Mobile
Most websites are built for desktop, while most of your potential customers will find your space through mobile.
Common fix: Use responsive design, optimize images for mobile, and test your mobile speed with the PageSpeed Insights tool.
4. Broken Links
Wrong links or ones leading to deleted pages can hurt your google ranking.
Common fix: Regularly audit your site for broken links with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
5. Duplicate Content
Having a duplicate page (or duplicate content on separate pages) gives the impression that your website produces spam content. Usually this is not intentional, and you would be surprised by how many duplicate content pieces you will most likely find on your website.
Common fix: Check for duplicate pages with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Afterwards use canonical tags to tell search engines which version of a page to prioritize. Avoid exact duplicate content and metadata. (you can use ChatGPT to rephrase texts like metadata, although I would advise not trusting the rephrasing outcome for high-quality texts.)
6. Bad URL Structure
Your URLs should be clean, keyword-relevant, and hierarchically ordered.
Common fix: Use clean, readable URLs that include relevant keywords and are ordered hierarchically:
www.mycoworking.space/index.php?id=255 ❌
http://www.mycoworking.space/private-offices/berlin ✅
7. Two Domains
Did you build a new site, but leave the old one running because it was performing good? Or maybe you have one website for information and one for bookings?
Common fix: Unfortunately this is one of the things you cannot fix without short-term consequences. You will lose some traffic, but it is crucial to only have one domain and it will help you generate more visitors in the long term.
Why? Number of visitors is an essential ranking metric in search engines. If you have two websites with 1,000 visitors, they will both rank lower than a competitor with 1,500 visitors (all other things considered equal), which will limit the new visitors to your website.
You should remove the secondary domain, by setting up a 301 redirect instead of outright stopping it.
Some free tools that you can use to analyze your website and find improvements:
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider 🐸 - If you have never analyzed your website with this tool, you should. It is free (unless you have a lot of pages) and it will clearly show you actionable improvements you can make. I recommend you do a full analysis once a month.
- PageSpeed Insights - Check the speed of your website and what's slowing it down.
- Google Search Console - Check the indexing on your pages, submit sitemaps, and many other Google tools.
- TinyPNG - Lower the size of images without affecting their quality.
