Your Online Self-Storage Storefront: Tips for Facility Operators on Building and Maintaining a Website

When you’re building a new self-storage facility, you don’t just plop down some prefab structures and open your doors the next day. You take your time. You ensure you have a good parcel, so you can start on solid ground. You collaborate with the best vendors. You shop for materials and components that’ll look good and stand the test of time. You invest in the best technology to streamline operation and provide the best customer experience.

To succeed in the long term, you need to bring the same care, attention and sense of pride to every other part of your self-storage business, including the website. Like the property it’s intended to support, your website needs to be well-designed, purposefully built and appealing. After all, it serves as a digital storefront, attracting potential customers, showcasing your units and amenities and, ultimately, driving rentals.

Helping your self-storage facility stand out online has become critical to attracting and retaining customers. In today's competitive landscape, you can't afford to neglect your online presence. Below, I’ll walk you through the steps of ensuring you have the best possible website and ways to keep it performing well over time.

Set a Strong Foundation

To get started, you need a domain name for your self-storage website, which is the URL users will type into a browser to get to it. It should be concise and easy to remember while including essential keywords. Try to avoid hyphens, numbers and repeating letters. If possible, go with a URL that ends in “.com” as opposed to “.net” or “.biz.” That’s the most familiar domain extension and what most customers will expect.

Once you’ve chosen a domain and registered it with a web-hosting provider, you can start thinking about design. As a self-storage operator, your goal is to craft a website that’s user-friendly, visually appealing and optimized for search engines. It should include the following basic pages:

First impressions matter, so make sure your website is clean and professional. Opt for clear navigation and a user-friendly layout. Invest in high-quality facility photos. Also, consistency with your company branding is crucial. If your website looks like it’s stuck in 1997, what does that say about the rest of your self-storage business?

Responsiveness is also critical. According to marketing company Statista, more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so make sure your self-storage website displays flawlessly on smartphones and tablets. It should be just as attractive, functional and easy to navigate on mobile as on a desktop.

Don’t forget about accessibility. Building your website with this in mind helps your search engine optimization (SEO) while enabling visually impaired tenants to do business with you. It also separates you from your competitors and, most important, protects you from potential lawsuits. According to “Forbes” magazine, website-accessibility disputes grew in 2023 by more than 30% over the previous year.

Convert Potential Customers

Once potential self-storage customers find your website, the goal is to convert them into paying tenants. Here's how to optimize your website for rentals:

Get Found Online

So, now you’ve built a great foundation for your self-storage website. It includes all the essential pages customers need to make decisions, and it’s very well-organized and easy to navigate. You’ve incorporated company branding and ensured that the site is both responsive and accessible. But a beautiful website that no one can find is worse than useless. You need to make sure it’s easy for potential customers to discover. The answer is to optimize it for search engines. Here’s how:

Enhance page-load speed. A slow website frustrates users and hurts SEO ranking. To make it faster, format images to be web-friendly, minimize HTTP requests, and keep the homepage simple and clean.

Use relevant keywords. Identify the ones people use to search for self-storage in your area. Tools like Google Keyword Planner can help. Include these keywords naturally throughout your website content including page titles, meta descriptions and image alt tags.

Focus on local SEO. Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing and ensure your NAP (name, address, phone number) information is consistent across all online directories. Encourage positive customer reviews on Google and other platforms.

Invest in content marketing. Your website content should address topics relevant to potential self-storage renters. In addition to your FAQ page, you might publish a blog or helpful how-to articles. Include local SEO keywords and link to other valuable resources. Consistency is key! Aim for a regular publishing schedule.

Keep It Fresh

Just like your self-storage business, your website will always be a work in progress. Regularly update it to sustain user engagement and improve SEO. Consider these pointers:

Be prepared to update and upgrade your website as technology, tastes and best practices change. In most cases, it should serve you for about two years. Initiate audits and peruse other websites to see how things have changed. If you haven’t refreshed your website in a few years, it’s definitely time for an update and possibly a new build. Technology changes at a breakneck pace, and a website that’s four, five or six years old is leaving optimizations, improvements and opportunities on the table.

Tying It All Together

Treating your self-storage facility’s digital presence the same as you would your physical site—with great care and attention—is going to pay great dividends. Serving your tenants in the way they want to be served and maintaining your online storefront will allow your business to be successful for many years to come.

By following these best practices and staying current with evolving trends, you can build and maintain a self-storage website that attracts new customers, drives rentals and secures a competitive edge in the digital age. Remember, this is an ongoing investment! Dedicate time and effort to get the best possible return.

CJ Pomerantz has been working in digital marketing for more than a decade, with clients in industries ranging from pets to powersports to real estate. He’s currently the product manager for Automatit, which provides digital-marketing services to the self-storage industry including website development, search engine optimization, paid search, call tracking and more. For more information, call 520.214.3628.