Back in the day, people had small notepads where they kept the numbers of all their handymen. Whether you needed a roofer or an electrician, all you had to do was find his number and set up an appointment. Alternatively, you would call a family member and ask for a recommendation.
Things have changed significantly with the development of the internet. Nowadays, we don’t need Yellow Pages or friends’ assistance to find local providers. Instead, we just have to refer to the Google search engine. Today, even word-of-mouth has lost its prior value.
This focus on technology has also changed marketing. Local companies, such as movers, no longer use brochures and pamphlets. They invest in digital marketing approaches such as SEO, SMM, and PPC. These promotional methods have become crucial tools for acquiring clients and building your brand.
In this article, we’ll focus on SEO as one of the best ways of acquiring web traffic for movers. We’ll explain why it’s so important for moving companies, how much it costs, and what to expect from it.
What is SEO, and how does it work?
SEO is an acronym that stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It refers to various processes that marketing experts perform to increase the organic visibility of a site. Their main task is to improve pages so they reach the top spots in Google search results.
So, why is optimization important?
According to data, 95% of all web users don’t browse beyond Google’s first page. By proxy, if you can’t receive organic traffic from search engines, there’s no point in having a website in the first place. But search engine optimization goes way beyond that.
The promotional method provides numerous direct and indirect benefits for your brand, ensuring its long-term viability. While many people refer to it as a form of advertising, it’s more similar to brand-building activity.
How can moving company profit from SEO?
Here’s how search engine optimization affects your moving brand:
- Increases total website traffic.
- Positions your company on top of Google
- Increase the overall number of sales.
- Improves brand awareness.
- Works in unison with other marketing methods.
Moving companies, in particular, benefit much more from running local SEO campaigns. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t implement the usual SEO strategy. Every unique visitor who lands on your service pages is a potential customer. So, it doesn’t matter where they came from as long as they’re ready to open up their wallets!
When will I start seeing moving SEO benefits?
To answer your question, you will notice the first increase in traffic after three to six months. If you had a fully functioning website for a while, you might see benefits even sooner. At Miromind, we use a unique approach that delivers an increase in relevant organic traffic to established moving companies within 3 weeks of launching an SEO campaign. Contact us to learn more.
Small local moving companies are too afraid to invest in search engine optimization. Some of them feel this is an intangible concept that may or may not provide any benefits.
As it goes with any brand-building activity, SEO provides results after months and even years of investing. It’s not a quick fix that will make you thousands of dollars overnight. If that were the case, everyone would be doing it.
No, the mentality behind SEO is a bit different. Companies use it to ensure the health and stability of their brand. They use it to dominate the market and become monopolists. That being said, you need to be patient with your expectation. Even if you invest a smaller monthly sum but are consistent, optimization will start showing results over time.
How much traffic can I get, and how much does it cost?
When looking for SEO services, most moving companies are interested in just two things: price and profits. Although we can’t tell you how much money you’ll earn from optimization, we can approximate how much traffic you’ll get.
Price
SEO packages can be very different in terms of pricing. As it usually goes, a large company will charge much more than a small agency. But let’s be more specific than that.
SEO services can range from $1,000 to more than $10,000. If someone charges you below $1,000, it can be a major red flag. On the other hand, if a service costs more than $10,000, you should expect great results in return.
Most business owners will have a chat with you before making an offer. For example, we always explain our unique moving SEO process and what you can get from it before talking numbers. That way, we can ensure full transparency.
Also read: SEO pricing: how much you should spend on SEO
Traffic
Traffic numbers are affected by numerous factors. They can vary significantly from industry to industry and from product to product. For example, there are fewer people browsing local moving services than those who are looking for the latest clothing collection.
As previously mentioned, if you’re a brand-new site, you should expect an increase in traffic after a few months.
Keep in mind that website traffic can often be deceiving. Some SEO providers will start driving visitors who aren’t your leads. They will optimize keywords that are irrelevant to your business, and even if the traffic numbers look awesome, they won’t lead to new sales.
Having that in mind, it’s sometimes better to get less traffic (even below 1,000 visitors), but for these people to be highly qualified leads. Anyway, you should take these metrics with a grain of salt and focus on the profits that you’re making from this approach.
Comparing Moving SEO with other marketing practices
Moving companies have several options at their disposal when looking for an optimal marketing approach:
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- SMM (social media marketing)
- PPC (pay-per-click)
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing, etc.
There are lots of different ways to promote your moving business. Ideally, you should use a combination of these processes to cover all relevant marketing channels. Here’s how each one of them compared to SEO:
SMM
Nowadays, you need to have at least Facebook or Instagram to connect with your target audience in a more informal manner. However, having an active account doesn’t necessarily mean you’re performing SMM.
Generally speaking, social media can be a nice tool for certain industries, but it’s less than ideal for movers. The potential traffic via Facebook pales in comparison to what you can get from Google. Moreover, based on our more than 10 years of experience in SEO for mover companies, SMM traffic conversion rates for movers are not that good.
PPC
You can also opt for several types of paid advertisements. They can be a solid option if you wish to make short-term profits.
It’s important that your site is optimized according to best practices for conversion rate optimization in order to get the most out of it. On top of that, the problem with PPC is that results vanish as soon as you stop paying. If you’re interested in building a long-lasting brand, it’s better to invest in SEO from the get-go.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is an excellent option in certain industries. However, it doesn’t work particularly well for local businessmen, specifically moving companies.
Email marketing
Once again, this isn’t an optimal approach for this particular industry. Emails can be fantastic for B2B marketing, but they’re not as efficient for businesses that need a steady influx of small customers.
How does SEO for moving companies look in practice?
Now that we’ve addressed the burning questions let’s see how SEO for movers looks in practice. Here is what the process looks like when you get a full package:
1. SEO audit
Before starting any type of optimization, an SEO expert should check the state of your site.
Sometimes, moving companies are struggling with site-wide issues that are pulling down their overall performance. In other cases, they might’ve been hit with a Google penalty. Whatever the case, an optimization expert should “clean” your platform of any problems before starting the process.
This is the most technical part of the process. An SEO company will check numerous things, such as site architecture, HTML files, site speed, mobile friendliness, potential errors, domain penalties, etc. If you’re suffering from some of these problems, this can completely stifle the entire campaign setting you back several months.
Still, it’s a necessary step that will ensure you have a healthy basis upon which to build.
2. Keyword research
After fixing any potential errors, an SEO agency performs keyword research. Before that, they might suggest some adjustments to your main landing pages as a way of helping long-term conversion.
During keyword research, the marketer’s job is to find lucrative phrases that would fit your brand. These terms should be relevant to your business and should attract the right kind of visitors to your brand. As previously mentioned, it’s much better to get fewer visits but for that traffic to convert at a higher rate.
In most cases, SEO agencies focus on volume and difficulty. Their job is to find popular phrases that are easy to optimize for. Instead of pursuing a major win, it’s much better to get lots of small victories.
For moving companies you need to focus on keywords with clear commercial intent, such as:
{moving company|movers|moving companies} + {location}
and keywords focused on specific moving services, such as: piano moving, pool table moving, commercial moving, storage, etc.
While ToFu/MoFu keyword research will help you identify keywords for blog topics. To understand the benefits of blogs – read our guide on content marketing for small businesses.
For this particular task, SEO experts use tools such as AhRefs, SEM Rush, and Google Search Console.
Also read: Long-tail vs Short-tail keywords
3. Content creation
After making a list with keywords, the optimization expert will start creating content. In other words, they’ll make articles that revolve around particular topics.
It’s worth noting that all content on your site should be unique. The general rule is one keyword cluster, one web page. Otherwise, if you overuse some of these phrases between multiple pages, you might cause problems such as keyword cannibalization.
When it comes to moving companies, you can cover topics such as furniture transportation, packing, and unpacking, how a family can prepare to move out, etc. Ideally, you should try to attract people who are getting ready to relocate to a new home. If they still haven’t chosen a mover, they might decide to go with you.
Aside from answering people’s questions, content has some other purposes. It is meant to instill confidence in anyone who’s reading it and to present your company as the subject matter authority. This can also increase brand awareness and the likelihood that visitors will hire you.
Interlinking is important but rarely mentioned part of content creation. When writing articles, you should connect them with similar posts, thus creating a logical structure. By using these internal links, not only are you optimizing web pages and boosting your topical authority, but you’re also leading visitors to your sales pages.
4. Link building
Link building is usually referred to as off-page optimization. During the process, you outreach to other blogs in an attempt to get valuable mentions from their sites.
Links are an important metric that can help you get to the first page of Google. They are a “vote of confidence”, showing search engines that other people are in awe of your post. As it usually goes, the more links, the better.
However, not all of them are made the same. A link from a popular news outlet covering your industry is much better than a link from a small blog that works in a different niche. In fact, certain backlinks can even get you in trouble resulting in a penalty.
Aside from providing SEO benefits, they can also drive referral traffic. For example, if a popular review site mentions your moving brand and links to your blog, you’ll get lots of traffic from the source page.
Also read: Link building SEO strategies guide
5. Local SEO
As previously mentioned, moving companies are especially dependent on local SEO optimization. People who type things such as “movers in New York” aren’t actually interested in reading articles. Instead, they just want to find local providers that can help them out.
To optimize your site for local search, an SEO expert will create or optimize existing Google My Business profile. With it, they can verify your company as a legitimate entity with physical premises. During the profile creation/optimization, they will optimize data such as an address, working hours, email, phone, company description, services, etc. In addition to GMB profile optimization, other activities such as implementing a local business Schema markup, citations with consistent NAPs and geo-tagged images play an important role in increasing visibility on Google Maps.
At Miromind we have unique approach to Local SEO for moving companies, contact us now to find out how we can help you boost your visibility in Local search.
Google shows all this data in the form of a rich snippet when someone’s looking for your brand online. So, creating Google My Business is important for optimization but also for user experience.
After setting up your data, it’s time to start collecting reviews. When running a local SEO campaign, online feedbacks are the best way of reaching top spots in Google for terms such as “movers in my city”.
This is where you start doing reputation management. Although not necessarily a part of search engine optimization, most SEO companies can perform this task.
If your moving company ever needs assistance with SEO or some other aspect of digital marketing, make sure to contact MiroMind!