Top 5 Problems on Your Moving Company Website and How They're Costing You Money

Ranking Higher for Moving Keywords on Google Means More Money

‍

If you own a moving company, you know ranking highly on Google means more business. But do you know how to make this happen?

Buzz word alert: SEO or Search Engine Optimization  

“SEO” is thrown around a lot these days in the home services industries and for good reason. However, SEO is not just a flick of a switch fix or a magic wand wave and BOOM you rank for every keyword you want. There is a technical side to SEO and an ongoing content side of SEO.

On the technical side, you're dealing more with website architecture, content and page layouts, and getting your pages indexed (aka discovered) by Google. This is work that has to be done however, this is not the work that will keep you ranking high.  

Content is king is a saying for a reason. When it comes to SEO, content is where you build site authority and what helps you not just rank for keywords but land on the first page for those keywords.  

You probably have fourteen emails sitting in your inbox already this week from different people offering to help “make you site rank higher on Google.” If you’re reading this, we were probably one of them. Let’s walk through the top five problems with your moving company website, how they’re costing you money and how to fix them.

For this list, we are going to use a fictional company: XYZ Moving. We’ll assume XYZ services the Dallas area with residential moving services and piano moving services. Okay let’s see how we can help them.

‍

1. Not Optimizing for Local Search

Throwing “We serve Dallas, Texas” in the header of your website doesn’t cut it. To truly optimize your website for local search, you need to do a few things.

1. Create a services page for every city, town or area that you serve. On this page, make sure to include the name of the area in the H1 tag and then use H2 and H3 tags with your keywords throughout. So, with our example company XYZ Moving, they mainly serve the Dallas area however, they do cover a majority of the Dallas – Fort Worth metroplex. If they want to rank specific suburbs, each suburb should have its own page. They might have a main services page that discusses the “Dallas Area” and then specific pages talking only about their services in Irving, Coppell and Grapevine. This tells Google, “Hey look at us we offer moving services in these cities too.” This will in turn get you ranking for those cites.  
   

2. Setting up or claiming your Google My Business is an easy thing to take action on that immediately makes your moving business more discoverable. Once you’ve done this, potential customers can find your business in the Google Maps sections, and this is where you want to send those happy customers to write a five star for your business. It’s important to keep your Google My Business listing up to date (address, responding to reviews, etc.) to keep your business relevant.
   

3. Is your business set up on Bing, Yellow Pages and Yahoo? Adding your business to as many directories as possible will also help you rank higher across all search engines. Which directories should you add your garage door business to you ask? We recommend using the free Moz Local Listing search to get a list of where your business currently has a listing, what listings have correct information or incorrect information, and where you need to add a listing.

2. Control V + Control C Problem

Building a website can be a particularly daunting task if it is not something you’ve ever done. This can lead to cutting corners that can negatively impact your rankings across search engines.  

Let’s go back to our example business, XYZ Moving currently has a website with 7 pages. They have a home page, contact us page, services page and four service area pages. The website is small and does not have ongoing updates or a blog. Instead, the builder of the website (probably the owner) has copy and pasted content from the home page across the rest of the website.  

This is a big “no-no.” Google will crawl that website see that duplicate content is on all pages and decide that it only needs to show one page because it thinks all the pages are the same.

Even if it is the same thing worded different, each page NEEDS to have its own content to help Google realize that the pages are different. The same goes for image alt texts on images, title tags and meta descriptions.  

You probably have an image you use on multiple pages on your website with a image alt text something like, “image-moving-01459(1)” Using the same image is okay but we need to change that image alt text to be page specific. For XYZ, they have a photo from a move on the Grapevine page and the Irving page. On the Grapevine page, the image alt text on the image is “grapevine-moving-service" and on the Irving page, the image alt text is “irving-moving-company.” Putting keywords into those tags can also help with SEO.

*Depending on the web builder you use, you may have to upload the image multiple times to change the image alt text.

‍

3. Optimizing the Wrong Keywords

Does your website currently say something like, “Best Moving Service?” This ties back to number one pretty heavily. Instead of using generic words, look at a map and draw a circle around the area you want to serve.  

Now go to a free keyword tool like Wordtracker's here. Type what service you do into the search bar and you’ll get a list back of all of the relevant keywords. Now take those keywords and add your service location in front of them and run another search. From there, check the search volume and once you have 5 or so keywords for each service area you now know what to target.

So XYZ Moving, might start their search with moving company. From the list, they might see piano moving company has a high search volume. Then they might run a search for “Irving piano moving” and see that it is relatively easy to rank for compared to its search volume. Now they have their first keyword to target with the city.

This will be time consuming, but it can help if you want to rank higher in some areas than others or for higher margin jobs such as commericial moves.  

‍

4. Keyword Stuffing

This one is very simple. Don’t do it.  

It might be tempting for XYZ to mention Coppell 80 times in 300 words on the Coppell services page but that will get them nowhere. Readability is a major determinant of rankings with search engines. That means write your web pages in a professional but easy to read manner. Mentioning your targeted keywords 10 – 12 times on a page seems to be the sweet spot. But do it in a way that actually makes sense to your website visitors.

‍

5. Not Doing Audits

If you don’t know where you’re starting from with your SEO journey how will you know what’s working and when you’ve reached your goal?  

Doing audits is very important and can be extremely frustrating because it can take three to four months before you know if what you’ve been working on is positively affecting your SEO. You’ll have weeks where you think the sky is falling because you lose 20% of your keywords and weeks where you triple your keywords.  

But it is crucial to continue to do the audits on a regular basis. These audits can give you insights on things like what is working and what is not, what high volume keywords you should focus on making content around and errors on your pages that are negatively affecting your rankings. We recommend and use SEMRush. This tool will also allow you to look at your competitors rankings, check all of your directory information (Yellow Pages listing, Bing listing, Yahoo listing, etc.) for accuracy and even analyze what type of traffic is coming to your website.

Conclusion

So there you have it. There are the top 5 problems with your moving company's website and how they’re costing you money. We know these tasks can be daunting and when you decide to start getting serious about SEO it can hard to know where to start. If you need help getting started, feel free to reach out to us!

‍