If you are looking to increase your leads in 2019 without breaking the bank, you’ve come to the right place. Investing time in your business by properly engaging with the search engine results can have a huge positive impact on your business and have you receiving more leads in as little as a few weeks for no additional costs. We’ve created this list to help you push forward with the newest techniques of the industry in 2019. Read on to get ahead of the game and ramp up your SEO game to begin to see the results just in time for the low season.
Update your old Articles
It never hurts to go over your old articles and revisit your past ideas and publications when searching for new content ideas and to see what was successful in the past.
Remember that article you wrote 2 years ago that ended up bringing in a bunch of new move referrals? Great, take a look and see if there’s an updated version you might be able to write for the coming year. If you want to boost the SEO juice of that old article, you can also opt to simply add to it with your new updates. This is a great strategy for bringing an old article back to life and make it new again.
Spend more time getting Quality backlinks
Building a great moving business is worthless if you don’t have any customers to serve. Unless you get out there with your marketing efforts, those nasty warehouse rental and truck lease fixed costs will haunt your dreams each night. This is why you need to get involved in the digital space and reach out to those who may be interested in your services and/or content. Let’s face it, there are a lot of moving companies out there that can get things from A to B, but how many of them demonstrate their expertise online to the community and share tips & tricks to help their customers experience a better move? Creating a great article that helps your end customers deserves to be recognized, and if you share this with larger websites where your customers may be hanging out there is a high chance they will link your website for their visitors as a resource. If the linking website has a high domain authority, your SEO credibility will increase, and rankings will follow suit.
It’s important to remember that it is not the only the number of backlinks to your website that matter, but also the quality of those websites that are linking in. If a bunch of spammy and poorly rated websites links to you it could end up having a negative impact on your SEO efforts.
Long story short: Don’t buy links, create helpful content for your end customer, and reach out to the community to share!
Pay Special Attention During Your Keyword Research
One big mistake that many moving companies make when blogging is not putting enough time and effort into keyword research before picking up the pen (or keyword?). Producing content is more about just writing articles about moving these days. You need to understand what problems your customer is facing so you can write about solutions for them and become a trustworthy expert in their eyes.
Luckily there are tools and methods such as Google Keyword Planner and Ubbersuggest that can help you see into what potential movers are searching for. Using either one of these tools, just pop in your targeted keywords and you’ll be able to see the search volumes and trends to determine which may be worth writing about. With a little research, you will be able to find out that perhaps in your area people are particularly interested in how glassware is packed, or how do you handle moves if it is snowing.
Try and be specific in your search and avoid topics that are too generic such as “moving company” or “removalist in my area”. These are already highly competitive and you’ll likely run into the same folks spending thousands on Advertisements to rank for these phrases. The goal is to find the low – midrange search volume people and bring them in while no one else is looking 😉
Make Blog Posts Longer
Depending on who you talk too people will say that it’s not the length of the article that matters but just the content. While true, this doesn’t give us the right to completely ignore length altogether. Composing a longer article usually means taking into account more factors of the issue, and will result in an all-in-one article that is more relevant for more related search terms. While it’s important to select your moving related post topic carefully and to maintain quality, offering a longer and more in-depth post on the subject should help you gain traction in the Search engine results.
Real Life Writing – Copywriting Technique
SEO for moving companies is a special game. You need to be able to keep visitors interested in the website and topic once they land on your website, and make sure they don’t leave right away. The key to doing this is to use friendly phrases, lists, and stats throughout the article. For example,
– So, what’s the big deal?
– Want to boil it all down?
– What else, you ask?
– Interested? Good, let’s learn more.
Using these informal transitions helps users feel like they’re being told a story, and engages their interest in what key information you may have included in the following paragraphs.
Good writing is tough, so make sure you include fun things like statistics and numbers that will stick in the visitor’s mind. Key informational points like this are great for helping remind your customer of things such how many moves you’ve already done successfully to build trust, or perhaps why they should purchase insurance because the average breakage rate is xx% in their destination location.
Review your Website’s SEO
SEO is more than just writing a bunch of articles and posting them up on your blog. This is just one aspect of a successful strategy for helping your moving company rank higher in the search results. In addition to great content, your website needs to include a variety of other technical factors to help boost your rankings in the search results. Performing a review on your web site’s HTML tags, meta descriptions, and speed (just to name a few) can also provide you with critical information in why you may not be showing up on the first page. We provide free seo reports for you to get an inside look at key areas you need to improve upon. Other tools such as SEMrush and Ahref’s can also provide some insights for you on how to improve your on-page SEO.
Wikipedia Links
The modern-day encyclopedia. What a great resource to find out information on something you have questions about. At one point or another, you have surely found yourself on Wikipedia looking for answers. Well, guess what? You’re not alone. Potential moving customer also browses the site looking for definitions and information on companies, processes, and acronyms all the time. By creating a listing, fixing a broken link, or contributing to the content with a relevant link back to your website you can gain traffic and a solid backlink from a domain with very high domain authority.
Internal Structure and Links
We’ve talked a little bit about building backlinks to your website, and while this is imperative to any successful SEO strategy for a moving company, ensuring that your internal page links are frequent, relevant, and organized can also play a great part in your page rankings.
Keeping readers on your website is important in reducing your bounce rate, so you want to link other relevant articles through-out each piece wherever possible for readers to reference as needed. Giving these references to other content on your site also signals to the search engines that you have more relevant resources all in one place (your website), which will help encourage them that you’re an authority in your space. Good internal linking also helps users find other articles/information on your site they otherwise may have overlooked, which can boost traffic for these linked articles as well as just the original they came to read.
Social Media Content Sharing
Okay, this one sounds obvious right away, but think a little harder on what’s coming up in our suggestion here. Naturally, you want to be sharing your content on all of the major platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to help build a following. But you’ll also want to look into the other “lesser known” platforms such as Quora to share your expertise. We’d also highly recommend checking out forums that are related to the moving industry and becoming a member to comment and support people who are having conversations around moving. Examples of these may be housing forums, expat forums for various countries, and international community forums.
Remember, it’s not about just shamelessly plugging yourself and your company. It’s about building up a trustworthy personality by actually providing helpful information. Customers will naturally see this and think of your company when it actually comes time for moving day.
Images and Infographics
Keeping your visitors engaged has been a recurring theme in this article.
Why?
Because it’s really important.
Make sure that you sprinkle in colorful, professional photographs throughout your content for the reader. This not only helps them form visualizations on the moving topic you’re writing about, but it also helps break the article up into more bite-sized chunks.
If you want to take it to the next level, take that article and turn it into an Infographic. Infographics have become hugely popular over the last few years and can be used to communicate a lot of good information in a short and engaging format. If you’re not an expert in Photoshop, just swing over to a website such as Fiverr.com or Upwork.com. You’ll find plenty of people willing to put beautiful graphics together for you for a very affordable price.
Competitor Keyword Research
With the modern-day keyword research tools that are available finding out what keywords and content have been working for your competitors has never been easier. When working on your keyword research and planning before writing an article, leveraging some of the tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush can give you priceless insight into what is already generating moving leads for your competition and how you can focus on those same turns to get a slice of the traffic.
While we don’t encourage theft of ideas or copying content, this research can give you an advantageous starting point for new content ideas so you can produce new and expanded content for visitors and out-rank the competition by providing a better result.
Make More Videos
Most people forget that Youtube is owned by Google and that many people default go to youtube to search for their answers rather than sifting through the text results from a normal google search. By creating video content covering anything from your packing techniques to international customs guides, you put yourself and your company in front of a whole new line of traffic that your competition likely has not even thought about.
Video content is also easy to share on social media and typically has a higher engagement rate by those searching for it. Google features relevant video’s in their search results too, so if you have the best video on “how to prepare in advance for moving day”, chances are the first result on Google is going to be your video.
Just like any other written content you would produce, don’t forget to target specific keywords in your video and description. This is equally important to allow people and search engines to find your video and rank it properly!
Optimize Your Page Speed
The modern-day web-surfer’s attention span is now shorter than ever, with a significant amount of users leaving a website if the page-speed is any longer than 2 seconds. Using tools such as Pingdom.com to test your website’s speed can help you make sure the potential moving leads coming to your site are not experiencing any delays and are being served the content they want as fast as possible.
To increase the speed of your website make sure to do things like optimizing your image file sizes, load only 1 video resource per page, and load all of the javascript in the footer rather than the header of the page. With Google now taking speed as an increased factor for their result rankings, every second counts in this category, literally.
Mobile Responsiveness
With the rapid increase in mobile device users around the world, web developers have been constantly developing new technologies to ensure the websites you view on your cell phone look just as beautiful and functional as if you were on your desktop computer. If someone who is considering moving in the next few weeks is perhaps doing some research in the park on their cell phone when coming across your website and they aren’t able to read the text because it is too small, or perhaps the evil horizontal scroll bar appears making them work right to left just to read your company’s introduction, chances are they’ll go to someone else to move.
Google also tends to rank mobile-optimized pages higher than non-optimized pages for searches that are being performed on a mobile device. That means if you could be missing out on all search results for those using their cell phones or mobile device just because your website has not been properly optimized.
Take time to ensure your developer is optimizing your website for all mobile devices so you don’t end up losing a quality moving lead due to poor technology.
Conclusion
Wrapping this all up, there are quite a few things you can do to help your moving company generate more leads for free through quality search engine optimization practices. If you spend some more time planning and make the investment up-front, you’ll be rewarded with a long-term, steady, and free source of highly qualified lead traffic to your website as a result. If you have any questions, reach out and we’d be happy to chat!
