The Big Question No One Wants to Answer
Moving companies are ambivalent about price. If you ask a dozen owners if they’ve got their prices on their site, you’ll get a dozen different moral stances, most of them from “no way” to “an approximate order of magnitude”. Here’s what the owners don’t get: potential customers are looking for price information anyway. They’re Googling, browsing competitors’ websites, reading reviews and message boards, and basing assumptions about your business on information they find online. That’s where seo for moving companies takes these often-overlooked pages from passive to competitive advantage, catching searchers when they are shopping and price-concerned.
A good FAQ page doesn’t just provide information. It catches search traffic, establishes trust before the prospect ever picks up the phone, and weeds out looky-loos so you’re not just getting leads, but people who are already a step closer to being customers. This is miles from hoping they find the courage to click ‘Get a Quote’ on your homepage.
Moving Searches are All About the Money
If you’ve just discovered you are moving in three weeks, what’s your first concern? They don’t think “I wonder what the corporate culture is like at local moving companies.” It’s “how much will it cost?” Price anxiety is the emotional epicentre for the search for moving services, and it fuels all the subsequent search terms. “How much do movers cost in [city],” “average cost to move a two-bedroom apartment,” “why are movers so expensive” – these are just some of the many variations on the same question: will I get ripped off?
If you don’t address that question on your site, the visitor leaves. They click to the next search result, which may be a competitor that at least provides a range, or a comparison site that prominently displays the competitor’s prices. In either case, you’ve missed the opportunity. An FAQ page that speaks to pricing honestly (including actual context, variables, and ranges) keeps that visitor longer, so you can establish the trust that a price estimate can’t.
Price questions also have high search intent. A person searching for “how much does it cost to hire movers for a two-bedroom apartment” has a clear goal in mind. He or she has a moving schedule and a budget. That’s a searcher with a high level of intent, and an FAQ page that’s perfectly suited to that searcher is waiting for him.
How to Write the FAQ Google Loves
Google has a particular format it prefers for answering FAQ search queries: questions and in-depth answers. The “People Also Ask” boxes displayed in search results are Google showing off its favourite FAQ content. If your FAQ page can get its content included in these boxes (or its page to rank above or below them), it’s a legitimate way to generate more traffic without paid advertising.
The technicalities are fairly simple. The questions should be written as questions and placed in a heading tag (H2 or H3 – depending on the hierarchy of your page). The answer to the question should start right away, rather than with an introduction such as “Great question!” or “We’re so glad you asked.” Get to the point. The most effective featured snippet answers are those that contain between 50 and 150 words – long enough to be helpful, but short enough to be easily digestible.
FAQ schema markup (structured data) – a particular type of code you insert into the page – tells Google that the page is presented as a FAQ. If done properly, this can result in your questions and answers from the FAQ being displayed in the search results, greatly expanding your listing and pushing other competitors down without you having to improve your rank in Google search. It’s one of those little things that somewhat looks like the elephant in the room on the search results page.
Price Questions, But No Number
I can see why most moving companies are reluctant to post their prices. Every move is different. Moving a studio apartment on ground floor with on-street parking is very different from moving a four-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a walkup. Advertising a single price that doesn’t reflect those differences sets up customers’ expectations to be disappointed – and that’s how disputes are born.
It’s not to avoid price questions. It’s to answer them with context. An FAQ answer to “how much do movers cost in [city]” might explain that local moves are generally in the range of $X to $Y for a one-bedroom based on the distance, time of day, and ease of access – and to get an estimate, you can call them in 5 minutes and they’ll make the estimate based on particulars. That answer is honest, informative, mentions the variables and provides a way to get a quote. It’s not evasive.
Don’t shy away from the costly situations. If it’s more expensive to move a piano than it is to move other furniture, say that. If the price is influenced by having stairs or elevators, say so. The customers who receive unexpected charge backs are the ones who leave bad reviews. Customers who know about variables and decide to hire you are the customers who leave you five stars because they were informed early in the process.
An FAQ Page That’s Easy to Find
This is all for naught if your FAQ page is three clicks away from your home page. FAQs should be in your primary navigation or linked from the homepage and service pages. If someone lands on the page for your local moving service and still has questions about cost, the easiest way to keep them on your page is to direct them to your FAQ.
You can include an mini-FAQ on your homepage, with four or five of the most important questions with short answers, and a “see all questions” link to your main FAQ page. This way, you will capture the person who will not proactively look for information but will read it if it’s presented in a natural way. It also provides more content on your homepage containing the keywords you want to target while not interfering with the services information that must be there.
Moving is a trust-based business, and trust is built on honesty. A FAQ page that is serious about answering pricing questions, serious about being accurate, and serious about addressing the whole gamut of questions that a customer uses to guide their buying decision is doing more than others are. That’s where the phone calls start coming.
