When a Blog Post is a Salesperson
Most moving company websites have an unread blog. A couple of articles from three years ago, with titles like “How to Have a Stress-Free Move” – no comments and a trickle if not a dribble in terms of traffic. But there are moving companies whose blog brings in thousands of people every month and turns a significant number of those into customers – without ever having to make a cold call. It’s not luck. It’s because the latter group learned how seo for moving companies turns basic content into a lead generator while the office is shut and the movers are sleeping.
A guide to moving that’s built on the right search intent and uses some basic SEO techniques doesn’t just get visitors. It attracts the right people who are looking for help in the process of moving – people who, with a little guidance, become potential customers. The guide makes the sales call easier. When a prospective customer calls following your 1,500-word guide on “how to move a three-bedroom home in under a day”, they’ve already decided to hire your moving company.
The Guides People Actually Search For
Not all moving guides are searchable. Advice like “begin packing early“, and “label your boxes” has been written by every other moving company on the planet and is of no use to Google. The guides that work – and drive sales – are the ones that deal with tangible, searchable concerns that people Google at 11pm on the night before their move.
What do you get asked on the phone? “Do you move pianos?” “How can I pack my king-sized bed frame without losing all the screws?” “When are moving companies cheapest in this town?” “Can I leave my IKEA furniture as is for the movers?” All of these questions are titles for guides. Every guide title is a keyword. Every keyword that’s ranking is a stream of traffic that you’re getting because you provided an answer to a question.
Geographic guides work particularly well. “How to Move in [City] Without Losing Your Mind” is a hoax-like search term but it’s also a local search term. A guide that explains quirks of various neighbourhoods, parking permit rules, elevator reservations in buildings, as well as traffic snarls during move-out season becomes an invaluable resource for a person moving to that particular city – and Google likes rewarding this value with top rankings. Generic guides float.
What Good Writing Can’t Do for Lead Generation
Good writing gets you reads. SEO structure gets you found. Neither alone converts. The moving guides that convert readers into leads have a third element: a plan for positioned calls to action within content that deserves to ask. A reader just informed by your guide that moving on a Wednesday in March is 20% less expensive than moving on a Saturday in June is already inclined to believe your knowledge of prices and availability. It’s time to give them a taste of that knowledge: a free estimate, a cost calculator, a downloadable moving checklist.
Where you put calls to action is important. A CTA placed at the end of a 1,200-word “guide” only catches those who read the whole article. Sidebars with sticky quote buttons, in-line text CTAs after especially helpful sections and anchor links are ways to provide an exit ramp to conversion while maintaining the flow of the article. If a reader gets to paragraph four and clicks to get a quote, that’s still a conversion – even if they never finish the article.
Internal linking is the connective tissue. An article on “how to move an apartment” should lead to a link to your apartment moving services page, your packing services page, and your location page for the city in which the apartment is located. The internal links tell Google that these pages are relevant to each other, and contribute to the overall authority of your local moving content cluster. It also provides a natural extension for the reader to click through to other pages of the site (and deeper into the sales funnel) without being really obvious.
Tailoring Guide Content to Customer’s Stage
There are different people in different stages of the moving process. Some are six months away and still evaluating cities. Some just signed the lease yesterday and need to book a mover by Thursday. A marketing strategy that doesn’t address them all is boring the early-stage reader, and is losing the late-stage reader to a company with more actionable advice.
Early-stage guides can be more general and teachy: “How to decide whether to DIY your move or hire movers,” “What to look for when choosing a moving company,” “When to schedule movers“. Such guides reach people who don’t want to book moving services – yet – but they familiarise them with your brand. They are also more easily linked to, as educational content is more likely to be shared and linked to than service pages.
Late-stage guides should be shorter and more practical. “How to hire movers last minute in [city]” is not for the person moving in eight weeks – it’s for the person who just discovered their lease is up in two weeks rather than six. They need a phone number and a simple confirmation that you can work with a tight schedule, not a 2,000-word treatise on moving. Writing a guide that is as short but comprehensive as the reader’s deadline is one of the keys to writing a guide that sells.
Promotion That Gives Guides a Long Life
The slow way to get a guide indexed by Google is to publish it and wait for Google to discover it. Links from other pages on your website get Google to find your page quicker. Tweets and Facebook posts with a call to action “What’s one thing you wish you knew before your last move?” will get you early interactions that Google will see as a sign that the guide is worth indexing quickly. Newsletters to previous customers with valuable moving tips help keep you in front of a customer who will come back when they move, and will also recommend your business.
Local media and bloggers are fair game. A moving guide that’s useful for locals is something a local news editor or local blogger will happily link to. These backlinks count in local rankings, and they drive referral traffic that isn’t dependent on Google. That’s the kind of referrals that make a moving guide pay for itself after the date of publication.
