How to Optimize Your Moving Company GMB Profile

Rising to the top of local search results has become increasingly important for moving companies, both small and large. The first step in your quest to reach this apex is to ensure your Google Business Profile—formerly Google My Business—is appropriately configured. Understanding your customers’ search behavior and how best to optimize your listing is widely considered the most significant aspect of any local marketing plan.

From increasing your revenue to providing valuable insights about your customers, optimizing your Google Business Profile is one of the simplest ways to improve your business’s visibility on search engines and, thus, gain traffic. While other kinds of search results—such as LSAs, Organic, and Google Ads—provide value to your business, GMB is highly visible, allows readers to leave reviews, and provides insights that give you valuable information.

The local search experts at MMMx have configured this guide to show you a few of the imperative ranking factors you can start optimizing today. Here’s everything you need to know.

Understanding Customer Search

Before we dive into optimizing your profile, it’s crucial you understand how customers search when seeking a local moving company.

We surveyed 150 Google searches to identify what kinds of search results people tend to click when searching for a local moving company.

There are still plenty of customers to capture with paid search and LSA placements. Yet, the largest share of potential customers still prefers clicking on a Google Business Profile listing or local organic result.

Optimizing Your Profile

Numerous ranking factors play a role in securing a top three ranking in Google’s map pack. Unlike a few factors like proximity, optimizing your profile is entirely within your control. Let’s dive into a few of these critical areas.

Name

This may seem straightforward, but there are a number of subtle nuances to keep in mind. Google explicitly says to “represent your business as it’s consistently represented and recognized in the real world across signage, stationery, and other branding.”

For example, if you are a multi-location brand, you may want to add additional modifiers in your name, like the city in which you’re located or the services being offered. While this may provide a boost, it is not without risks. Namely, Google may suspend your listing if they come to the conclusion it violates their guidelines. Resultantly, we highly recommend using your legal business name or the name listed on your signage.

Categories

Business categories are the most important ranking factor within a listing and should be one of the first elements you optimize. Google allows one primary category as well as nine additional ones. Note that the primary category should match the core service a business provides as closely as possible. Secondary categories will provide you with some potential additional map pack rankings, but they generally won’t have the reach a primary category will.

Below are some important categories a moving company could use when optimizing its profile.

• Moving company
• Moving and storage service
• Moving supply store
• Piano moving service
• Pet moving service

Description

Your business description is an excellent way to tell customers about your company and the services you provide, but it’s also a great opportunity to add some relevant keywords for which you want to rank. This method is perhaps the easiest way to improve the relevance of your Business Profile. However, it’s important you don’t go overboard with moving-related keywords. Try to write something naturally while listing what you offer in the character amount allowed.

Google Business Posts

Google Business posts are a free and easy way to reach potential customers. Each time you create a new post, add your keywords to the content. You can even include hashtags for relevant terms. This will allow you to keep your Business Profile optimized for keywords and phrases most important to attracting moving customers.

Reviews

Reviews can be a powerful tool, not just for consumer behavior, but as an essential ranking factor. It’s no surprise that customers have a higher likelihood of choosing a business with a higher review rating, but reviews that include keywords relevant to a moving business will help you rank even higher in the map pack for those terms.

While it is difficult to naturally get optimized reviews, asking others for reviews or setting up an automated system to request them should be a part of your marketing strategy.

One great way to increase the keyword density in reviews you can control is by responding with relevant terms. Nevertheless, note that you shouldn’t go overboard by responding with “thanks for using an affordable moving company near you” in every review. Over-optimizing your reviews could trigger the Google Business Web Spam team.

Images

Images are an easy optimization you can influence. Not only do they provide another type of content to show in the search results, but Google is becoming increasingly more competent at understanding what an image represents. Try providing images that visually describe the services you offer. For example, if you write “piano moving,” include an image that shows a moving team transporting a piano.

An additional component to optimize in your images is the EXIF data. This is metadata that search engines can read and includes items like geographical coordinates. Optimizing the EXIF data will give Google an additional local signal to help your rankings.

Google Business Q/A

Google Business Q/A is an area that few companies optimize. Anyone can ask or answer a question about your business, so it’s a good idea to provide relevant questions and answers for potential customers. If you don’t, someone else will.

This is also a good opportunity to use some relevant keywords. For instance, if customers often search for the price, use this as an opportunity to provide relevant information and optimize for that term.

Finding Local Moving Company Keywords

Now that you have an idea of how to optimize your listing, let’s look at the top 15 storage keywords by monthly volume:

Using these keywords will help you tell search engines about the content on your website’s page and subsequently help users find your content among the many results.

Contact MMMx to Learn More About the Benefits of GMB

The moving industry is saturated and highly competitive, so it’s consequently imperative that you stand out from the crowd. Using Google My Business is a tremendous method to engage new customers, spread the word about your company, or find your way into any market. By taking advantage of some of the aforementioned tips and tricks, you’ll be well on your way to attracting new business and standing out in your niche.

Contact MMMx by calling 1-800-725-6669 or completing our contact form today for any further questions or concerns.