How To Do Online Marketing For A Portland Moving Company

April 7, 2014

I recently chatted with the owner of a well-known moving company in Portland, Oregon. His company is very interesting because it is one of the most common types of local service companies. And since the company operates in a large cosmopolitan area, the competitive environment is quite fierce. That makes this a very interesting example for us in terms of marketing.

SEO Strategies To Promote A Moving Company

Almost no matter where you live, there are probably already moving companies in the area which have been in business for many years. That means that they got a head start in advertising in just about every way. For SEO, this means that to beat them we need to have a creative strategy.

Obviously the main search term for a moving company in Portland is “moving company in Portland” but this happens to also be the most competitive search. So one idea is to go wider on the search terms, and to target longer-tail search terms.

Many of the potential terms may at first not seem like an immediate fit, but even the vaguely related search terms are good because you never know the kind of jumbled searches consumers will be making. And my feeling is that you want to make your top of the sales funnel as big as possible. You never know what kind of customers may come from different search terms. So it is good to open yourself up for as wide an audience as possible. I partially discuss such nuances in my article on the freemium business model which offers different perspectives on free or low-paying clients. For example, they may not pay as much, but if you can get them to spread the word or add nice reviews about your service, that can potentially bring in far more money than the single job of moving their items.

Going Wide In Terms Of Market

Since the company we are discussing is a college moving company, the clients would typically be price conscious residential clients. But as a business, we want deep-pocketed customers, or customers who are willing to pay more to get the job done right. So for bigger moving jobs like moving offices or large residential homes, the company launched a new moving site that targets those types of clients. That new site is PDX precision moving.

There is a whole new set of marketing challenges when it comes to promoting a new website. Google makes it very difficult for new websites to rank well in search because those sites are not authoritative. So we must come up with an entirely different strategy to attract clients. One strategy can be to leverage other big platforms like YouTube, or another large social or entertainment platform where it is possible to get big exposure. And since the new company is also an inter-state moving company, it might just make sense because this moving company can cover a large area.

General Local Service Marketing

If you are curious about what other ways there may be to promote a local service like this, there are a couple of articles that you might find insightful. Here is the article on how to promote a local service and here is the article which is an offline marketing tutorial.