Any home service business requires a steady flow of customers to stay in the green. If you are a moving company, you are probably familiar with the practice of buying mover leads. Though this process can be costly, you might see it as the only way to reasonably drive leads to your business.

This isn’t the case.

While a moving company may still find it to be ROI-positive to buy moving leads, it is usually more cost-effective to generate moving leads through one’s own marketing efforts. This article will cover the basics of generating moving leads for your business through SEO and PPC advertising on Google Ads.

If you want to take control of your lead generation and cut out the middlemen, we can help you develop the proven strategies for driving leads directly to your phone or website. Give us a call to talk to a digital marketing strategist about how you can stop relying on the middlemen and generate your own leads! We have a team specialized in SEO for contractors, and we’d love to help you!

How Do Moving Companies Get Customers?

The process of buying leads from third parties is customary for many professional movers at this point. Most moving companies have used industry standards like HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, and Billy.com to get a steady flow of leads, but these leads can be expensive and aren’t guaranteed to pay off.

How Much Do Moving Leads Cost?

When you pay-per-lead through a third-party lead provider, the price of each lead is based on a few factors. These include the estimated distance and time expenses of service, the type and amount of items in the haul, how competitive your service area is, and how high you are willing to go in the bidding war with your competitors.

Billy.com’s Mover Lead Cost

Billy.com’s estimated lead cost is between $5.95 and $9.95 but can be as high as $15 to $40 for exclusive mover leads. The leads go out to other service providers, too, meaning the cost of leads can be driven higher, and the price the customer pays you can be driven lower.

Thumbtack’s Mover Lead Cost

Thumbtack’s mover lead prices are a bit more elusive to tack down. They require you to sign up with your email before giving you an accurate estimate for the average mover lead cost. They claim on their site that leads, in general, can cost anywhere from $8 to $10 for smaller jobs and as much as $50 for larger jobs.

HomeAdvisor’s Mover Lead Cost 

HomeAdvisor has a complicated history with contractors. They are considered to be the most expensive lead providers. Their range is pretty significant. The company’s site doesn’t have exact mover lead estimates and claims that the prices vary based on region, demand, competition, and the job’s specifics. Based on BBB accounts from contractors, leads can cost moving contractors anywhere from $15 to well over $100.

Are Mover Lead Providers a Scam?

None of those above-mentioned mover leads providers are scams, but there may be more cost-effective solutions out there. They definitely are good at the business of matching eager customers with moving companies who need their services. Mover lead providers are great marketers, and they excel at convincing small moving companies like yours that their service is essential. Their service will generate leads for you, it is true.

But the process of matching you with potential customers is not a closely kept secret. For the cost of annual subscription fees and the pay-per-lead model of the third-party lead providers, you could take specific marketing steps that would get your business to rank at the top of search results.

This process eliminates the need for third-party mover lead providers, guaranteeing a steady flow of customers without paying off the middlemen.

How to Get My Own High-Quality Leads?

Let’s dig into two cost-effective ways to take control of your digital marketing and generate your own high-quality mover leads: SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising through Google Ads. PPC can have near-instant results, while SEO takes some time and patience to see your investment pay off. Both have advantages depending on what type of moving business you want to run. Let’s look at both in a bit more detail.

PPC for Moving Companies

PPC is a marketing channel where companies pay a small fee every time their advertisements are clicked on. If the click cost is $1.00, but the click leads to a $1,000 contract, the profit yield can be extremely high.

When it comes to PPC services, Google Ads is the way to go. Since the word “Google” itself has become an eponym for “internet search,” your moving business should take advantage of the world’s most popular search engine. If you don’t know what an eponym is – Google it! (You’ll see what I did there).

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads is a PPC platform that streamlines the PPC system and allows advertisers to get their business’ ads in front of customers. Businesses bid on keywords; when customers enter searches into Google using these keywords, the top results are advertisements for the business.

Google then considers the advertiser’s Ad Rank, a metric based on data pulled from the advertiser’s website, quality of the advertisement (in terms of relevance, keyword optimization, etc.), and how much money an advertiser was willing to pay for the ad space.

The winners then appear at the top of any search results page before the actual results. When you see “Ad” to the left of the top few search results, now you know!

How is PPC Different Than Paying for Leads From a Third-Party?

When you bid on leads from a third party, you have little control over how you are advertised by that third party or the quality of leads that get sent your way. Some mover lead providers like HomeAdvisor are facing lawsuits for how they sell leads to contractors. Sometimes their leads are fake or of poor quality, and, ultimately, you still have to pay for them.

Also, PPC advertising takes potential customers directly to your website, not to the third-party’s website. When they click on your name, they come directly to you on your site. You aren’t paying for leads that go to other companies because HomeAdvisor used your name to drive clicks to their site.

If these leads visit your website but don’t contact you, you can “retarget” them with ads on Facebook, YouTube, and other websites. You’ve probably seen this practice in the past; you viewed a product, then were “followed around” for a few days, seeing ads for this product or service on other websites.

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For example, I was recently shopping for a couch using Google Search, and now, when I visit unrelated websites, the ad bars on the right are full of advertisements for sofas. I clicked on a GoogleAds advertisement a few weeks back, and now I am being retargeted for that query. Source: CNN

How much should I pay for PPC management?

Unlike SEO, a strong PPC campaign can show results almost instantly. A keyword-targeted PPC campaign can potentially bring new leads to your business as soon as it launches. The challenge comes from actually doing the keyword research and optimizing your ads for Google’s search algorithms.

If you have the time and resources to learn the intricacies of Google Ads and how best to construct and implement winning advertising campaigns, then you definitely should. However, many professional moving businesses do not have the time or the resources to do so without compromising the well-being of their business.

This is where hiring proven digital marketing professionals can help your moving business run the best advertisement campaigns possible and generate tons of leads as a result. Check out our PPC management page for a comprehensive breakdown of our ROI-driven PPC management service.

SEO for Moving Companies

SEO is another marketing channel you can use to drive more mover leads to your professional moving business without having to pay directly for them. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your website so that it appears as high as possible in the Google Search results when people search for a particular product or service in a specific location.

Let’s get a bit more specific. There are three main objectives of good SEO for professional movers:

• Making sure the website is optimally crawled and indexed by Google
• Optimizing the relevance of the website’s content so that Google sees the content as valuable for addressing the keywords people use when searching for professional movers
• Improving the authority and trustworthiness of a moving business’s website through link acquisition and content

What is the Difference Between SEO and Paying Third Party Mover Lead Providers

Well-executed SEO can replace the need for third-party lead providers because what they do for you is essentially SEO. However, the SEO they perform mostly benefits their business interests and only helps you indirectly.

Let’s explain:

When you pay to participate in third-party home service marketplaces, these home service marketers do all the hard work of local SEO and keyword research, using your company’s name to drive organic traffic back to their site instead of yours.

These companies then host a bidding war over leads that may have been generated by your website’s appearance in the search bar. That click-through on your name may have landed your competitor the lead.

Cut Out The Middlemen and Generate Your Own Mover Leads

Hiring an expert SEO team will make sure that every click on your name goes to your site. Once those visitors arrive, professional SEOs know how to turn those leads into bona fide conversions.

To learn more about LevelUP's winning SEO strategy, check out the search engine optimization services we offer.

How Long Does SEO Take to Get Results?

A successful SEO campaign will take several months to bear fruit. This is for several reasons, but the primary reason is that Google needs to learn that your website is authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy regarding the targeted keywords you want to rank for.

Building an accessible site architecture and optimizing location pages, services pages, and content takes time, as does building up valuable and logical internal links and external links. However, the results of expertly executed SEO are proven.

Rank for Specific Moving Services

If you offer unique or niche moving services, you can take advantage of these services to help boost your SEO. Developing localized service pages for specific moving services adds authority and relevance to your site when people search for niche moving services.

The Types of Mover Leads You Can Get With High-Quality SEO

·      Commercial Moving Leads

·      Office Moving Leads

·      Car Moving Leads

·      Long-distance Moving Leads

·      International Moving Leads

·      Industrial Moving Leads

·      Piano Moving Leads

·      Aquarium Mover Leads

·      Pool Table Mover Leads

To learn more about LevelUP's winning SEO strategy, schedule a complimentary introduction call with us today! Schedule a time here that is convenient for you here: we can't wait to meet you!