Connecting Jonah's Movers
With Their Local Houston Community
In the cut-throat moving industry, over-promising and under-delivering is the norm. Jonah's Movers has aimed to do things different with a strong focus on training, high-quality moves, and good business practices; the only question is: How do we promote this competitive advantage?
Working for Jonah's Movers, I've had the opportunity to help a small, locally-owned business by designing & redesigning their website and developing a comprehensive digital marketing plan from the ground up.
Over 3.5 years, I've managed to build a beautiful & functional website with a strong focus on educating customers and making the moving process as easy as possible. With a solid SEO strategy, Jonah’s Movers continues to produce leads, customers, and sales year after year.
UI/UX Design
WIX Development
Local SEO
Branding
Research, Strategy, Results
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A poor online presence / low website traffic
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A difficult booking process for customers
From SEO to new website copy, rebranded graphics to a new quote form and automating everything in-between, the focus was to simplify the process for everyone.
There's no substitute for first-hand experience. I spent my first 6 months at the company as a mover and eventually a crew leader. I then worked in the office, taking sales calls, and understanding those processes, as well. Working side-by-side with the team, two major problems became evident:
1. A Poor Online Presence & Low Website Traffic
In order to showcase your brand and the services that you have to offer, you first need to get in-front of people looking to purchase. For a moving company, I would argue Google Search is the best place to reach those people. While social media or direct sales work great for some industries, people only look for and care about movers when it is time to relocate and the first place they go is Google.
BEFORE:
In October of 2019, Jonah’s Movers was ranking #1 for their brand keyword “Jonah’s Movers.” They we’re also on page 2 of Google for the keyword “The Woodlands Movers” (a suburb of Houston). Combined with their Facebook & Yelp pages, that was their entire digital footprint.
This meant the only real way for customers to find them was through word-of-mouth and the occasional Facebook or Yelp message.
Strategy:
After talking through the project specs, I first tackled the website, especially the SEO strategy moving forward. Since the company did mostly local work, I focused on building out their local service area pages for high traffic keywords related to Houston and nearby suburbs (The Woodlands, Conroe, Magnolia, Cypress, Tomball, and more). The work involved research & targeting each page with a relevant keyword, adding 700-1000 words per page, improving the on-page & off-page SEO, a new design, and much more.
Upon seeing the local strategy succeed, I’ve also honed-in on keywords such as "Houston to Austin Movers" and other cities like San Antonio, DFW, and Corpus Christi leading to long-distance moving success.
Results:
Though SEO takes some upfront work to initially get going, once everything is set-up and Google starts crawling through pages, the work finally starts to pay off. Though it’s taken a few years, Jonah’s Movers now ranks on page 1 (usually in the top 3 results) for nearly every keyword we’re tracking including:
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Houston Senior Movers - Rank 1
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Houston to Austin Movers – Rank 1
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Houston to Dallas Movers - Rank 1
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Houston to San Antonio Movers - Rank 1
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Tomball Movers - Rank 1
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Magnolia Movers – Rank 2
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Movers Spring TX – Rank 2
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The Woodlands TX Movers – Rank 2
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Storage Facility Tomball – Rank 2
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Cypress Movers – Rank 3
*Search Data was updated 10/16/2023
Not only is the website bringing in lots of relevant local traffic, but it also converts many of those visitors into leads and paying customers:
In July 2023, SEO/organic search brought 725 unique visitors to the Jonah’s Movers website. Of those, 154 people submitted a quote form and 64 people called the business— 218 total organic search leads. This is a 30% website-to-lead conversion rate. Knowing that 25% of JM's organic leads become customers means that 54 of those leads actually booked a move. At an average of $1,500/move, this has brought the company over $81,000 of revenue in just 1 month!
USERS
725
=
Leads
218
=
Customers
54
=
Revenue
$81K
2. A Difficult/Confusing Booking Process
BEFORE:
Now that Jonah’s Movers schedule was booked out, the focus was on customer experience— and not just on the website. Although there were better conversion rates and it was a little quicker for customers to fill out the simple 6 question quote-form, the office staff wasn’t getting nearly enough information.
This led to back & forth emails and follow-up calls for nearly every quote form submitted...
The Solution:
I redesigned the quote form with more questions that use conditional fields, hiding and showing extra fields based on the users needs. This means the form can be filled out quickly if it’s a basic move or take a little longer for a more involved move.
I also added an "Availability Checker" which integrates directly with Jonah's Movers scheduling software. Customers can select different move dates to check which dates are booked up, have limited availability, or are fully available.
All of this has led to a much simpler process for customers and more useful information for Jonah’s Movers staff.
