Using paid ads for movers gives you an advantage over your competitors. Purchasing ads increases the chances of your target audience noticing your company ahead of the others listed below the SERP.
However, it’s not a bulletproof or standalone method. You could have an expensive PPC ad and still generate lower sales compared to organic sales if you fail to implement the proper SEO practices.
From content to timing, paid ads can be a boost to your already effective SEO practices, depending on when or what you’re paying to be visible within Google’s algorithm. In other words, if you don’t have a strong foundation plan and step-by-step strategy, you’re just wasting money.
So what is the right way of using paid ads for movers? Learn all about it below.
“When” Matters Just as Much as “What”
Starting with paid ads is a good idea. It gives newer websites or expansion services a chance to jump into the competition strongly. But paid ads aren’t just for the beginning. Seasonal off-peaks can ensure you get those leads that are moving during low-demand seasons.
So paid ads need both strong content delivery and great timing. While you can’t always generate leads through paid ads, you can boost your already performing or beginning website with them.
Platforms for Paid Ads for Movers
There are multiple ways to generate paid ads for movers on the Internet. The question is which one is the best for your moving company.
Google Search Ads
Google search ads are arguably the most well-known type of paid ads for any type of service. It’s Google’s version of PPC, which stands for pay-per-click.
Pay-per-click is all about bidding on high-intent keywords to reach the top of the SERP. Depending on how much you bid and how much your content relates to the keyword being bid on, you could find yourself at the top of a page with a high-quality lead.
The bid, however, is a double-edged sword. Depending on how many times a lead clicks on your ad, you’ll have to pay Google. You’ll need to balance out how many clicks actually lead to a sale to ensure quality results.
Local Search Ads
Local search ads are very similar to PPC with a few tweaks. Local search ads (LSA) aren’t ideal for everyone like PPC. But they are ideal for movers! LSA was made for your service-related businesses like lawyers, home services, and movers.
It’s similar to PPC in terms of that you only pay when a specific action is taken by the user. For LSA, the action required is for the user (then turned lead) to call or message your business.
Unlike PPC, there’s no keyword bidding involved. Local search ads are all about geographically recommending your brand to potential leads that are searching within your location.
A bonus you get from local search ads is that Google gives you a trust badge that increases your trustworthiness. However, you will need to submit several requirements to actually get into LSA and earn that badge.
Social Media Ads
Social media is an open platform for paid ads that exploit the human habit of scrolling. Each video, interaction, and post a user makes on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok can reveal what your interests and needs may be.
Using paid promotions on social media platforms allows the platform itself to navigate your ads directly to those who are likely to be interested in your services.
Brand Awareness
First impressions count for everything, but multiple impressions make your target leads associate your services with your brand. If they consistently see promoted ads for your services while scrolling, they will naturally be reminded of you as a moving company with all their needs at the ready.
Retargeting
Social media also allows retargeting. Have you ever left your cart full and not purchased anything? If you use social media, you’ll know some promoted ads somehow remind you of the service you once thought about buying but failed to.
That is what retargeting is. It’s when a lead was close to a sale and is retargeted again to try to continue purchasing the product or service they were interested in.
Choosing the Right Method to Use Paid Ads for Movers
The cost of paid ads is an important factor to consider when creating a paid ad strategy. Three things should be taken into account when choosing a form of paid ads: cost, quality, and complexity.
Comparing the Costs of Paid Ads
On average, the lowest cost of a single lead would be $8.00. However, there are increases to consider. PPC ads in particular receive spikes in bidding (depending on the season), and hiring lead brokers could increase the pricing depending on how effective they can be.
Take a look at your budgeting. Learn the different costs and estimate which one suits the funds you have set aside for paid leads.
The Quality of Paid Leads
Another thing you should consider is the quality of the paid leads you may be receiving. Quality does not equate to quantity. You could have a lot of leads and impressions but get few that turn into a sale.
The way you use your paid leads and where you source them matter. A common concern would be where your paid leads actually come from. There is a high chance, if you pay for leads, that you could be targeting an already targeted group of individuals by your competitors.
This shared set of leads will likely have fewer transactions and sales conversions compared to original or exclusive leads.
Think about the purpose of your paid leads. Are you aiming for brand awareness, or do you want the entire path of a lead to end in a sale?
Complexity of Setting Your Lead Strategy
Lastly, consider how difficult your lead strategy may be for your team. Whether you’re outsourcing your lead generation team to someone else or perhaps choosing to do this with your own team members, there is always an effort required to implement a paid lead strategy correctly.
How skilled is the team you’ve hired? And how well can they produce accurate results? Choosing an effective lead strategy also requires considering the limits of your team members.
Setting up Paid Ads
There are multiple methods for using paid ads. However, each one has its own necessary setup before it should launch to promote your moving company.
Negative Keyword Selection
Negative keywords should absolutely be placed prior to launching your paid ad. While keywords themselves are a necessity for users to find your moving company, negative keywords are words you do not want associated with the promoted ad.
This helps limit the number of searches where your ad could be considered irrelevant.
Geo-targeting
Your location is a necessary step to ensure that the quality leads within your area can find you. The closer you are to a user searching for your moving company services, the more likely your company is to appear.
While this is true even without paid ads, LSAs and PPC campaigns can easily make your business more visible compared to other competitors. Even gaining the potential leads’ attention before others.
Ad Copies and Extensions
A talented SEO specialist would know that the key to gaining the attention of quality leads isn’t just promoting your ads to be the first to be seen. It’s also about context. Creating unique and informative ad copy is a necessity for all the text you spread out to the world associated with your company. If you fail to give eye-catching copy on your promoted ads, it’s likely to be scrolled away by the leads you’re looking for.
Extensions are also important when setting up paid ads for movers. Providing contact information, pricing, and other helpful information is the next step your lead will likely take. This makes it easier to trace which paid or organic method gives you high-quality leads.
Effective Conversion Optimization With Landing Pages
To ensure a proper call-to-action (CTA), you will need to have a dedicated URL connected to your paid ads that redirects them to an effective landing page.
Landing pages aren’t like your usual webpages. They’re not pages that are filled with information or other navigational buttons to other sections of your website. Its sole purpose on the user’s side is to create a convenient way to reach out to your moving company.
Each landing page should have its own click-to-call or instant quote forms that let the potential lead submit their information for more insights on your services. Licenses, guarantees, and even a handful of reviews can persuade them of how trustworthy and reliable your brand may be.
Take note: an effective landing page should also be related to what your paid ad is referring to. Don’t make it too confusing, and ensure that the potential lead that is redirected to your landing page will find only the information regarding what the promoted ad was discussing.
Tracking and Optimizing For Maintenance
How do you measure the success of your paid ad strategy? It’s the same way as how you track and optimize it for maintenance. By placing KPIs in each method and tracking their progress, you can find out which of your methods needs more structure and which one is the most effective.
Maintaining your tracking and optimization of each paid lead strategy ensures you’re getting your money’s worth.
Call and Form Tracking
Let’s go back to landing pages. Since landing pages are mostly CTA-focused webpages, we will need to track how many of your leads actually submitted their information or clicked on your landing page.
A skilled digital marketing and SEO team would be able to track the percentages of interacted landing pages, calls, and form submissions to trace which ones have become more effective regarding your paid ads for movers and which ones need reoptimization for effectiveness.
A/B Testing
Once you have tracked the results of your paid ads, the next best step is to ensure each is performing well. To do this, you’ll need to conduct A/B testing.
A/B testing is when you take two slightly similar strategies and watch their performance. The changes between the two could be the content, the time it’s released, or even the keywords and negative keywords you’re using.
Pay close attention to the different variants. Which one performed better than the other? And how can you improve the results of the other?
Bid Adjustment (Timing by Seasons and Area Performance)
Keyword bidding has a lot of price spikes and even seasons when it’s less effective than taking control of organic lead strategies. To ensure you’re not wasting money, you will need to track conversion rates, costs, and user behavior for at least a month or two.
Off-peak hours and seasons are when you should implement bid adjustments. When do the leads react the most to your paid ads, and which hours or days of the week do they provide fewer conversions? Adjust your bids during these specific core variables for optimized performance.
There are two types of bid adjustments: positive and negative. A positive adjustment refers to increasing your bid costs. Signs that you should lean towards positive adjustment refer to
Positive Adjustment
Signs you should increase the cost of your keyword bidding fall under the positive adjustment category. Example signs are when there’s a high conversion rate to a sale, generating many leads. Another sign is if your investment on the bids beat your target goal.
Negative Adjustment
Signs of a necessary adjustment to lower your keyword bidding is when you’re spending more on bids and yet receive lower sale conversions or when mobile device users have lower engagement with the performing ad.
Common Mistakes When Doing Paid Ads For Movers
There are many ways in which paid ad strategies can go wrong. To lessen any mistakes that can happen, keep an eye out for the most commonly forgotten issues when implementing paid ads for movers:
Broad Targeting
Paid ads work best when you have a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a made-up person that’s designed to become the ideal client for your company. From their interests to their ages and purchasing power, a buyer persona allows you to minimize your targeting to the specifics of what type of lead tends to turn into a sale.
While your leads will naturally not fit all of the boxes that your buyer persona does, it will give you insight on which methods (from the tone of your content to the peak times your ads should perform) are the most effective.
Lack of Negative Keywords
Implementing negative keywords is crucial to ensure you don’t waste your paid ads on irrelevant searches. Take, for example, the service senior moving. If you don’t remove the keywords unrelated to senior moving (like senior community programs or fitness centers) you are likely to receive less leads.
Poor Landing Pages
Landing pages are essential to track your paid ads progress. However, a poorly written and made landing page can turn off a lead. If it’s confusing, has too many navigational buttons, and doesn’t get straight to the point, a potential lead will leave the landing page and refuse to provide any information for retargeting.
No Tracking
Tracking is a necessity for maintenance and reoptimization of your paid ads strategy. Failure to track whether or not your paid ads are performing past the KPI or below it is funneling cash without knowing the expected outcome.
Budgeting
The costs of your paid strategy must always be less than the return. Ensure that you total out your costs by dividing them by the number of leads and conversions you receive. Should your results be below a maximum of at least 30%, you’re doing well.
Paid Ads for A Solid SEO Foundation
Ultimately, a solid SEO foundation can get you the best results you need for the long term. However, having paid ads gives you a significant boost to support your performing content and ads.
Having difficulty with PPC management? Or are you thinking about hiring an expert PPC specialist? Mover Search Marketing is a great agency that specializes specifically in paid ads for movers.
Author Bio:
Bryan Bloom is a digital marketing expert who helps moving companies grow through SEO, PPC advertising, and high-converting website design. As the former owner of Priority Moving, Inc. in San Diego, he built the company’s online visibility from the ground up, earning top rankings for competitive moving-related searches and driving significant growth before the business was sold. Bryan later founded Mover Search Marketing, where he helps moving companies across the United States improve search rankings, generate qualified leads, and strengthen their online presence. A recognized voice in the moving industry, he has written extensively about SEO for movers and regularly speaks at industry events nationwide.
About Mover Search Marketing
Mover Search Marketing helps moving companies generate more leads through SEO, Google Business Profile optimization, website design, paid advertising, and AI search optimization.
Unlike general marketing agencies, we focus exclusively on the moving industry. We understand what movers need because we’ve spent years working with moving companies and helping them grow.
Our goal is simple: increase your visibility, generate more qualified leads, and help you book more moves.
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About Moversville
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