I Wrote a Mover’s Homepage Line for a Robot, Not His Sister

Every mover I know does the walk-through in the same order, every single time.

Front door, living room, kitchen, up the stairs, and only then do you ask about the basement, because the basement is where the honest answer to your estimate is hiding.

You look at the turn at the top of the staircase before you look at the sofa, and you already know which of those two is going to be the problem on the day.

Then you name everything you saw. Wardrobe boxes, dish pack, the piano, the chest freezer nobody thought to mention on the phone.

By the time you walk back out to the truck, every object in that house has a label, a number and a line on your sheet.

How long does naming a wardrobe box take you? A second and a half, and you have never once left one blank.

Now think about your own website, where one line has never been named by anybody at all.

Where your trade lands on that line

A while back I ranked all 47 trades on that one line, and moving companies came out 36th, with 98.9% of the sites carrying that line.

The national figure sits at 99.1%, so hardly anybody in your trade is missing it, and I want that said plainly before I go one step further.

The line is nearly always there. The line is nearly always the problem.

A check that almost everyone passes tells you almost nothing about who gets hired, which is why the surgeon across town passed the same one and still lost the patient.

And I can say that with some authority, because one of the worst ones ever written came out of my own keyboard, and the client paid me for it.

What I wrote, and why I was pleased with myself

Years ago I built a website for a moving company, back when I read every search blog I could find and believed most of them.

The title tag is the only writing on a business website I can read without opening the website at all, and it never shows up on the page while you are reading one. Your customer never finds it sitting there either. She meets it in a list of search results, in the moment she’s deciding which of six companies gets her phone call.

The one sitting on his homepage had his city in it three times, the word movers twice, and the word cheap, which he had never asked for and would not have chosen.

I was delighted with it, and I sent him a note explaining how clever it was.

Then I opened his homepage to admire my work, and the tab across the top of my browser had run out of room somewhere in the middle of the second town name, with the rest of my clever line sitting out of sight, doing nothing for anyone.

Did it work?

In a manner of speaking, yes, and that’s what made it so hard for anyone to argue with me at the time.

He turned up in searches. He also turned up looking exactly like the companies people have trained themselves to scroll straight past.

It worked, technically.

Would you have called him? Be honest about it, because you scroll past those results as fast as anybody else does.

His sister asked him at a family dinner why his website looked like the outfits that phone you about your air ducts.

A month later a customer said it out loud on the phone, in the first ten seconds, before anybody had talked about dates or stairs or what he charged.

“You’re a real company though, right? With a yard and trucks and everything?”

He said yes. He was still saying yes to that question a year later, on call after call, and I had handed him the reason in a single line.

The cost never showed up as a ranking

That’s the part I got most wrong, and it took me an embarrassing amount of time to see it.

My eyes were on whether the site turned up at all. Nobody was watching what happened in the ten seconds after it did.

He was starting every conversation from behind, proving he was a real business with real insurance before he could get anywhere near the estimate.

How many people never called him at all? Neither of us will ever know, and that number is the expensive one.

Nobody phones a company to tell it that its search result looked cheap. They just don’t call.

What I do differently now

I write that line before anything else on the site gets built, in the words the owner actually says while he’s standing in a driveway with a clipboard. It sits near the top of the list I work through before a site goes live, above anything anybody would call design.

I put the company name at the end of it, not the front, because nobody is searching for a name they haven’t heard yet.

Then it gets read out loud, once, at speaking pace, and anything that sounds silly out loud gets written again.

And I stopped writing for the machine, which was the whole of my mistake in the first place. The machine was never the one deciding.

What would yours sound like read out loud to a woman in her hallway? That’s the only test I run on it now.

The hallway runs your blog too. Another mover had forty articles up and not one of them answered what customers ask him in a hallway.

Your trade is not bad at this

None of this is a story about a careless industry, and I’d hate for you to close the tab thinking it was.

Moving companies average 75 out of 100 across the ten checks I run, which is a perfectly respectable place to sit.

96.0% of them hold at least one Google review, and that only happens in a trade where people are comfortable asking a customer for something face to face.

You asked for one last week, in an empty living room, with the truck idling at the curb and her keys already in her hand. She said yes, didn’t she?

You ask for the review. You ask for the referral. You ask the awkward question about the basement.

The line on your website is the one thing nobody ever asked anybody to write, so it got written by a template, or by a fellow like me who thought he was being smart.

It happens everywhere. I read forty solar homepages in a row once and the line was missing from every single one.

The one job

Open your homepage on a laptop and look at the wording along the top of the browser tab.

If it reads like a shopping list of search terms with pipes between them, or if it says the name of a template you’ve never heard of, rewrite it as a sentence a person would say: what you move, the place you move it, and then who you are.

That’s it. Now ignore everything else in this post.

Ignore the score, ignore where your trade ranks, ignore my client’s sister. One line, on one page, before the end of the week.

If you’d rather that line and the thirty behind it were someone else’s job, looking after the whole website is the work I do for movers.

But you can do this one yourself in the time it takes to drink a coffee, and I’d rather you beat me to it.