She Loved Your Moving Guide on Sunday and Lost You by Tuesday

Nine at night on a Sunday, in a living room with the couch shoved against the wall and eleven moving boxes stacked where the coffee table used to be.

A woman is sitting on the floor with her back against the couch and her phone a few inches from her face.

Her lease is up in three weeks, she has a piano she inherited from her grandmother, and she has no earthly idea what a person is supposed to do with a piano.

So she asks her phone, and her phone hands her your article.

She reads all of it, including the part where you explain why a mover asks about the turn at the top of the stairs before he asks a single question about the piano itself.

These people know what they’re doing, she thinks.

Then she puts the phone down, because it’s nine at night on a Sunday and nobody calls a moving company at nine at night on a Sunday.

Tuesday at lunch she picks it back up and searches for movers in her city, and six results fill the screen.

One of them is you. She has no way of knowing that.

How does a moving company win a customer on a Sunday night and then lose her by Tuesday lunch? I audit websites for a living and I still find that one hard to watch.

Your trade actually writes

Writing is the job every owner I meet swears he’ll get to in the winter, and then winter arrives and the trucks are still out on the road every morning.

Movers do it anyway. 49.6% of moving companies publish something, 5 of 47 trades once I lined them up.

Nothing else about your industry surprised me as much, and I’ve been through all of it twice looking for a better story than that one. Only 37% of the small businesses I audit publish anything at all, and the owners who don’t write have mostly decided they never will.

Why does your trade break the pattern when almost nobody else does? Because a move gets booked weeks ahead of the truck arriving, and every one of those weeks is time your customer spends reading about it.

Nobody sits down to research a plumber. I certainly didn’t, the night my kitchen pipe let go.

Your customer has a date circled on a calendar, a lease ending, a kid changing schools in September. She has evenings, and she spends them on her phone working out what she’s got herself into.

A solar installer I know writes for that exact evening, and the appointments he books now start further along.

The line nobody wrote

Take one line out of a page and see what survives the loss.

The article still reads, the photos still load, your phone number still works, and the page looks exactly the way it looked yesterday afternoon.

The one thing that stops working is a stranger’s ability to pick you out of a list of six. That line is the title tag.

Almost nobody leaves it blank, mind you. 98.9% of moving company sites have that line filled in, 36 of 47 on that same list, and the national figure is 99.1%, so the gap I’m pointing at is thin enough to see straight through.

Filled in by whom, though? On most of the sites I open it was the software, on the afternoon the site was built, using whatever words it could find lying around at the time.

Which leaves you making a strange trade every time you sit down to write something.

You’ll spend a Saturday morning on eight hundred careful words about protecting a hardwood floor in February.

The line that tells a stranger those eight hundred words belong to you takes about eight seconds, and it’s the one that keeps getting skipped.

Eight seconds.

What the gap actually costs

Back to the woman on the floor with the boxes.

Six results on her screen at Tuesday lunch, and four of them name a city and a service while two of them show a company name and the word Home.

Which two do you suppose she skipped without reading them?

She taps the one that mentions pianos, and the mover she calls has never written a word in his life.

You wrote the piece that convinced her. He picked up the phone.

Add it up and that’s one three-bedroom job in July, gone, along with the deposit, the Saturday crew, and whatever her sister was going to book in the spring.

Now count everybody else who read something of yours this year. How many of them ever worked out that the article and the trucks were the same company?

Not many.

The writing did its job. The line above it never had one.

Writing can fail all on its own, in ten ways I run into over and over, and none of them are what went wrong here.

Go and check my work

I’d rather you didn’t take my word for those two numbers, partly because you shouldn’t take anyone’s word for a number and partly because the report is more interesting than my summary of it. Set the trade box to moving companies, leave the city box on all, and one card comes back with every check on it, each one showing how many sites it counted. Read the blog row, then read the title tag row, and tell me those two belong to the same industry.

Does any of that show up on the page you’re looking at when you proofread? Not once, and I think that explains most of why it survives for years at a time.

You proofread the article, you proofread the photo captions, and you probably read the whole thing out loud to someone in the office. The line lives on the browser tab and in the search results, and neither of those is a place you ever look at your own website from.

So it sits there quietly saying the name of your theme, or the word Home, on the best page you own, and I find it that way on working businesses most weeks of my life.

The whole fix is a sentence

Not a rebuild, not a new site, just one sentence per page, and you can start with two pages this afternoon.

Two sentences, then.

Take the article you’re proudest of and take your homepage. On each one, write the name the way you’d answer the phone at seven in the morning: what you move, the city you move it in, then who you are.

Write it for her and not for the software. I wrote one of those lines for a robot once, and it took a mover’s sister to tell me how it read.

Would a stranger learn what you do from that sentence and nothing else? If the honest answer is no, I’ve just found your ten minutes for you.

Then stop and go back to work.

Ten minutes for the pair of them, and you spent longer than that last week arguing with a supplier about pallet wrap.

One question before you close this

How long has your best article been sitting underneath a line that says Blog?

I ask because plenty of owners I talk to have quietly decided that the writing didn’t work for them. It brought nothing in, so they stopped doing it, and they feel a bit foolish about the whole experiment.

One of them emailed me to take his blog down. Forty posts, not one job, and he was about to quit the one habit his trade leads on.

I’d bet the writing worked fine. I’d bet the reader simply couldn’t tell it was you the second time she went looking.

That’s a far cheaper problem to have, and it’s a much nicer thing to discover on a Tuesday than the expensive one you’ve been assuming.

Some owners would rather never think about any of this again, and handing the whole website over is the job I do for movers. But you don’t need me for a sentence, and I’m not going to pretend you do.

A second pair of eyes is worth having, though. Send me the article you’re proudest of, drop the address in here, and I’ll read the line above it the way she would on a Tuesday lunch break.

Then I’ll tell you straight whether she’d have found you.