A Step-by-Step Framework for Auditing Your Moving Company's SEO

An SEO audit is not a single scan — it's a structured review across five interconnected layers. Skipping a layer means missing problems that might be canceling out work you've already done.

The Five Audit Layers

• Technical SEO: Crawlability, indexation, page speed, mobile usability, HTTPS, structured data, and canonical tags. These are the foundation. A technically broken site limits how much the other layers can help.
• Local SEO: Google Business Profile completeness and accuracy, citation consistency across directories, service-area coverage, and local schema markup. For moving companies competing in specific cities, this layer often has the most use.
• On-Page SEO: Title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, keyword alignment, and internal linking across service pages and city landing pages. This is where most DIY audits focus — but it's rarely the only problem.
• Authority and Backlinks: The quality, relevance, and diversity of sites linking to yours. A moving company in a competitive metro needs more domain authority than one serving a rural county.
• Content Quality: Whether your pages answer what searchers actually want, or just repeat target keywords. Thin pages, duplicate city-page templates, and missing service detail all fall here.

Each layer interacts with the others. A site with excellent on-page optimization but poor technical health will still underperform. A technically clean site with thin content won't rank for competitive terms. The audit process exists to map all five layers and identify where your specific gaps are — not to assume the problem before looking.

This guide walks through how to diagnose each layer, what tools to use, and how to prioritize what you find.

Technical Audit: What to Check First

Start with a site crawl using a tool like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or a similar crawler. You're looking for:

• Crawl errors and broken links — pages returning 404 errors, redirect chains longer than two hops, or orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them.
• Indexation issues — check Google Search Console for pages blocked by robots.txt or noindex tags. It's common for moving company sites to accidentally block service pages during site rebuilds.
• Page speed on mobile — use Google PageSpeed Insights or Core Web Vitals data in Search Console. Moving-industry searches are heavily mobile; slow pages lose visitors before they can convert.
• HTTPS and mixed content — your site should be fully secure. Mixed content warnings indicate resources (images, scripts) still loading over HTTP.
• Duplicate content flags — identical or near-identical city pages are a common issue on moving company sites built with templates.

Local SEO Audit: Your Google Business Profile and Citations

For most local movers, this layer has the fastest turnaround on fixes. Check:

• GBP completeness — every field filled in, including services, service areas, business hours, and a description that uses natural service language.
• Category accuracy — your primary category should be "Moving and Storage Service" or the most specific relevant option. Secondary categories matter for broader coverage.
• Citation consistency — your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) should be identical across Yelp, Angi, the BBB, and any directory listing that references your company. Inconsistencies confuse Google's local ranking algorithm.
• Review velocity and recency — not just review count, but whether you're consistently earning new reviews. A profile with 40 reviews all posted two years ago signals lower activity than a competitor with 30 reviews spread over the past six months.

On-Page Audit: Service Pages and City Pages

Moving companies typically have two page types that carry most of their ranking potential: service pages (local moving, long-distance moving, packing services, commercial moves) and city landing pages (moving company in [city]). Both need individual attention.

For each important page, check:

• Title tag alignment — does the title include the service and location? Generic titles like "Services" or "About Us" leave ranking potential on the table.
• Heading structure — a clear H1 that matches search intent, followed by H2s and H3s that organize the content logically. Avoid stuffing multiple H1s on a single page.
• Internal link coverage — can Google reach every service and city page from your homepage within two to three clicks? Orphaned pages rarely rank well.
• Unique meta descriptions — duplicate meta descriptions across city pages are a common finding. Each page should have a description written for its specific location.

Content Quality Audit

This is where moving company sites most frequently fail. Common findings include:

• Templated city pages with swapped city names — search engines recognize near-duplicate content. If your Austin page and your San Antonio page are 95% identical except for the city name, neither will rank well.
• Thin service pages — pages under 300 words rarely satisfy search intent for competitive moving-related queries. They also give Google very little to work with when determining relevance.
• Missing FAQ or trust content — searchers looking for movers have anxiety-driven questions: What does your pricing include? Are you licensed? What happens if something is damaged? Pages that don't address these questions convert poorly even when they rank.

Audit content quality by comparing your top service pages against the pages currently ranking in positions one through three for your target terms. Note the depth, structure, and types of questions they answer that yours don't.

For moving companies in competitive markets — major metros, fast-growing suburbs — backlink authority is often the deciding factor between ranking on page one and ranking on page two. An authority audit answers three questions: how much authority does your site have, where is it coming from, and is any of it doing harm?

What to Look For

Use a tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush to pull your backlink profile. You're evaluating:

• Domain authority distribution — a handful of high-quality local links (local news outlet, chamber of commerce, local business association) typically outperforms dozens of generic directory links.
• Local relevance — links from sites in or about your service area carry more local ranking signal than links from unrelated national sites.
• Anchor text diversity — a healthy profile mixes branded anchors (your company name), generic anchors (click here, learn more), and some keyword-relevant anchors. A profile that's overwhelmingly keyword-exact can trigger algorithmic scrutiny.
• Toxic or spammy links — links from link farms, irrelevant foreign directories, or penalized domains can suppress your rankings. These are less common for local moving companies than for e-commerce sites, but worth reviewing.

What a Realistic Authority Benchmark Looks Like

There is no universal benchmark — authority requirements vary significantly by market competition and city size. In our experience working with local service businesses, a moving company in a mid-size market needs meaningfully less domain authority to rank than one competing in a top-ten metro. The audit should compare your authority profile against the sites currently outranking you, not against an arbitrary number.

If your backlink profile is substantially weaker than the pages ranking above you, that's a priority gap. If your profiles are roughly comparable, the ranking gap is more likely explained by on-page or local factors.

Most moving company site audits surface more issues than can be addressed at once. Prioritization prevents the common mistake of spending time on low-impact fixes while high-impact issues go unresolved.

A Simple Priority Scoring Framework

Score each finding on two dimensions: traffic impact (how much is this issue suppressing rankings or clicks?) and fix complexity (how difficult is this to resolve?). High-impact, low-complexity issues go first. High-impact, high-complexity issues get scheduled with realistic timelines. Low-impact issues — regardless of how easy they are to fix — go to the bottom of the list.

Findings That Are Almost Always High Priority

• Crawl errors blocking important service or city pages from being indexed
• Google Business Profile with missing or inaccurate service-area information
• Inconsistent NAP data across major citation sources
• Duplicate or near-duplicate city landing pages being flagged as thin content
• Core Web Vitals failures on mobile (especially for sites running slow image-heavy galleries)

Findings That Are Often Lower Priority Than They Appear

• Minor meta description rewrites on pages that already rank and convert
• Adding schema markup to pages that don't rank at all (fix the ranking problem first)
• Image alt text on secondary blog posts with no traffic potential

Document your findings in a simple spreadsheet with columns for issue, page affected, impact score, complexity score, and priority tier. This turns an audit from a list of problems into a workable project plan.

When to Bring In Outside Help

If your audit reveals technical issues beyond your comfort level — server-side redirect problems, JavaScript rendering issues, site architecture that requires a rebuild — that's a clear signal to bring in professional support rather than delay action. The same applies if you've completed an audit and aren't confident in how to interpret the findings. An audit that produces a prioritized action plan is useful. An audit that sits in a document without a response plan is not.

An audit is only valuable if it leads to a decision. Once you've completed the five-layer review and prioritized your findings, you're at one of three decision points.

Decision Point 1: You Can Handle It In-House

If your audit revealed primarily on-page issues — title tags, meta descriptions, thin content, internal linking gaps — and you have someone on your team who can implement changes in your CMS, you may be able to address the highest-priority findings without outside help. Set a 90-day window, execute the changes, and track movement in Search Console rankings and GBP insights.

Decision Point 2: You Need Specialist Support for Specific Layers

Technical SEO issues (crawl architecture, page speed at the server level, JavaScript rendering) and link building both require specific expertise that most moving company operators don't have in-house. In these cases, partial engagement with a specialist makes sense — bring in outside help for the layers beyond your capacity while handling on-page content work internally.

Decision Point 3: The Full Picture Is Too Complex to Manage Alongside Running Your Business

If your audit reveals problems across multiple layers, your competitive gap is significant, or you've already attempted fixes that haven't moved rankings, the cost of continued DIY is usually higher than it appears. Time spent on SEO troubleshooting is time not spent on operations, sales, or customer experience — all of which directly affect revenue.

In this case, a professional audit from an SEO specialist who works with moving companies gives you both a verified diagnosis and a team that can act on it. The audit you've done here is a valuable starting point — it tells you what questions to ask and what issues to validate, so any engagement begins from an informed position rather than starting from scratch.

If you're at this decision point, request a professional SEO audit for your moving company to get a verified diagnosis with a prioritized action plan.