Unique Movers Explodes Across Central Minnesota With Website Design, SEO, & GMB
Originally Published October 2021
Unique Movers is an up-and-coming moving company, initially catering to the St. Cloud, MN area and residential moves only. Started in 2015 under the leadership of Connor Steen and Nicole Horstman, their drive and ability to assemble a strong, reliable, and effective team quickly helped Unique Movers build a loyal following of clients.
The future was looking bright for Unique Movers, except – they needed a way to quickly and effectively communicate how different they are compared to other movers in the area, take requests for moving dates, and draw in searchers from Google to use Unique Movers instead of a competitor.
So, where would Unique movers turn for marketing and website design help in the St. Cloud area? Cohlab Digital Marketing.
Let’s break down what we did.
Unique Movers Explodes Across St. Cloud, Alexandria, Brainerd, Willmar, and Monticello Areas With Website, SEO, & GMB
Proposal
2017
Back in 2017, Connor and Nicole reached out to Cohlab Digital Marketing to help create Unique Movers’ first website. The first Unique Movers website was fairly basic, but helped their clients understand what they offered and handled basic search engine optimization (SEO) well.
Over the course of a few years, Unique Movers and Cohlab Digital Marketing continued to partner on a Google My Business listing for their Sauk Rapids shop, helping with logos and other graphics, and minor website updates.
2020
As the COVID-19 pandemic started to affect material prices, home prices, and affect where people choose to live, Connor and Nicole recognized the need for advanced SEO techniques to capture more of the market, spread the business across the state, and capture market share from their competitors.
A virtual meeting was set up between Connor, Nicole, and the Cohlab team, where a proposal was presented. This proposal advocated for an entirely new website to be built in WordPress, utilizing advanced SEO techniques such as:
- regular Google Lighthouse Audits and updates
- City Pages
- additional Service Pages
- Reputation Management (reviews)
- consistent client photos with alt text for the website and GMBs
- additional Google My Business (GMB) listings
October 2020, New WordPress Website Design, Reputation Management, & Advanced SEO
After a series of interviews and information gathering, new rounds of keyword research were conducted, a new sitemap was authored, and a new homepage design was mocked-up.
Unique Movers were also encouraged to hire a professional photographer/videographer to make the most of their new website and include their own imagery, personnel photos, client photos, and videos.
The keywords, sitemap, and designer were all fine-tuned as content was created, optimized, and edited for the entire website, including a new series of city-focused pages to drive geographically-specific searches, though excluding St. Cloud and Waite Park as we were ranking with our home page there:
- Alexandria, MN
- Brainerd, MN
- Kimball, MN
- Little Falls, MN
- Monticello, MN
- St. Augusta, MN
- St. Joseph, MN
- Sartell, MN
- Sauk Rapids, MN
- Willmar, MN
After the sitemap, design, and content were approved, a development site was created on Cohlab’s servers to show Unique Movers how the new WordPress website would look and react in real-life. The content is included at this point, along with any photos and videos that were provided.
We also gathered together all of their existing social media and industry websites, such as Yelp, BBB, YellowPages, Google, Facebook, Houzz, etc. and brought all of the reviews into our Cohlab.Reviews software so they could be displayed live (refreshed twice a day) on the website all together, and make leaving a review extremely easy for clients.
Before Unique Movers’ new website went live, we mapped a series of redirects from their old website, ensured our new hosting would be faster, ran a number of Google Lighthouse Audits to optimize the site, and fine-tuned any other performance or UX issues.
November 2020-January 2021, New St. Cloud Area GMB Locations
Connor, Nicole, and the Cohlab team worked closely together on creating new GMB locations across the St. Cloud area in order to better compete in Google Search results as well as Google Maps. Unique Movers already had their Sauk Rapids shop showing up on Google Maps since 2017 with Cohlab. With the Unique Movers team working out of their homes, and new pandemic-related rules from Google, opening new Google My Business locations became a great strategy.
New GMBs were set up in three new locations:
- Kimball
- St. Joseph
- St. Cloud
Each location needed a deluge of data to be as complete as possible, compete with other moving companies in search results, and provide the best experience possible for potential customers. Data we needed for these locations included:
- Name
- Category
- Address (hidden for service-area-businesses or SABs)
- Hours Of Operation
- Phone
- Website
- Description
- Opening Date
- Logo & Other Photography (ongoing)
- Health & Safety
Results
First, we’ll let Unique Movers speak for themselves:
Unique Movers
5-Stars | Google Review | Sept. 13, 2021
“Cohlab Digital Marketing has been a fabulous company to work with! They built and designed our entire website at Unique Movers! Not only have they built our website, they also help with marketing and giving us ideas for new ways to get our business name out there! We have worked with them for well over 5 years! We work closely with Logan, and he has been so accommodating, and helpful!”
Note: Did you enjoy that review? Check out more reviews from Cohlab clients!
We’ll be looking at the 12-month period of Nov. 2020-Oct. 2021, along with the previous year for that same period for comparison.
Note: City-related data is pulled via Zip Code, so may include some areas you expect – and others you don’t – of certain cities depending on whether there are multiple zip codes involved.
Website Analytics | Nov. 2020-Oct. 2021 (2021) vs. Nov. 2019-Oct. 2020 (2020)
Overall Website Performance
2021 Overall Website Users: 9,645
2020 Overall Website Users: 4,859
Percentage Change: 99% Increase
2021 Users From Google Search: 5,221
2020 Users From Google Search: 2,527
Percentage Change: 106% Increase
Alexandria Area Website Performance
2021 Alexandria Users: 59
2020 Alexandria Users: 8
Percentage Change: 638% Increase
Brainerd Area Website Performance
2021 Brainerd Users: 89
2020 Brainerd Users: 25
Percentage Change: 256% Increase
Kimball Area Website Performance
2021 Kimball Users: 12
2020 Kimball Users: 5
Percentage Change: 140% Increase
Little Falls Area Website Performance
2021 Little Falls Users: 188
2020 Little Falls Users: 103
Percentage Change: 83% Increase
Monticello Area Website Performance
2021 Monticello Users: 47
2020 Monticello Users: 14
Percentage Change: 236% Increase
St. Augusta Area Website Performance
2021 St. Augusta Users: 0
2020 St. Augusta Users: 0
Percentage Change: N/A% Increase
St. Cloud Area Website Performance
2021 St. Cloud Users: 1,948
2020 St. Cloud Users: 1,058
Percentage Change: 80% Increase
St. Joseph Area Website Performance
2021 St. Joseph Users: 57
2020 St. Joseph Users: 27
Percentage Change: 111% Increase
Sartell Area Website Performance
2021 Sartell Users: 314
2020 Sartell Users: 235
Percentage Change: 34% Increase
Sauk Rapids Area Website Performance
2021 Sauk Rapids Users: 107
2020 Sauk Rapids Users: 87
Percentage Change: 23% Increase
Waite Park Area Website Performance
2021 Waite Park Users: 32
2020 Waite Park Users: 19
Percentage Change: 68% Increase
Willmar Area Website Performance
2021 Willmar Users: 77
2020 Willmar Users: 7
Percentage Change: 889% Increase
Google My Business Analytics
Below, we will extrapolate what the website visits, direction requests, phone calls, and text messages would have looked like over the past 10 months for the four Google My Business listings we created.
Note: We only have data for the past four months, so we’ve extrapolated that data to a twelve-month range.
Unique Movers GMB Overall, Nov. 2020-Aug. 2021
- Website Visits: 5,820
- Direction Requests: 3,426
- Phone Calls: 2,338
- Text Messages: 187
Unique Movers GMB, Kimball, MN, Nov. 2020-Aug. 2021
- Website Visits: 28
- Direction Requests: 615
- Phone Calls: 0
- Text Messages: 0
Unique Movers GMB, Sauk Rapids, MN, Nov. 2020-Aug. 2021
- Website Visits: 5,364
- Direction Requests: 1,347
- Phone Calls: 2,235
- Text Messages: 187
Unique Movers GMB, St. Cloud, MN, Nov. 2020-Aug. 2021
- Website Visits: 344
- Direction Requests: 907
- Phone Calls: 87
- Text Messages: 0
Unique Movers GMB, St. Joseph, MN, Nov. 2020-Aug. 2021
- Website Visits: 84
- Direction Requests: 1,143
- Phone Calls: 15
- Text Messages: 0
ROI For Website Design, SEO, & GMB
Through partnership with Cohlab Digital Marketing, the Unique Movers team was able to generate the following results from their website design, SEO, and GMB in just one year:
- more than 180 text messages via GMB;
- more than 2,000 additional phone calls via GMB;
- more than 5,000 additional website visits from GMB; and,
- more than 100% increase in visitors from Google Search overall!
Additionally, their website and GMB will continue to stay relevant in search results and maps for a long time! They may need some maintenance: photos added, details updated, changes based on Google’s whims, etc. But they can take care of it in-house if they have the desire, or they can always come back to Cohlab for additional help. That means their ROI will only continue to grow as time goes on.
Thank you to Connor Steen, Nicole Horstman, and the entire team at Unique Movers for partnering with Cohlab Digital Marketing for your website design, SEO, and Google My Business! We’re proud to serve local businesses and local communities. Get in touch with Logan Gruber near St. Cloud for your marketing and website needs near Saint Cloud, Annandale, Cold Spring, Milaca, Rice, St. Joseph, Sartell, Sauk Rapids, and Waite Park.
Cohlab Digital Marketing