Digital Marketing for Freight & Logistics Companies: Key Takeaways
- Our SEO costs ~$1000/month
- Our Google Ads management costs $450/month.
- Google (Local SEO, Organic SEO & Google Ads) is the bread and butter for logistics companies.
- Track keywords, organic traffic, conversions, Google Business Page
Client Case Study: Our Marketing Strategy for a Local Logistics Company
- It all starts with a great website. This means the site is simple to navigate for users and is easy for search engines to find. Make sure it loads reasonably fast, is mobile optimized and includes obvious call to actions.
- Turn on Google Ads. For freight forwarding & brokerage terms these campaigns are profitable. If you don’t want to learn PPC yourself, talk to us.
- Make sure your Google Business Page is on-point. The bar isn’t very high. The majority of your competitors will have less than 40 reviews. Ask loyal customers to leave you a review. Request reviews regularly, ideally with an automated system.
- Submit your logistics & freight business to online directories. The big three are: local directories, trade specific directories and mega directories (eg: Yelp, BBB).
- Setup Google Search Console (GSC). If you’re using WordPress setup Yoast or Rank Math to generate a sitemap. Submit your sitemap to GSC. If it doesn’t index push it through manually.
- Build and optimize the important page. Homepage, logistics, freight forwarding etc.
- Write content to support your search engine rankings (but do it well)
- Build links. Some lower quality links are fine (eg: local business directories) otherwise focus on quality.
- Review your Google Search Console data and keyword tracking data and iterate where necessary. This may mean adding more content, improving UX, adding more unique media or updating old content.
- Review your SEO marketing strategy and build on steps 3, 4, 7, 8 and 9.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely here for one of two reasons.
- You’re dissatisfied with your current SEO provider. This could be for a lot of reasons but ultimately it’s because your expectations are not matching the reality.
- You are a marketing manager or owner of a logistics company that is not currently running SEO and you’re wondering if digital marketing it might be a good fit for your business.
Let’s start with the questions every single client asks.
How much does Marketing Cost for Logistics & Freight Companies?
An SEO campaign will typically cost between $750-$1500/month. A PPC campaign will cost $400-$500/month to manage and $1000+ on Google Ads itself.
For context, we have a client in a city of 1m people and we charge $900/month for SEO and $400/month for Google Ads plus the ad spend.
Book A Free Marketing Strategy For Your Logistics Business
How long will it take for Digital Marketing to work for my Logistics Business?
With Google Ads we can start driving high intent clicks to your business immediately.
With SEO, it takes a little bit longer. If you have an existing website we sometimes drive additional visitors in as little as 2-3 months. Sometimes a website upgrade can immediately give you rankings a big lift.
Typically what we see is it takes 6-9 months to start seeing good returns on the SEO work done.
What’s an easy way for me to determine if my Logistics company is a good candidate for Digital Marketing?
If you’re in a city with over 500k people digital marketing should work for your business. Logistics is unique in that there aren’t that many companies that offer that service AND are digitally savvy.
We’ve found even the big legacy companies tend to be a little bit clunky as it relates to SEO and Google Ads. There have been some big tech start ups in recent years like Flexport, a big freight forwarding company that have come in and done a masterful job with their digital marketing strategy. And there are a number of smaller companies like DynaRoute who focus on last mile logistics who are also doing a great job with their digital marketing.
However there is almost always room at a local level to rank for keywords like freight forward + city, customs broker + city, freight + city, truck companies + city and so on.
So back to the question: does digital marketing work well for freight & logistics companies?
In our experience digital marketing tends to be a good marketing channel for freight and logistic companies.
