Local & Industries · 8 min read · September 24, 2026 · Hafsa Tariq, gaash.ai
Win locally as a mover: what buyers ask an assistant and what to state
A moving company gets named by an assistant for the towns it serves when its site states, in text a machine can read, where it is based, which towns it moves people from and to, what a two-bedroom move costs, whether it is licensed and insured, and whether it does weekends, stairs and storage. Those are the questions buyers ask, and the answer is built from whoever states them.
What do people ask an assistant about movers?
They ask the questions they would ask on the phone, with the town in the sentence and one specific worry attached. The assistant fetches pages that seem to answer, reads them without a browser, and writes two or three names into a paragraph. A page that states the specific thing gets matched to the question that asked for it; a page that says "stress-free moves, big or small" matches nothing.
- "movers in Spokane that also do long distance to Portland"
- "how much does it cost to move a two-bedroom apartment across Denver"
- "licensed and insured movers near Tempe"
- "moving company in Naperville that works Saturdays"
- "movers who will do a third-floor walk-up with no elevator"
- "movers with storage for a month between houses in Raleigh"
Each one is a fact about you that either is or is not on your site. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the work is on the site rather than on the assistant. There is no lever inside ChatGPT or Gemini that we or anyone else can pull; there is only what your pages say when they are fetched.
What your site has to state
One statement per question, in plain text, on the page where a person would look for it. The table gives the six questions, what answers each, and where the answer goes. None of it is marketing; all of it is the information your office gives out twenty times a day.
| What the buyer asks | What the page has to state | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| "local or long distance?" | Both services by name, with the towns you move within and the states or provinces you move to | The services page and the homepage, in a sentence, not behind a tab |
| "what does a two-bedroom move cost?" | A range in dollars by home size and distance, and the three things that move it: stairs, distance from the truck to the door, packing | A prices page in HTML text, never a PDF |
| "are you licensed and insured?" | The license or registration numbers you hold and who issued them, and the coverage options you offer, as plain facts | The footer and the about page, worded the same on both |
| "do you work weekends?" | Hours for each day, including Saturday and Sunday, and whether a weekend move costs more | The contact page in text, and openingHoursSpecification in the markup |
| "can you handle a third-floor walk-up?" | A stated stairs and elevator policy: what you do, what you charge extra for, what you will not carry | The prices page, under its own heading |
| "do you have storage between houses?" | Yes or no; where the storage is, how long a customer can keep things there, and how it is charged | A storage page, or a section of the services page |
Every one of these belongs under a heading that is the question itself, with the answer in the two or three sentences that follow. That shape is an answer page in miniature, and it is the form an assistant can lift whole. Your name, address and phone number sit in the footer of every one of these pages, written identically, because the assistant has to be sure whose answer it is quoting.
The schema type is MovingCompany
The schema.org vocabulary has a type for this trade. MovingCompany is one of the LocalBusiness subtypes, and using it instead of a generic Organization tells a machine what kind of business the page describes without a word of prose. The properties that matter are the ones Google's local business documentation lists: name, address, telephone, opening hours, geo, priceRange, plus areaServed for the towns. A template, to be filled with your own facts:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "MovingCompany",
"name": "Your Moving Company",
"url": "https://www.example.com/",
"telephone": "+1-555-555-0100",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "100 Example Street",
"addressLocality": "Spokane",
"addressRegion": "WA",
"postalCode": "99201",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"areaServed": ["Spokane", "Spokane Valley", "Coeur d'Alene", "Portland"],
"openingHoursSpecification": [{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"],
"opens": "07:00",
"closes": "19:00"
}],
"priceRange": "$$"
}Two rules from Google's structured data introduction govern the rest. Write it as JSON-LD, which is the format Google recommends, and mark up only what a visitor can see on the page. The markup does not replace the text; it confirms it. A page whose markup says Saturday and whose contact page says Monday to Friday has given the assistant a contradiction, not a fact.
What the audit found for movers
Movers do better on markup than almost every other trade we measured. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, September 2026), 16.1% of moving company sites had no schema.org markup at all, second only to carpenters at 15.8% among the trades with a hundred or more sites in the sample, and well ahead of real estate agents at 33.6%.
That is the good news, and it is smaller than it looks, because across the whole sample most of the markup that did exist described the website (WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList) rather than the business. The page builder put it there. LocalBusiness or a subtype appeared on roughly a quarter of all sites. A mover with WebPage markup and no MovingCompany markup is counted among the sites that have schema, and has told the machine nothing about moving.
The figures that decide a local answer are worse and are not specific to movers. Across all 9,483 sites, 61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and 50.7% had at least one heading phrased as a question with no answer under it a machine could isolate. 43.1% were inconsistent about their own name, address or phone across three pages. 64.7% showed no review signal a crawler could read. And 2.1% kept their real content, which for a mover is the price list, inside a PDF.
The fix order for a moving company
- One identity, every page. One name, one address, one phone number, in the footer of every page and on the contact and about pages, character for character. Add the list of towns you serve as text next to it. This step costs an afternoon and everything after it depends on it.
- MovingCompany markup. The template above, filled in from the footer, so the two cannot disagree. Add
areaServedwith the same towns andopeningHoursSpecificationwith the same hours. - The prices page, in text. Ranges by home size and distance, the stairs and packing surcharges, the storage terms, all as HTML. If it exists today as a PDF, retype it; a crawler that will not open a file cannot quote it.
- The six questions, as headings, answered. The table above is the outline. Put the answers where a person would look for them and keep each under eighty words.
- Reviews on the page. Quote two or three real ones with the reviewer's first name and the platform, and add a rating in markup only where the rating is shown on the page with its source. Google's rules forbid marking up reviews of yourself that you wrote.
- Check what a crawler receives. Fetch a page as a crawler would, with scripts off, and confirm the words above are in the HTML and not behind a bot challenge. Then measure.
How to know whether it worked
Write six to twelve buyer questions, one per town and service pairing that matters to you, in the words above. Put each to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity three times, because one run varies, and record whether you were named, whether you were recommended, whether you were first, and which other movers were named. Repeat monthly with the same questions. The procedure we run for clients is narrower: twelve questions for a mover's towns and services, each put once per reading to one assistant, Claude: a baseline, again once the fixes are live, and every month with monitoring. The questions have to stay fixed either way, or the readings stop comparing.
Two limits worth stating. A single reading is not a rate; our own probe named 14.9% of businesses on one Claude question each, and we label that directional for exactly that reason. And being named is not the same as being recommended, which is why the record keeps both. What the numbers will show, month by month, is whether the six statements above are now being read. Nothing else on this page can show that.
Common questions
Should I publish prices when every move is different?
Yes, as ranges with the things that move them. "A local two-bedroom move usually falls in this range; stairs, a long carry from the truck and packing add to it" is a sentence an assistant can quote and a buyer can plan around. "Call for a quote" gives it nothing. Publish the ranges as HTML text on a page of their own; 2.1% of the sites in our audit kept the price list in a PDF, where a crawler that will not open files never sees it.
Do I need a separate page for every town I serve?
No. One page that lists the towns in text, with a paragraph for the three or four that bring most of your work, does the job. Write a page for a single town only when you have something different to say about it: parking permits, elevator buildings, a storage yard nearby. Twenty pages with the town name swapped and the rest identical give a machine nothing to distinguish them by.
Does the assistant check whether I am really licensed and insured?
We cannot see it verify anything against a registry, and we do not claim it does. What we can say is that a license number and an insurance statement written on the page are facts it can read and repeat, and an unstated one is absent from every answer. State the numbers, name the issuer, and use the same words in the footer and on the about page so the two cannot be read as different claims.
Is MovingCompany markup enough on its own?
No. Google's own guidance is to mark up only what the visitor can see, so the markup describes the text rather than standing in for it. A site with clean MovingCompany JSON-LD and a homepage that never says which towns it serves has told a machine its type and its address and nothing a buyer asked about. Write the statements first, then mark them up.
Sources
The trade figures are our own, from the audit named below; the sample was drawn per metro and trade, not from a random frame, and the 14.9% figure is one Claude probe per business, not a rate. What the schema types and properties are comes from schema.org and Google's documentation, linked where used.
Sources: our audit of 9,483 small-business sites, with its method · schema.org, LocalBusiness and its subtypes · Google, local business structured data · Google, introduction to structured data
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