Services — search
Search work for freight, trucking, brokerage and 3PL operators — pointed at the lanes, equipment and compliance questions shippers actually type, not at the generic shipping terms the load boards already own.
Winnable — we build here
Held by the boards — we do not bid here
DAT · Truckstop.com · Uber Freight hold the head terms · Site $2,450 flat · Ongoing search $995 a month
Logistics SEO is search work built around a business buyer rather than a consumer. Your traffic is freight managers, supply-chain directors and procurement teams, and they search with high commercial intent in precise industry language: “drayage company Los Angeles”, “3PL fulfillment partner Midwest”, “customs broker for ecommerce imports”. Ranking for those terms requires pages with real operational depth. Keyword density does nothing here.
In practice it combines three things. Technical site health — the kind of freight and logistics web design that loads fast, canonicalises correctly and carries valid service schema. Content authoritative enough to answer the operational questions a buyer has before they will call you. And link acquisition from sources inside the trade: transportation directories, industry associations, supply-chain publications. Local search sits across all three, because most logistics buyers want capacity within a specific region or with access to a specific port.
The newer layer is retrieval. A material share of vendor research now happens inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, where there is no results page to rank on — only an answer you are either cited in or absent from. That is a related but separate discipline, and it is what AI search optimisation for logistics covers.
Why a specialist
A generalist agency does not know the difference between a freight broker and a freight forwarder. It cannot tell you which terms a shipper uses versus which ones a carrier uses, it does not know that an MC number and a CSA score are trust signals worth putting above the fold, and it has no model of how a supply-chain decision-maker evaluates a vendor online. That gap gets paid for out of your budget, in month one, as education.
When a shipper searches for “reefer trucking company California” or “customs broker for FDA shipments”, the intent is specific and the expectations are specific with it. The page has to match both — with authoritative, detailed content that demonstrates you have done this exact thing before. That is why SEO and logistics marketing are the same engagement in practice: the ranking is only useful if there is something substantial at the end of it.
We work only in logistics. Freight terminology, transportation regulation, carrier networks and the competitive dynamics of each vertical are the starting position rather than the first deliverable — from trucking SEO through to moving company SEO and 3PL search. Specialisation is why the work starts faster and why the leads that come out of it are qualified.
Diagnosis
Six structural failures that are specific to ranking a logistics site, and what we do about each one.
Problem
FixTarget selection before optimisation
DAT, Truckstop.com, Uber Freight and the big directories hold the generic freight queries, and no amount of on-page work dislodges them. The winnable ground is specific: equipment plus lane, mode plus region, commodity plus credential. “Flatbed trucking company Dallas” and “temperature-controlled freight forwarder” are terms a single operator can rank for and convert. “Shipping company” is not.
Problem
FixLink acquisition inside the trade
A new logistics site is competing with carriers that have twenty years of link history. The route through is industry-native rather than general: transportation and supply-chain directories, association memberships, port and terminal listings, shipper association profiles, and content that trade publications will actually reference. Slow, but it is the only kind of authority that holds.
Problem
FixOne deep page per service you actually sell
Most freight sites list eight services in eight sentences. That page cannot rank and cannot convert, because it answers none of the questions a shipper has: what equipment, what lanes, what accessorials, what compliance, what turn times. Every service gets a page long enough and specific enough to be the best available answer for its query.
Problem
FixTerminal-level local SEO
Shippers search for capacity near their facilities, and that behaviour holds even for national operations. Each terminal, yard or office gets a Google Business Profile, consistent NAP across freight directories, a location page with real detail about what runs out of it, and LocalBusiness markup. Multi-terminal operators are the biggest beneficiaries and the most common to get this wrong.
Problem
FixStructured data built for freight
Without markup, a crawler sees a page about trucks and cannot tell a drayage move from an LTL lane. We implement Service schema per offering, LocalBusiness per location, Organization for entity identity, BreadcrumbList for hierarchy, and FAQPage where the questions genuinely appear on the page. No review or rating markup — fabricating that is a manual-action risk, not a ranking tactic.
Problem
FixCore Web Vitals as a build constraint
Dispatchers, drivers and shippers check carriers on mobile, often on poor connections. Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift are treated as budgets during the build rather than as a clean-up task afterwards — which is most of why the sites we ship are server-rendered HTML with almost no client-side JavaScript.
Scope of work
A full logistics SEO engagement runs all six. A targeted one runs two or three, and we will tell you which.
Title tags and meta descriptions written as the phrase a freight buyer would type, a real heading hierarchy, internal linking that connects service to lane to location, and body copy that uses industry vocabulary rather than translating around it.
Crawlability and index coverage, canonical handling across near-duplicate lane pages, XML sitemaps that contain only live URLs, robots directives, real 404s and real 301s, and page-speed work against Core Web Vitals thresholds.
Google Business Profile setup and maintenance per location, citation building across transportation directories, NAP consistency between the footer and the structured data, and location pages with enough operational detail to deserve the ranking.
Service-area pages, equipment and mode guides, compliance explainers, and long-form operator content built around real search demand. This is the discipline that becomes topical authority, and it is the one most freight sites skip.
Service, Organization, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage markup, validated and kept in sync with the visible page. Structured data is also the substrate AI assistants read, which is where it overlaps with GEO.
Transportation directory placement, logistics association profiles, freight publication outreach and digital PR aimed at the supply-chain press. Measured on referring domains that a human in the industry would recognise, not on raw link counts.
By vertical
Keyword sets, page structures and conversion mechanics differ in every respect between these nine. We build each against its own search behaviour.
Rank by equipment and lane, with DOT authority, FMCSA standing and CSA scores visible on the page a shipper lands on.
Local pack placement, city-level pages, and a quote flow that survives the mobile traffic those searches send.
Shipper-side queries and carrier-side recruiting at the same time, with bond status and carrier vetting made legible.
FMC licence, NVOCC filing and trade-lane pages that answer a logistics manager comparing four vendors over three weeks.
HTS classification, ACE filing and bond queries — low volume, extremely high intent, and almost entirely uncontested.
WMS integration names, capacity, and SLA detail, which is what an ecommerce shipper is actually filtering on.
Port and terminal names, chassis availability and IPI routing — the most geographically bounded search set in freight.
Service zones, cutoff times and same-day intent, where the search-to-booking window is measured in minutes.
Time-critical and outsized freight, where a handful of queries a month can each be worth a six-figure move.
Freight operates in a search landscape that does not behave like ecommerce or SaaS. The buyer is B2B and the purchase runs through a procurement process: a shipper evaluating a trucking company or a freight broker researches capability, coverage, equipment types and compliance record before they make contact at all. Nothing about that cycle is impulsive, which means the strategy has to serve a reader who arrives already comparing, and who will leave the moment the page fails to answer a specific operational question.
The competitive structure is also unusual. Load boards and marketplaces — DAT, Truckstop.com, Uber Freight — occupy most generic freight keywords, and industry directories and review aggregators hold much of what is left. An individual operator does not out-rank an aggregator on an aggregator's term. What an operator can win is the specific, high-intent query the aggregators do not serve well: “hazmat LTL carrier Northeast”, “bonded customs broker perishable goods”, “step deck oversize permit Texas”. Those queries carry a shipper with an immediate and defined need, and they convert at rates head terms never approach.
The technical requirements are heavier than most agencies expect. A logistics site needs Service markup per lane and per equipment type, LocalBusiness markup for every terminal, and Organization markup that establishes entity identity consistently enough for a knowledge graph to resolve it. Without that structured-data foundation, a search engine can see the words on your drayage page and still not understand that you run drayage. This is also the layer that determines whether an AI assistant can extract a correct answer about you, which is why we build it once and use it twice.
Finally, content has to mirror how supply-chain professionals search. They use trade vocabulary, they search by equipment and by lane, and they evaluate providers on specialisation rather than on breadth of claims. A page that says “we handle all your shipping needs” loses to a page that says what you run, where you run it and what you are certified to carry — with a searcher and with a model. Our content strategy is built to mirror that pattern, page by page, which is the entire reason this site has one page per question rather than one page per service category.
Questions
Expect three to six months for meaningful ranking movement and six to twelve for the traffic to compound. Local and long-tail freight queries move faster — often two to four months — because the competitive set for “drayage company Long Beach” is far thinner than for national head terms. The variables are your current domain authority, how contested your vertical is, and how many services and locations need building out.
Equipment plus geography is the highest-yield pattern: “flatbed trucking services Houston”, “reefer carrier Midwest”, “hazmat LTL Northeast”. Layer on commercial-intent terms that signal a shipper ready to book — “freight shipping quote”, “trucking company near me” — and compliance-led terms where your credentials are a differentiator. Avoid generic mode terms; the load boards own them and you will spend a year losing to them.
The site the ranking work sits on is $2,450, flat, and includes the schema, sitemap and technical SEO foundation. Ongoing search work is $995 a month: two new pages targeted at real search demand, one researched content piece, call tracking and form attribution, and a monthly report that counts quote requests. Both numbers are published on the pricing page — nothing appears only after a call.
It is worth it when your buyers research before they call, which in freight they almost always do. The mechanism is straightforward: a ranked page keeps producing enquiries after you stop paying for it, whereas paid search stops the day the card does. The honest caveat is that it is slow and it compounds, so it suits operators who can wait two quarters. If you need capacity booked this month, that is a paid-media problem, not an SEO one.
SEO earns rankings over months and keeps them; PPC buys visibility instantly and stops when the budget stops. For freight the practical split is that SEO wins the research-phase queries where a shipper is comparing capability, and PPC wins the urgent ones where somebody needs a truck today. Most operators who do well run both, and use the paid data to tell them which organic targets are worth building pages for.
Four things, in order: a page per service that is genuinely the best answer for its query, technical fundamentals (fast, crawlable, correctly marked up), a Google Business Profile per location with consistent NAP, and links from sources inside the transportation industry. Then keep publishing. Nothing on that list is a trick, and there is no version of it that works in six weeks.
Yes — including national operations. Shippers look for capacity near their facilities, so “near me” and city-qualified searches produce some of the highest-intent freight enquiries there are. For a multi-terminal carrier, each facility is its own local search entity: its own profile, its own citations, its own page. Treating a ten-terminal network as one location is the most common local SEO failure in this industry.
Thin service pages, missing or invalid structured data, no Google Business Profile, poor mobile performance, near-duplicate location pages with the city swapped, chasing head terms the load boards own, and no internal linking between services, lanes and locations. A distant eighth: publishing review or rating markup for reviews that do not exist, which is a manual-action risk rather than a ranking shortcut.
Keep reading
Getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews.
The build the ranking work sits on top of.
Content and campaigns that keep the site compounding.
Trucking through to air and ocean charter.
$2,450 flat for the site, $995 a month for ongoing search. What is in each scope.
A web design agency that came out of logistics.
Next step
You get back a specific read on what is holding the site down, which queries are realistically winnable, and what it would take to get there.
