Web design and Google Ads for a Connecticut shipping company that can trace every quote request

City Post Express is a Connecticut shipping company, in the area our New York office covers. When we first looked at its website, it was written almost entirely about domestic e-commerce shipping, with no pages for individual routes. Yet Ireland is the route the business was built on. Most of its customers are in the middle of something big, such as a family relocating, a student heading overseas for a year or someone finally moving home. The people most likely to book were landing on a site that didn't speak to them.

A page for every route

City Post Express knew a great deal about its routes that had never been published anywhere Google could find it, so we rebuilt the site around them. Each of the fourteen destination pages names the customs relief its route runs on, such as Transfer of Residence for Ireland and the UK, Menaje de Casa for Mexico and flyttegods for Norway. A customer can see what paperwork their move involves before they pick up the phone. Guides link to the destination they support, so someone reading about a move to Ireland is one click from a quote for that route. The team can edit every page themselves, and adding a route means filling in a form rather than commissioning a page.

Quote questions that change with the shipment

The old quote form was a freight form asking for piece counts, weights, dimensions and an HS code. That is a fair thing to ask a freight forwarder and an intimidating thing to ask a student with a few boxes of clothes. The enquiries that did get through needed a round of calls and emails before anyone could price them.

We replaced it with a quote wizard on every service and destination page, where the second step changes with the first answer, so each customer is only asked what fits their shipment. A student is asked which way they're travelling and roughly how many boxes, while a household move is asked about rooms and contents. Anything a customer might not know yet has a 'not sure' option.

Tracing every request to the ad or search behind it

Each request used to be typed into the company's CRM by hand, and nobody could say which marketing had brought it in. Now it reaches the team by email at once and lands in the CRM as a new opportunity, with a follow-up task set for the next day. Its source, campaign, search term and landing page sit in fields the team can filter on. The site also records the first and most recent way each visitor arrived, from an ad to an AI assistant's answer. Deciding where to spend is no longer guesswork.

Ads aimed at specific routes instead of generic terms

Generic shipping terms are expensive, so we built the Google Ads programme around specific routes instead. More than 200 negative keywords keep people looking for UPS, FedEx or USPS out of the budget. Each group of ads points to its own landing page, written to match what the searcher asked for.

We also tuned the site for phones, lightening the homepage video and images so pages load quickly and don't jump about while they do.

Just over half of the 321 completed requests in the ads programme's first twelve weeks came from ads, and around one in five came from people who arrived from ChatGPT. The pages for shipping to Ireland and sending boxes to the UK brought in the most.

The guides about moving to Ireland now appear on the first page of Google for the questions they answer.

A quote form should ask each kind of customer only the questions that fit what they need, and let them answer 'not sure' rather than guess. If your expertise lies in the detail of each route, product or place you serve, giving each one its own page makes that knowledge easy to extend and easy for Google to find. Tracing each enquiry from its first visit into your CRM lets you judge every channel by the quotes it brings in rather than by its traffic.

Read more about our web design, SEO, PPC and conversion optimisation services, or see more web design case studies and other moving and storage projects.