Logistics
SEO for freight forwarders
A freight forwarder ran through our August 2026 benchmark, and its competitor lists exposed the gap between brand peers and search rivals.
The forwarders who outrank you are not the brands you compare yourself to.
Global logistics names dominate the industry conversation, but the SERPs for a market's freight searches are owned by local forwarders with specific lane and service pages.
That split showed up exactly in our August 2026 benchmark: the SEO team listed 5 global freight brands as the client's competitors, the tool's discovery returned 10 local forwarders from the live SERPs, and the two lists shared nothing. Both are defensible lists; only one is the set of sites holding the positions you want.
The forwarder site itself graded A in that benchmark with 15 checks passed, 7 warnings and 7 fails over 91 pages, and produced the largest keyword set of the fourteen clients at 30 recommended keywords. Lane, mode and service searches stack up quickly once someone enumerates them, which is exactly what most forwarder sites never do.
Keyword research that enumerates your lanes
Air, sea, customs, warehousing, project cargo, per market: keyword research pulls volume, difficulty and intent for the searches your services actually generate. In our August 2026 benchmark this niche produced 30 recommended keywords, more than any other client.
Help centre: Keyword researchA map from services to pages
The keyword map matches every lane and service search to a page and names the missing ones. Forwarder sites tend to bury five distinct services in one capabilities page, and the map is where they get separated.
Competitors from the SERP, not the deck
Discovery returns the forwarders ranking for your terms in your market, with evidence per pick, and you approve the list. The global brands stay in your board slides; the tracking runs against the sites actually above you.
A technical audit built for old, deep sites
Forwarder sites accumulate years of pages, redirects and stale structures. The audit crawls the live site, grades what it verified, and lists what it could not reach as unverified rather than guessing, so the fix list a developer gets is entirely real.
Start with the free tools
Each one runs without an account, on your own site or keywords, before anything is signed up for.
- Keyword checker
- Check search volume, difficulty and intent for any keyword.
- SEO competitor analysis
- Compare a domain against its organic rivals.
- On-page meta checker
- Inspect a page's title, meta, headings, canonical and status.
- Website traffic checker
- Estimate a website's organic traffic.
Questions people in this niche ask
The ones that decide whether this fits, answered with the verdict first.
- Our competitors are global brands. Why does the tool list local firms?
- Because the local firms hold the rankings. In our August 2026 benchmark the team's global list and the SERP's local list shared zero names; for winning positions in one market, the local list is the one that matters.
- Do we need a page per trade lane?
- Per lane people search for, yes. The keyword data says which lanes carry real search volume in your market, and the map turns exactly those into pages instead of templating hundreds nobody types.
- Our buyers come from referrals. Is search worth it in freight?
- The keyword volumes say yes: our August 2026 benchmark found 30 real keywords for one forwarder, the most of any client in the run. Referred buyers also search you before calling, which the same pages serve.
- Our site is old and has hundreds of pages. Where do we start?
- With the audit. It grades the live site, orders fixes by impact, and marks what it could not verify instead of guessing. On a site with years of accumulation, the ordered list is the difference between a project and a swamp.
What we will not do
We will not measure you against global brand peers when the SERP says your rivals are local, however much better the brand list looks in a deck.
Logistics
See it on your own site
A free audit grades your site A+ to F, then the keyword map says which pages your niche is missing. No card required.