Cleaning
How to get a cleaning company found online
A cleaning company has no shopfront, which changes the problem. There is no address for people to search near, so the thing that has to be published is the list of towns actually served, and most companies keep that list in the owner's head.
A site that exists and is not indexed at all is a common fault and a cheap one to fix, so it is worth checking before anything is bought. Nothing here promises a position in a search result.
This plan assumes there is a website already and somebody in the business can change it. If that is not you, the free check asks two questions and builds the version for your own business.
Six you can do yourself, for nothing. One we would do, $99. One thing to leave alone.
This catalogue lists 27 businesses under Cleaning, and not one of them links an Instagram account. 2 of them publish no phone number, so somebody who wants to ring has to send a message instead. Not one of them publishes a price. Those are the businesses somebody is looking at beside you. Count them yourself: they are all on this site.
Step 1You or usCheck Google can see the site at allfree
Search site:yourdomain.com. If nothing comes back, Google has not indexed the site, which is a technical fault and not competition. Check three things in this order: the "discourage search engines" setting left on from staging, a robots.txt blocking everything, and whether Search Console was ever verified and a sitemap submitted.
Not ranking and not being indexed are different problems with different fixes, and people spend months on the first while suffering the second. The staging checkbox is the single most common fault we find on a new build, and it is one click.
Your business name plus your town should be yours within days to a few weeks once indexed. If it is not after a month, something is broken rather than competitive.
How long: an afternoon
Step 2YouStart asking for a review at the moment the job endsfree
Get your short Google review link from the profile, save it in your phone as a text you can send in two taps, and send it to every customer as the job finishes, while you are still standing there. Not the next week by email.
Reviews move because of the share of customers who are actually asked, and most owners ask far fewer than they think. A text sent at the moment the work is done, with the person still holding their phone, is the version that gets answered.
Asking is allowed. Paying, discounting or offering anything in return is against Google's review policy, and that includes a dollar off, which owners assume is harmless. Do not filter who you ask based on how happy they seem. On a site built by us this is a button in the app on your phone: your link and your wording are already saved, so asking is one tap at the end of a job rather than something to remember and retype.
How long: ongoing
Step 3YouWrite down the five things customers ask on the phonefree
Write, in plain words, what you charge or your price range, exactly which towns you cover, what you do and do not take on, how soon you can come, and your licence or insurance number. One page, your own words, no polish.
This is the content of your website, and it is the part nobody else can write for you. Every build that stalls stalls here. Every generated page that reads as empty reads that way because this page did not exist, so the words had to come from somewhere generic.
If you only do one thing from this plan, do this one. It makes every later step cheaper and faster, including the ones you pay someone else for.
How long: an afternoon
Step 4YouSay which languages you work in, in writingfree
Write the languages you and your staff actually work in into the Google profile description, into the top of the site, and into every bio. Name them: Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, whichever it is. Do not write the word multilingual.
Somebody looking for a plumber who speaks their language searches the name of the language, so the name of the language has to be written down somewhere a search engine can read it. It works in the other direction too. A customer who has already read that English is your second language is not surprised by it on the call, and the few who mind will pick somebody else before they have taken an hour of your afternoon.
List only a language you can serve in start to finish, including the follow up two days later. A language on the page that nobody in the business speaks today produces exactly the enquiry you cannot answer.
How long: an afternoon
Step 5You or usReply to every review, including the bad onesfree
Answer each review in a sentence or two. On a complaint, say what happened, say what you did, and give a way to reach you. Do not argue the facts in public and do not copy the same reply onto ten reviews.
The reply is not written for the reviewer, who has moved on. It is written for the next person reading, who is deciding between you and the listing below you. A calm answer under a one-star review does more for that decision than the star average does.
Reviews that break Google's policy can be reported, but most unfair reviews stay up. Plan on answering them well rather than on getting them removed.
How long: ongoing
Step 6You or usCheck the domain is registered in your namefree
Log into the registrar with your own email address and confirm you can see the domain and change its settings. If you cannot, or you do not know where it is registered, run a whois lookup to find the registrar and start their account recovery process.
The domain is the address everything else points at: the site, the email, the profile link, every card you ever printed. If it sits in a developer's account, your site can go dark over a disagreement and there is nothing you can do from your side.
Privacy protection hiding your name in whois is normal and says nothing about who controls it. The real test is whether you can log in. Expect a 60 day transfer lock after a registration or an ownership change, so sort this while relations are good.
How long: an afternoon
Step 7UsHave us build your site$99
We design and build the site, $99 one time, from the page of answers you wrote and the photographs you took. Three to five pages is the right size for a local business: what you do, the towns you cover, prices, who you are, how to reach you. If you already have a site, this replaces it, and the addresses people have already linked to are kept pointing at the right pages.
This is the only part of your presence you own, and the only one that can actually sell. It holds what a Google profile structurally cannot: your prices, a service explained in more than two sentences, your licence number, and the answers to the five questions that decide between you and the next listing. Being able to edit the wording of a site is not the same thing as the site being able to do that work. Where we could read yours, the line under this says what it is missing. Where we could not, judge it yourself: open it on your phone, press the number, and try to book a time without telephoning anybody.
After the build you pay the real running costs directly: a .com is roughly $12 to $20 a year and hosting is in the region of $5 to $30 a month. Check current prices, they move. A blog is not part of this and for a referral-driven trade it is not worth starting one.
How long: a week
Not yet
Leave this aloneDo not pay for ads yet
Hold off on Google Ads, Facebook Ads and boosted posts until there is somewhere for the click to land: a page that states your prices, your service area and how to reach you, and a way to answer the enquiry the same day.
Ads buy attention, they do not create a reason to hire you. Sending paid clicks to a profile with no photos or a page that does not say what you charge means you pay for every visitor and convert the same share you would have converted for free. The money disappears with nothing left behind.
Revisit when the profile is verified with real photos, the site states prices, and you reliably answer enquiries within a few hours. Then start small enough that a bad month does not matter, and count calls, not clicks.
This is the general plan for Cleaning. The free check asks what you want more of and what you have now, and will read your own website if you give it the address.
The businesses listed under Cleaning are at /c/cleaning.
Businesses we built sites for
Real companies, real websites. Open them and look: that is the only way to tell whether anybody is actually behind this.
Most of this plan is yours and costs nothing. The steps marked for us are the ones we would do, and what they cost is written on them. Nothing here is an offer you have to take: the plan is the same either way.