Cleaning
How to spend less on ads for a cleaning company
Cleaning is one of the most expensive local categories to buy clicks in, because every company in the county is bidding on the same four words and a lead generator is bidding above all of them to resell the call back to one of them.
Buying your way out of that is a monthly bill with no end to it. The steps below reduce how much of it you need, and most of them are free and permanent.
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.
Five you can do yourself, for nothing. Two 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 4You or usPut your prices, or a real price range, in writingfree
On the site and in the profile description, state what things cost. A range with what moves it is fine: a call-out is this much, a full job in a house this size is between these two numbers, here is what makes it more.
A large share of the phone calls you take exist only to ask the price. Putting a number up answers them without the call and filters out the people who were never going to book, so the calls you do get are closer to work.
If you genuinely cannot price without seeing the job, say that, and give the call-out fee and two real examples from past jobs. That is still more useful than "contact us for a quote".
How long: an afternoon
Step 5UsWe claim your Google profile and get it verifiedpart of a build, or of the monthly work
We search your business name, find the listing if one is already there, and claim it in your name. If there is none we create it, under the real business name and nothing else. Then we take it through verification, which for most small businesses now means a recorded video: one continuous take, no cuts, starting outside with the signage or the unit number, then branded equipment or stock, then something printed with the business name such as a licence or a utility bill, then opening, unlocking or operating something only staff could. We write that shot list for your premises and run the attempt with you. Ninety seconds of it has to happen on your phone at your address, because that is where the camera has to be. Everything either side of those ninety seconds is ours: the list, the order, the submission, and the appeal if it comes back rejected. The login is yours at the end of it.
The profile is what puts you in Maps and in the local results, and until it is verified in your name nobody can set the hours, the phone number, the categories or the photographs those results are built from. Video verification is checking three things at once: the place is real, the business is real, and you are the person who runs it. Filming only the inside proves one of the three, which is why most rejected submissions look fine to whoever filmed them. It is the step owners fail at, and failing it twice is how a profile ends up stuck for a month. It is near the top because it is quick to start and it comes with the build, not because it does the website's job: a profile cannot hold your prices, explain a service or answer the questions that decide between you and the next listing.
We enter the real business name only. “Smith Plumbing” verifies. “Smith Plumbing Emergency Plumber Chicago” is the most common cause of a failed verification and of a suspension months later. After two rejections we stop resubmitting and appeal with documents, using exactly the address format we typed in. We cannot promise any profile gets verified or reinstated, and nobody who tells you otherwise can either.
How long: a few days, most of it waiting on Google
Step 6UsHave 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
Step 7YouCollect the free, boring local linksfree
Your chamber of commerce, any trade association you already pay dues to, suppliers who list the installers who fit their product, the local team you sponsor, the local paper when something genuinely newsworthy happens. Ask each one to list you with a link.
These are the links that do anything for a local business, and almost all of them are free. The test is simple: if that website would still exist with no SEO industry at all, a link from it is worth having.
Most of these you are already entitled to and have never claimed. Start with the organisations you already pay money to.
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.