Start a Cleaning Service – Presence on the Internet

As a business new to the cleaning industry, you will most likely be operating your business from home. This will be the case for at least the first year or even two. And that’s fine and as it should be. However, the fact that there is no store only increases the need for a strong web presence in the form of a website. Elsewhere on the Internet you will find instructions that a basic website is all you need. That is wrong on every level. In the long run, your website is the most important investment you’ll ever make. The reason is very simple and common sense: with a well built website and proper SEO, you will get Google ranking on the first page in local searches. That will eliminate the need to spend money on local advertising and even Google ad words.

There are four organic pieces to your internet presence that matter and one non-organic piece. Following those five rules will give your web page a high rank, and in that way, better access to leads and prospects.

The first piece of a proper internet presence is a professionally built, uniquely content and SEO optimized website for your business. With a little time spent searching, you will find several providers online who will build this type of website for you at a very reasonable cost, starting at $300 and up. It’s always nice if you provide some content too. Your website must have at least the following pages: home page, about us page, services page, testimonials page, special offers page, FAQ page, checkout page, and contact form page. The checkout page works best if PayPal is integrated with it. Social media buttons should also be integrated into the page.

The second important aspect of your internet presence is building strong social media profiles for your cleaning service. Profiles must be detailed and regularly updated. Recommended websites for those profiles are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and a blog like Tumblr. The three most important are Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Google+ shows up in local search, and by targeting that profile, your Google rankings will improve and people will be more likely to hire you due to the visibility of your business in search. My suggested approach to collecting reviews is to collect emails from your first 40 customers, and then send them an invite to enter a sweepstakes for a whole-home deep cleaning if they complete a Google+ review of your service. Set a timeline at the end of the review, for example, before 12/28/2015 for a more powerful call to action. These approaches will get you up and running and if you get as few as five revisions it will be worth the free cleanup.

Facebook is important for a very different reason. If your customers become friends with you, Facebook offers you a means of mass communication like no other. Promotions, upsells, new services and announcements – it all happens with one post and reaches everyone instantly. For example, you introduce tile and grout cleaning services just before spring cleaning season and offer them at a 50% discount to all existing customers and anyone they refer. All of your customers will at least share that post with their friends and build your brand in the process. This is great value for your brands, so don’t be afraid to encourage your customers to like your company’s website.

LinkedIn offers a different approach to starting a business. This social network is used almost exclusively by professionals and provides great access to the people who sign checks in their companies, that is, to decision makers. It removes the gatekeepers that often prevent you from meeting the right person when trying to sell your services. The key to using this successfully is a great profile. Take the time to create the best profile you can with a professional image, your training and education, titles and previous jobs listed. Then connect with your old bosses and everyone you know who has some kind of respectable title. Once this is done, search various terms on LinkedIn to connect with people who might offer you business. Connect with office managers, real estate agents, executives, bank managers, local business owners, and anyone who may eventually become a customer. In a few weeks, you’ll have a few hundred people in your network who are important in the community and at your workplace. At that point, start working on publications that advertise your business and ask them to hire you or recommend your service if they have someone in need. You will be surprised at the doors this approach will open for you.

The next piece of online strategy for your cleaning service should be appointments. Citations are listings of your business in various online directories, including Google, yellow pages, white pages, etc. It is very important to list your cleaning service in as many directories as possible, preferably at least two hundred. Completely fill out each listing and don’t miss a single detail. Once Google crawls these listings, detailed profiles will do wonders for your websites and your business’ ranking on Google. You can enter all these listings manually, which will take a lot of time and can be a very boring and tedious process. I highly recommend using the services advertised online to do the job for you. Just make sure it’s a manual entry service that you hire and pay once. You want to avoid monthly subscription services. While they work instantly, they cost more but are gone if you ever cancel service.

The fourth piece of your online presence should be link building. You want as much inbound ink from high-ranking pages on your website as possible. You can achieve this by asking other high-ranking local businesses to list you as a partner on their website – look for businesses that work with similar clients but on different things, such as plumbers, electricians, and plant personnel. Also, hire a writer or write a couple hundred unique articles and post them to article databases with the link back to your business. Choose only high-ranking databases.

The fifth non-organic way to increase your web presence is pay-per-click advertising. This can be very expensive, especially with Google. I recommend staying away from it until you can budget for at least $30 a day.