Online Marketing Tips for Cleaning Companies

Online marketing offers an incredible opportunity for cleaning businesses to reach new customers that may otherwise never hear about your business. This Blog Post provides you with heaps of great Online Marketing tips for cleaning companies that they can implement themselves to start generating more business online.

Social Media Marketing

Most of us use Facebook regularly so why do most small businesses resist starting a Facebook Business Page? Most businesses say that they don’t have any idea what they would post so we thought we would share some great ideas for posts:

• Initially get some good photos to post on your Facebook page of staff or of before and after photos. Images tend to attract a lot of engagement, so make sure that most of your posts has an image
• “Get to know my cleaning business” style post. A general post about why you enjoy what you do is always a great post to kick off your Facebook page.
• Ask Questions. Try to generate engagement with every post by encouraging users to respond by asking questions. Try to include a question in most of your posts. Make sure your questions are easy and quick to answer
• Respond to comments. It sounds simple however a lot of people don’t do it. So please make sure that you reply to ALL comments quickly and appropriately. A great tip is to use people’s names in your reply and to also use your name at the end of your reply.
• Cleaning Tips. Now of course you don’t want to do yourself out of a job however a few cleaning tips here and there (especially ones that may make your cleaning staff’s job easier) will be highly valued and likely to be shared.
• If you are bale to create videos of perhaps your staff saying Merry Christmas in December or a happy customer giving a testimonial then use whatever opportunities to post video you have.
• General Stuff. It’s good to also post about stuff that is not related to cleaning or business.
• Check out your competitors. There is nothing wrong with checking out your leading competitors and using their posts as a guide as to what you may post about.

Here is where you can get started on Facebook: How to Create Your Facebook Business Page. If you have any problems Facebook have some great Facebook Page Help.

So you have created a Facebook Page and you have some ideas for posts but how do you get likes?

Ask friends, family and staff to like your Facebook Page before you ask customers.

I always recommend getting your friends to like your Facebook page and asking if staff are happy to share your Facebook Page and ask their friends to like the page as well. It’s always a good feeling to get some likes before you start asking customers to like your page.

Of course though one of the keys to make Facebook work is that you need to ask your customers to like you on Facebook. If you don’t have a database of your past customers, please start keeping their details. Send an email to all your past and current customers and let them know that you now have a Facebook page and ask them to like you – this is a great start. However you will need to make sure staff mention at the end of every job as well.

Make sure you know as much as possible about your customers, so you can target them more effectively. Once you know your customers well, you can provide them with content they are likely to want to see and engage with in their news feed.

If Social Media Marketing doesn’t work for you from the start don’t give up. You must remember that social media is here to stay. It is definitely tough when your posts get no engagement (eg likes or shares or comments), so try changing the timing and/or the content, and you will gradually get a feel for what your users want to see.

Google Rankings Improvements (SEO)

Please note that these strategies to improve your rankings in Google assume that your cleaning business has a website.

So you want to get more customers clicking on your cleaning business website? Which means you need to get as close to the top of the Google search results as possible. In many industries that have little competition this can be a reasonably easy process. However, cleaners in capital cities in Melbourne face stiff competition so ranking high in Google can be tough.

However, we can give you some tips so you have the best chance of reaching as many people as possible.

Imagine yourself as a potential customer looking for a cleaning service online. If a Google search for “cleaners” returned a list of all the cleaners in the world it would take forever to find a suitable option. However, Google has developed significantly, as has users searching techniques, so users often add in other keywords that are important to them and Google applies location-based filtering to deliver local results.  This means that you have 2 different opportunities to ensure you are found on Google when a user does a search:

1. Local listings
2. Keywords

The first thing you need to do in regards to Local Listings is to set up a Google My Business Listing – Google have some great information about Google My Business:

• Google My Business Information

This will assist your business in getting found on Google, particularly from people searching in your local area.

There are also many other directories that will help you establish a local presence as well as improve your visibility online. To get you started, we have listed the Top 10 Australian Directory listings with links to sign up for a free listing:

1. Yellow Pages
2. True Local
3. Yelp
4. Hot Frog
5. Start Local
6. WoMo
7. AussieWeb
8. Local Business Guide
9. Yalwa
10. Super Pages

It is great to add these directory listings as they will boost the rankings of your website and you may actually find some of these directories will start generating hits to your website. We generally advise cleaners to pick a two or three of the directories that are working for them (ie generating hits on their website) and look at getting a paid listing. Although this is generally optional, the cleaning industry is so competitive online that it is a good idea.

Get listed, then focus on two or three directories

Some of the directory listings rank businesses according to the number of reviews so a good strategy can be to encourage/incentivise your customers to leave a review. We worked with one carpet cleaner on the Mornington Peninsula who generated over 50% of his business around one of the Top Directories. When he finished a job, he offered a $20 discount if people left a review on his directory listing. And too make it easy he would hand them his Tablet so they could do it on the spot! He is consistently ranked in the top 4 for his suburb and continues to generate great business form this one directory.

The other factor that we mentioned is “Keywords”. What we mean is that you need to choose the keywords that are going to be important to your business and may give you a point of difference from your competitors. You might like to rank highly for a general keyword like “cleaners Melbourne”. This keyword has a massive amount of searches each month (estimated at 1600 in Google each month in Melbourne). However, as the keyword is so popular, this means it also has massive competition. We wouldn’t suggest targeting this keyword unless you have been doing digital marketing for years! However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t identify other keywords that are attractive for your business. You could focus on specific service offerings, specific industries or your points of difference. Please see some sample keywords below that have lower competition (the search volume each month in Melbourne is shown)

The Google Keyword Planner Tool was used to generated this data.

So once you have picked some keywords, what can you do now? The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you have some content on your website that mentions these keywords. It is a good rule of thumb to assume that each web page can only target 1-3 keywords. So if you want to target 10 different keywords then you may have to create a few new web pages. And if you only have a 1 page website then it is going to be hard to target a high number of keywords.

So for each web page identify 1-3 keyword targets and make sure you do the following:

• Change the Page Title to include the targeted keyword(s). However please make sure you think about the users search so that your Page Title might match the actual search terms entered by a user
• Change the heading on the page so that it matches the targeted keyword(s). Again, please make sure you have the user in mind so that it sounds logical and could even exactly match their search
• Add the keyword(s) into the first paragraph – or as early on the page as possible.

If you have a WordPress website then a tool that we highly recommend is Yoast SEO PlugIn. Yoast makes it very easy to edit the “Meta Tags” on your website (this is your Page Titles and Page Descriptions). You can download a free version here.

We understand that this may seem to be getting a little technical however Google offer some great information to simplify it for you:

• Page Titles & Google Snippets
• Meta Tags

Listing of your business on these high quality directory websites, combined with targeting keywords attractive to your business can give you the necessary boost in your website rankings that you need to generate more leads and grow your business online. Of course if you think you may need some help then please contact us for some Digital Marketing Help.

Please note that we only work with one cleaner in one geographic location