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Help Potential Customers Find Your Cleaning Company

Categories: Sales & Marketing

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It wasn’t long ago that potential customers turned to the Yellow Pages or local flyers in the grocery store window to find a contractor. But nowadays even the most stubborn of us have adapted to using the internet to find businesses to work with, both in a professional and consumer capacity.

According to the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of American adults use the internet. The large majority of those users regularly use a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo to find information online. According to a study by BIA/Kelsey, 97 percent of internet users look online for reviews and to find businesses local to them.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that in 2017, digital advertising finally surpassed television in terms of overall ad spend. Companies are becoming savvier to the importance of the internet to consumers and the opportunity that it offers their business. In particular, appearing high in the search results on Google, Bing, and Yahoo can bring in a large volume of sales leads.

Today, the janitorial, sanitation and cleaning companies that are prospering are those that can be found in the search results. Customers tend to click the top results. According to Moz, one of the leaders in the digital marketing industry, 92 percent of people click a result on the first page of Google. Therefore, if you want to bring in more leads, it’s vital for your business to appear on this first page in the search results. Doing so isn’t easy, but it’s likely to have a significant impact on your bottom line.

How Does Google Rank the Search Results?

To algorithmically rank trillions of webpages, Google uses a complex formula. Nobody knows precisely how it works, but through extensive research and testing experts have been able to decipher key elements and how they impact the search results. According to Brian Dean, a digital marketing expert, the three most important factors are the quantity of links pointing to your website, the quality of the websites linking to yours, and the content which is on your page. He also agrees that for local businesses, the number of positive reviews they have on Google My Business is also a critical ranking signal.

How Can a Cleaning Company Rank Higher?

As the owner or operator of a cleaning or janitorial business, you’re unlikely to have hours to spare each day. For this reason, many cleaning companies choose to hire a search engine optimization expert. However, there is a lot that you can do yourself to have a noticeable impact without requiring you to invest a huge amount of time.

1. Reviews are not only important for ranking your business higher in Google, they also influence customers purchasing decisions. Positive reviews can convince a company to choose your business as their cleaning provider, regardless of where you appear in the search engine rankings. Take the time today to email all of your customers, who you know had a positive experience with you, and ask them kindly to leave a positive review on your Google My Business profile. If you don’t have a profile yet, you must create one today because it’s a great way to get new sales leads. Going forward, it’s always worthwhile to email new customers after a month to implore them to leave a positive review on your Google My Business profile. This step can single handedly increase your rankings, bring in more people to your website and generate more leads for your business.
   
   
2. The content on your website is how Google knows what search queries you should show up for. One important factor they consider is the quality and quantity of this content. For this reason, you should always make sure that your sales pages and website home page are full of informative and useful content. Ideally, they should also contain more words than your competitors so that your page is likely to show up higher than theirs. In small towns and cities, this improvement might be enough to catapult your website to the top of the search rankings for queries like “janitor near me” or “local house cleaners” which are likely to generate sales leads.
   
   
3. Links pointing to your website are the most valuable ranking signal. They tell Google that other people find your website trustworthy or useful and therefore it should rank in the search results. A simple way for you to get links from high quality websites is to reach out to everybody that you know who owns a website. If they live in your local area, work in the same industry, are a supplier or customer, a link from their website to yours can be incredibly beneficial. For cleaning and janitorial professionals, an excellent way to get links is to ask your long-standing customers to include a link on their website that says something along the lines of “cleaning services by:” and then a link to your website. Ideally, this link should point to your sales page, or if you sell using your homepage, to the homepage of the website.

About the Author.

Jack Prenter is the founder of Chore Bliss cleaning, a company based in Toronto, Canada. He has been using digital marketing techniques to generate business leads for more than seven years.