How to Start and Grow Your Own Cleaning Business
 

How to Market Your Web Site
Using “Optimization” and/or “Pay-Per-Click” Technology
By Gary Goranson

You already know that the Internet is an important resource for people looking for information about virtually anything you can think of. Anyone in the residential cleaning business who does not have a Web site is missing out on a valuable media for generating new clients.

However, the fact is that simply putting your Web site on the Web without driving traffic to it would be like having a retail store with no advertising to bring potential customers in. It wouldn’t matter how great a product you offered, how magnificent the store was or what kind of spectacular service you provided – if nobody knew about you and if it was almost impossible to find you.

Why the Internet is so Powerful

When you use conventional advertising media, you are using a shotgun approach to generating new clients. Since you don’t know who is looking to hire a house cleaning service at a particular point in time in a specific market, you have to get your message out to thousands of people in the hopes of reaching someone currently looking.

Conversely, when people use search engines to find out about cleaning services in their area, the majority of people who click through to your Web site are currently interested in finding your business.

You Must Drive Traffic to Your Site

First of all, all of your conventional advertising efforts should include your Web site address. In fact, anything that can be seen by a prospective client, including business cards and letterheads, should direct people to your site. Since you’re printing brochures and flyers and/or running newspaper ads anyway, it really doesn’t cost you any more to include your Web address in these media – and you can say a whole lot more on your Web site than you can in a newspaper ad.

If you were to use the search term “house cleaning” on Google alone, you would see that there are over 8 millions potential results for this key word phrase. Most surfers don’t go beyond the first 10 or 20 results, so you can be sure that if your listing is number 100 (let alone 1,000,000) your chance of consumers finding your site are slim to none. Clearly, you need to make your Web site easy for prospective clients in your market area to find. But how do you do that?

There are two ways to attempt to get your Web site listed on the first or second page of the search results from virtually any search engine:

1. Having your Web site professionally “optimized” for search engines; and

2. Subscribing to “Pay-Per-Click” technology

Web Site Optimization

Research has shown that 85% of all computer users rely on Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL when looking for information on the Internet. Although there are literally thousands of search engines, most of them rely on the major ones as an information resource. For example, if you were to use Ask Jeeves as your search medium, the results you find would originate from Google.

Search engines have become very sophisticated in the way they list and rank Web sites based on search words and phrases which surfers enter. Search engines actually send out “spiders” to browse through the millions of Web sites and catalog key words and key word phrases that can then be matched to the same or similar key words typed in by people during their search for information. Depending on relevancy and other factors, they then use algorithms to rank where those search results will appear on their Web results pages.

The challenge in meeting the criteria for both initial high ranking in the “natural” search results (not the “sponsored” listings which we’ll discuss next) is ensuring that your Web site is optimized in accordance with a search engine’s criteria.

 In the early days of the Internet Web developers relied on what are called “meta tags” to get their clients’ Web sites noticed and ranked by search engines. Meta tags are a group of key words and key word phrases that are imbedded and remain unseen by people visiting the site. In an effort to draw more traffic to the site, it became common practice for developers to imbed irrelevant key word meta tags into Web sites. For example, a Web site developer might include the word “chocolates” as a meta tag for a house cleaning Web site. The idea was to drive as many people to the site as possible, even though people looking for information on chocolates had no interest whatsoever in house cleaning. In an effort to ensure their users be directed only to relevant Web sites, this practice is now one way to get your Web site permanently banned from the major search engines!

Search engines have become extremely good at identifying information on the internet that is relevant to the topic being searched. This has spawned an industry of “optimization specialists” who identify key words and key word phrases that search engines will use to list and rank their clients’ Web sites high up in their search results. They know how to place these key words in your Web site to achieve this result .

Another challenge popped up over the last year or so. Every so often, sometimes every month, the major search engines will change their algorithms and you could see your Web site go from a top ten ranking to virtual obscurity. We have seen that happen on our own Web site from time to time. For this reason, onetime optimization isn’t enough anymore to maintain a strong ranking in the natural search results.

I strongly recommend that you have your Web site professionally optimized for YOUR specific market. If you’re in San Antonio, Texas it won’t be of much benefit to be attracting visitors from Paris, France. This can be done very easily. I also recommend choosing a professional with a proven track record in the industry and one who will agree to monitor changes in search engine algorithms and make optimization modifications on a regular basis to keep pace with what search engines are doing.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

If you could run a newspaper ad, radio spot or TV commercial on the basis of only paying for people who actually contacted you as a result of the advertising, would you be interested in that arrangement? How much would you be willing to pay for this kind of deal? Pay-per-click search engine advertising is based on exactly that type of arrangement.

When you go to a search engine and initiate a search, you will see PPC ads in one of two ways. You can see search results at the top and often at the bottom of the page identified as “sponsored” results and/or you will notice small box ads, generally on the right hand side of the page. Any time you click on one of these results the advertiser will pay a PPC fee to the search engine or its agent. Depending on the competitive nature of the search term, the PPC fee can be as little as a few cents all the way up to several dollars each time a person clicks through to the advertised Web site.

The major players currently in PPC advertising are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search. Google’s results will also show up in sponsored positions on AOL and others who partner with Google.  Although MSN announced it is creating its own program to compete head on with Google and Yahoo, at this writing it gets its sponsored search results from Yahoo Search.

There are several other smaller search engines from which you can subscribe to PPC advertising as well: Looksmart, Findwhat, Kanoodle and Enhance just to name a few. Like the major ones mentioned above, they also partner with other search engines to produce their search results. However, my recommendation would be to focus on utilizing Google and Overture instead of spreading your money and efforts around at the beginning.

When you subscribe to these PPC programs you will be asked to bid on specific key words or key word phrases. Your sponsored position on these PPC results will be determined in part by how many other competitors are bidding for the same key words as well as the popularity of the key words. Generally speaking, more specific exact phrases such as “house cleaning Portland” or “find a cleaning service in Portland” will be less costly than the broader phrases “house cleaning” or “find a cleaning service”. Besides, as we pointed out earlier, you don’t want to be paying for click-throughs from outside of your specific marketing area.

 When creating key words and key word phrases on which you’ll be bidding, try to come up with a list of 25 or more. For example, if you were located in Dallas, you might want to bid on key word phrases such as the following:

• Find a house cleaner in Dallas

• Find a maid service in Dallas

• Find a residential cleaning service in Dallas

• Dallas house cleaning service

• Dallas housecleaning service

• Dallas maid service

• House cleaning service in Dallas

• Housecleaning service in Dallas

• Residential cleaning in Dallas

• Price for house cleaning in Dallas

• Price for residential cleaners in Dallas

• Dallas house cleaning prices.

Of course you would also want to use key words and phrases without the city name, such as:

• House cleaning

• Housecleaning

• House cleaning service

• Maid service

• Home cleaning service

• Housekeeping service

You will be able to see what type of bid it will take for each specific keyword phrase to obtain the number one PPC listing. When you place a bid, you will also see what position your ad will be in based on each bid. You may choose to have your bid automatically adjusted to retain a specific rank or you can elect to manage your bids manually. You may also set a maximum bid for each phrase as well as a daily and/or monthly maximum budget that you’re willing to spend on the campaign.

One great feature about PPC advertising is that you can begin receiving traffic to your Web site within 20 minutes after setting up your account. By comparison, Web site optimization can take days or even weeks to begin seeing results.

Get on the Band Wagon Today!

You may not be able to compete with major advertisers using conventional media, but you can be right up there with them with your Internet marketing activities. Move into the 21st century today by extending your marketing activities with 21st century technology.

I certainly don’t advocate dropping your current marketing efforts.  In fact, you'd better not.  But you certainly need to move in the e-commerce direction to help grow and expand your residential cleaning business. If you don’t, your competitors will!

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