Is your cleaning business's blog not generating new growth? Or are you thinking of launching a blog to reach more cleaning customers?
Look - you have a cleaning business to run and trying to reach your customers online using blog content can be challenging. Maybe you spent hundreds of dollars on hiring freelancers to write for your cleaning service, and you still aren't seeing any new leads off your blog.
So how do you get your cleaning company's website blog to start working for you? In this article we'll learn the seven ways on how to make your cleaning blog successful or launch a new one that actually reaches your target market and curious readers into shopping prospects.
With that, let's jump in!
7 Ways to fix your blog and get more leads
1. Understand your reader's mindset
The readers you want to visit your blog will be in one of two stage:
The “Awareness” stage
The truth is your readers NEED house cleaning - they just don't realize it yet. Many of them are doing their own cleaning and aren't aware of the value that comes with hiring a cleaning company.
Because of this, your blog needs to help these readers understand the concept of hiring a cleaner without coming off as "salesy".
The “Curious” stage
The second stage is where your readers begin to get curious about the possibilities of having a cleaner. They're not ready to pay for the service yet, but now they're day dreaming of what it would be like to not have to worry about cleaning.
It's in this stage that they might also do some casual research to see what goes into hiring a house cleaner, and how much it costs. They might even post on social media to ask for feedback from friends on what having a cleaning service is like for them.
The “Shopping” stage
Finally, the last stage for your readers is where they're actively shopping for a cleaning service. They've budgeted for it and have decided which rooms and areas they want cleaned. Now they're looking for the best service.
The pros about readers being in this stage is that it's easier to get them to take a call-to-action, like scheduling a free walk-through. The cons though is that this stage is typically smaller than the other two. Not only that, most other cleaning businesses are competing for this stage as well.
But once you've understood these three stages of your readers, you can develop a much more successful blog layout which is what we'll talk about next:
Written by: Isaac Cano
Cleaning business owner of 15 years
Professional blog writer of 6 years
2. Use the Three 'E's framework
Now the goal is to write a blog article that will help move our reader from the "Awareness stage", to the "Curious stage" and finally into the "Shopping stage."
To do this, we'll use what I call the "Three E's" framework, which includes the following:
E nticing
Bottom line: we want to get people to click on our blog. To do this, we have to make our articles enticing. So much so, that people skimming Google or social media can't resist clicking on it.
The first way to do this is by crafting the article's Headline into a title that promises value in a measurable way. For example, the article you're reading now says "8 Ways to fix your blog and get more leads." I could have simply said "How to write a great blog article". and that would have been accurate. But the headlines needs to be more than accurate. It needs to be enticing.
A second way to make it enticing is by writing on topics your readers actually relate with, but we'll address this more in second.
E nlightening
Okay, we've got the person to click on our article. Next, we have to deliver by enlightening them with amazing advice that will blow them away. If they click on the article just to find fluffy, generic content that's dull and uninteresting, that's called click-bait, and they will bounce from your website.
You need your article to be enlightening by offering real advice to their concerns, questions to their problems, recommendations to their projects, or tips that will radically improve their life.
E mpowering
Lastly, we want our article to empower them to take some kind of action. We want them to feel inspired to try something that will benefit their lives. When it comes to cleaning blog articles, we want to carefully transition them into reading about how we can help them as a cleaning company solve their problems.
The skill we have to learn is how to craft the content so that it naturally flows from a "Enlightening" tone and shifts to an "Empowering" one. To do this, let's jump into step 3:
3. Become skilled at writing about 3rd-party topics
A 3rd party topic could include "How to plan a successful Christmas party". Technically that's something an Event Planner would write about. But you might choose this topic because you're trying to get more after party cleanings.
When you're writing about other 3rd party topics, your goal isn't to be an "expert". Your goal is to be an "influencer". An export is someone who devotes their life to creating and selling something. An influencer is someone who has experienced a product and simply shares it with others.
When you're writing about cleaning related topics, you definitely want to come off as the expert. But save that for your website's service pages. For your blog, you want to be an influencer of 3rd party topics.
For example, I wrote this sample article that you can read called "5 Tips for removing stress in 1 week". If you google "how to remove stress" you'll get a lot of advice from mental health organizations or therapists. So why write an article like this for our cleaning company? Because as you can see in the article, we told them that one way to remove stress was by having a clean home. We then carefully moved them into the "shopping" stage and empowered them with a call-to-action.
Notice how we didn't try coming off as an expert. We simply told them that these were the tips that worked for us and our clients and were happy to share with them.
Of course this doesn't mean your reader will suddenly schedule a walk-through. They will still have reservations that keep them from taking action. In order to encourage them, we want to take the fourth step:
stment in your cleaning business!
4. Nurture your readers core 3 values of action
A website visitor will only pick up the phone, send an email, complete a form or schedule a booking when they feel like you've met their core values for shopping, which are the following:
1. Respect - they believe you are who you say you are
Bottom line, we want our prospects to know that we are a qualified company with a legitimate service. There are a lot of "house cleaners" who offer dozens of other gigs as well like landscaping, running errands, pet sitting, handyman work, etc.
your prospects won't respect you because of how many professions you're juggling. They'll respect you because they see you are a legitimate cleaning business that is highly skilled in what you do.
Some of the best ways to help nurture respect is, (1): Communicating the top cleaning services you offer on your website (2): Be as clear as possible in explaining what goes into your cleaning services (3): Communicate anything that distinguishes you from your competitors (warranty work, insured, vetted team members, etc).
2. Trust- they believe you can do what you say you can do
Next, your prospects need to trust that you have the integrity to follow through what your services. It's easy to promise things on our website and make our services sound really cool. But ultimately, prospects need to know that you'll deliver on what you say.
One of the most effective ways to do this is by providing customer testimonials on your website. This allows your prospect to verify from other customers that you can be trusted to follow through on your services.
You can also a provide before and after photos of your past cleanings so people can see how well you do your work.
3. Empathy - they feel you understand their needs and have their best interests at heart
Most importantly, your prospects need to feel that you care about them as a person. People don't want to be looked at as consumers. They want to be seen as humans with deep needs that you can meet.
One thing that helps communicate your care for your customers is by publishing a video on your website and letting them know you understand their needs. A video (especially of the company's owner) goes a long way in touching someone's heart.
5. Invest the effort in your article design
When you're publishing your blog article, design is crucial for engaging readers. If your text is too small, feels to tight, and has too many images bombarding the page, this can cause your readers to feel confused and lose interest. Even if your article has great content to offer.
There are four design principles I follow to make my articles stand out:
1. Don't use tiny text
The paragraph text size for this article is 20pt, and I would recommend keeping your paragraph size no lower than 15pt.
2. Use a 1.5 or higher text line height
I call this "Creating air for your text to breath". You don't want your line text to be too close together, otherwise it can feel squished.
3. Use wide margins to your right
The best article have lots of white margin on the sides. I use white margins on both sides of my text to help make the reading easier to digest. Below are a few online brands who do a great job at this:
HubSpot
Backlinko
Fiverr
On the other hand, here are some examples of blogs with poor margin and spacing:
ServiceMaster
Mr Rooter
TheWireNut
4. Make your header titles stand out
Like the article you're reading now, the header titles that separate chunks of content from each other should stand out. You can do this by making the text bold, using a larger font size and trying a different color.
6. Do a 3 minute SEO Checkup
SEO audits can take a while to conduct, but you really just need a quick SEO check up to ensure you're able to rank better in Google. In fact, the SEO check up I recommend only takes three minutes! To get started:
1. Add one high-focused keyword to the top of your blog
Your high-focused keyword should be related to your blog topic. For example, the article you're reading now has a high-focused keyword near the top: "how to make your cleaning blog successful".
Avoid using multiple keywords related to house cleaning. This is considered a form of keyword stuffing, and Google will penalize your SEO for this practice. Just focus on one keyword at a time.
2. In your text editor under styles, choose the "H2" option
This helps Google crawlers identify your keyword and effectively match it with a readers search inquiry. If you're using a website like WordPress, Wix, Weebly or SpaureSpace, you won't need to do any coding for this. In fact, this only takes a few seconds.
3. Update your Meta tags with your keyword
Again, if you're using a website like the ones above, this is easy. Your website should have an "SEO Settings" option in your page settings. Copy/paste your keyword into your meta tags. If you're not sure where to find this, just go to Google and search the following inquiry:
"How to update my meta tags in {your website host}
4. Update your images "Alt Texts"
Google crawlers can't define images because crawlers work with code language. When you update your Alt Texts with a description of the image, this improves your SEO.
5. Add one or more links to other pages on your blog
Healthy SEO also means on-site clicks. This is when a reader is on your blog and they decode to click another link that takes them to another page on your website.
7. Use 3 proactive outreach tactics to attract traffic
We love SEO and blogs because of the organic inbound traffic it promises. But one of the biggest SEO requirements from Google is that you already have existing traffic visiting your blog. So before they send you more organic traffic, they want to see some external traffic already.
Some bloggers use the backlink building strategy for getting this traffic. This is a lengthy process of trying to get other website owners to publish blogs that link back to your website.
But for the house cleaning market, I don't find this process as effective. Instead, there are three easy ways you can start bringing in external traffic to your website:
1. Email the blog link as a newsletter to all your current customers
If you only have a few customers, send a personalized email to each one with a link saying something like:
"Hey Mary!
Questions - I wrote this article on how to remove stress. I wanted my customers to benefit from it's ideas. Would you be open to taking a glance and letting me know if you spot any problems other readers might have?"
Using a tone of email where you're asking for a favor usually leaders to higher click-rates. the investment in your cleaning business!
2. Post on Social Media
I would take one section of your article at a time and promote it on social media. For example, the article I wrote "5 Tips for removing stress within 1 week" has five sections I could turn into the social posts below:
Monday post:
Title: Reduce stress by organizing everything you're working on
Body: Take a note pad, journal or Google Doc and brain dumping everything that's causing stress, and prioritizing them..."
To learn more, click here: cleanercontent.websitely.pro/article-sample
Friday post:
Title: Reduce stress by replacing junk food with highly nutritious, healthy foods
Body: I've noticed for me personally that my mind can deal with stress better when I'm putting healthier foods like vegetables, fruits and healthy carbs and proteins in to my body.
To learn more, click here: cleanercontent.websitely.pro/article-sample
See how both social posts are unique from each other, but they both come from the same blog article? This will help your followers stay more interested in your posts and allows you to create multiple social posts in a week linking back to the article you need traffic on.
3. Text friends and ask them to read it
Even if they're not customers, asking your top 10 friends to do you a favor and take a look at your new blog will help gain traffic. Each friend who views the article will be using their own phone or computer, each unique with it's own IP address. This counts as a "New Visitor" in Google.
4. Run a $10 Facebook ad for 7 days targeting your area
With Facebook ads, you can run a short seven day campaign and target one more more zip codes in your area. This will help get people clicking on your blog.
If for some reason you're not seeing a lot of clicks, then target a larger geographical area like your whole state or country. Remember, our goal isn't to get more customers for the $10 ad spend. Our goal is to get a hundred or more visitors on our website to help increase web traffic.
3 Blog obstacles cleaning companies face
As I've helped hundreds of cleaning companies develop their business blog, one thing I notice is that it's hard for them to get going. Or sometimes they start out well, but eventually lose momentum. Or their articles never gain traction.
The biggest obstacles for cleaning companies failing to implement these blog strategies include:
1. Trying to plan
Planning out your weekly blog topics is challenging.
It takes a lot of research and intentionality to come up with a Google sheet of 50+ blog topics for the rest of the year.
2. Trying to write the content
Writing a 500-1,000 word article can be time-consuming.
When I asked my clients how long it usually takes for them to finish their first draft of a blog article, the average time I heard was 1-2 hours for a 500 word article, and 3-5 hours for a 1,000 word article.
3. Designing the blog article
Touching up your article's design can feel overwhelming.
Especially if you don't consider yourself very computer savvy or design inclined. When it comes time to publishing your content on your blog, fixing the layout and structuring your text is the last thing you want to do.
What's the best option?
The great thing is you don't have to plan, write and design your blog alone.
At CLEANER.content, I use my experience in the cleaning industry and blog writing to manage this process for you.
The best news? It's actually affordable.
You won't break your budget investing in weekly blog content. It's affordable, easy to get started and worth the investment in your cleaning business!
QUESTIONS? Contact me!
cleanercontent@websitely.pro
