Making Your Website Work for You
Learn the secret to successful commercial cleaning websites
In today’s video/ podcast your host Mike shares his wisdom with guest Dave Foellinger from the Jack Laurie Group on how to get more traffic to your commercial cleaning websites!

KEY POINT: Commercial Cleaning Website Success Can Happen in 1, 2, 3.
Last week we discussed the three reasons why your commercial cleaning website is not making money. Let’s do a quick review before diving further into commercial cleaning websites!

Messaging, Continuing Customer Conversations, and Website Traffic: How to solve these potential website woe
Refocus your message
Not getting the customer attention you want on your webpage? Your webpage may be sending the wrong message to potential clients. Refocus your website to draw in customer attention! When customers visit your website, the last thing they want to know about is you. Unfortunately, the first thing they see…is a page all about you. Flashing information that says “we’re green, we can do this or we can do that” will not interest your customers in the least bit! Aim for what your customers really want to know more about which is: what you can do for them! They want to know “What can you do to change my life? How can you solve my issues?” Talk about a message that your visitors are interested in.

Have a plan.
Make a plan for when customers visit your commercial cleaning webpage! Use your website to continue communications with customers. Don’t offer anything with sales propaganda attached to it. Provide customers with actual insight and genuine information that’s helpful to your clients! Here are some quick ways to do this:

Get a lead magnet or gift/info product to your customer!
Create a chart, guide or infographic so your client can use this information!
In return for providing your customers with helpful information, customers can leave their email address, name and phone number! You can add them to your email list, a newsletter or, simply, call them! They can follow your podcasts, blogs, and videos as well! You can continuously be a resource of information for your customers and capture their information while you’re at it!

Now…Get Some Traffic!
Hearing crickets? Does your website resemble a ghost town? Missing traffic on your webpage can be a bit discerning. Last week we discussed this factor and this week, we dive into how you unlock traffic to your commercial cleaning websites! Let’s get moving!

Two Main Ways to Get Traffic for Your Commercial Cleaning Websites
1. Paid traffic or “pay per click”.

2. Organic traffic also known as “free traffic”.

Let’s chat about paid traffic to begin with. Within the “paid traffic universe”, there are many, many ways you can get paid traffic for your commercial cleaning websites. For today, we are going to highlight two: Facebook and Google. The traffic is out there. These websites have already done an amazing job of gathering these people together.

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RESOURCE ALERT: Check out this podcast with web designer John Ayers
Paid Traffic through Facebook and Google

Let’s first take a peek at Facebook and how that might look for your commercial cleaning websites tracking

As you know, Facebook is a social media outlet. People visit Facebook to keep tabs on family or to check out videos of cute kittens. With this in mind, also know that your customers aren’t necessarily logging into Facebook to find their next cleaning company. Think about these points when using this social media tool to get some serious traffic:

Facebook requires a different approach (THINK: messaging)
Resource alert: Missed the information about messaging on your webpage for customers? Check out last week’s podcast here!
People use it to keep tabs on family, friends, etc.
Cheaper than pay per click traffic because the quality isn’t as good.
So, people are less apt to use Facebook for sales purposes because the quality isn’t as good, HOWEVER, you can use this social media tool if you treat it differently than other pay per clicks!

One way of doing this is by creating a straight out ad! Let visitors know where to go for information by using videos, podcasts, and infographics!

In order to be successful, consider using a two-step process:

Give something out for free…like a free blog!
Found out what your customers are interested in and create a blog on it!
Free blog tells your customers “I don’t have to give out my email address.
So, how do you grab customer attention this way? An example of how to use this is through Facebook pixels. What’s a pixel? Simply put, you can place a pixel on a particular customer, (or all of the customers that visit your blog), and you can “follow” that particular individual on the internet and continue to present ads to them. This will cost you about 50 cents or $1.00 for each pixel.

Go for the straightforward approach-invite customers for a free gift, (coupon, ebook, free cleaning etc.) in exchange for email information.
A little more expensive than pixels….possibly $2.00-$4.00
More expensive but no blog writing needed.
GENIUS TIP: With Facebook-You can be specific about who you want to talk to
Pixels are one way to get specific with your targeted customers. Another way to grab traffic is called “the look a-like audience”. Take your best 100 (has to be at least 100), prospects and customers and upload their email addresses to Facebook. Facebook will then create a list of people similar to those you just uploaded! You can also flat out say—“I only want to show this to forty or fifty women within 15 miles of this point who are property managers”.

To summarize-You can get extremely specific prospects and customers through pixels, by telling them who you want to show the ads to or through a look a-like audience.

How to Get Paid Traffic Through Google
Using Google as your paid traffic source may be more expensive, but it’s a sure-fire way to encourage some website footprints. Check out our notes on Google below:

Using Adwords on Google can be extremely effective.
More costly: $5.00 -$10.00 or upwards to $15.00 for a mere click.
Expensive but more likely that these individuals will become customers.
Organic Traffic–aka:“Free Traffic”
Another way of encouraging website traffic to your site is through organic traffic or “free traffic”. With “free traffic” you utilize Search Engine Optimization which is more commonly called SEO’s. Here are some points to note when thinking about organic traffic:

SEO’s change all the time. Almost a cat and mouse game…constantly changing market. What worked six months ago may not work today.
Requires an extensive amount of time due to its ever-changing nature.
Not really “free”
Really requires you to spend your time on this, which costs money or for you hire someone to do so…which also costs money.
Constantly evolving art. Encourage to hire someone to do it for you.
Your Best Bet: pay someone to do it for you. If you hire someone to do the SEO for you, the tips below will help ensure you get the right guy, gal or agency to hire for this job.

Three things to Ensure with Optimization for Your Webpage
In this section, make sure you read each one of these steps. Most people only complete the first step, which can lead to less traffic!

Your website! Also known as: onsite optimization.
Couple of things with onsite optimization: make sure you have the right amount of keywords. Putting in a certain keywords over and over used to be enough. Google is now wise to this and will actually penalize you and not show your webpage to people searching! You need to be careful to make sure your metatags and headings are in line.

MAKE SURE your site is mobile optimized.
Like it, not like it, think it’s dumb? Believe it or not up to 40 percent of traffic is mobile. That’s almost half of your potential traffic stopping by your webpage via cell phone devices!

Not mobile optimized? Google won’t even show that search if your site is not mobile optimized! Yikes! There goes almost half of your website traffic right there! If your site is not optimized, stop what you’re doing and make it happen. Now!

Site loading speed.
Here’s a sad fact: Americans, nowadays, have an attention span that is one second shorter than that of a goldfish. What’s even worse…when we go online it drops to three seconds. So if it takes your website 3.68 seconds to load. You’ve already lost them.

KEY POINT: Second Part to Website Traffic: Optimize for a Local Search.
Good news is the competition out there is terrible. The bad news is you’re probably doing a terrible job of getting your website seen!

It only takes one thing to be successful with local search: claim your address. Lots of small business owners don’t know that. If you have a personal address for your business, you will need to decide if you want your personal address up there or not.

If you have a business address, you need to claim it. Once you claim that address, Google will send you a little post card with a pin number you can verify that you receive mail at that address.

Once you do that, check out Google. In fact, check out Google right after this! Google any business you want and at the top you’ll see the paid ads and, generally, below that is what’s known as “the three pack”. These are the three local ads which have the address, phone number and, if you have more than five ratings, a star rating.

Below that, you can catch a glimpse at that “organic guy” right below your local ads and probably spent thousands of dollars to get up there. That’s how important local search is.

Quick Review from this blog/podcast: Make sure you have a foundation for your website and make sure you rank local!

KEYPOINT: The Third Part to SEO Success with your commercial cleaning websites: Video
Most people already know that Google is the largest search engine. What you probably don’t know is the second largest search engine is Youtube. The beautiful thing is that Google owns Youtube. What that means for you and your webpage is that Google puts a lot of value on video content. So when you make videos like we have, you appease and “make friends” with YouTube which in turns help you to rank better approval with Google.

Keep in mind the traffic is already out there. You can rank in front of other companies big and small local and not so local!

Let’s Wrap Up by Stepping Up your Commercial CleaningWebsites Traffic!
Here’s a summary on stepping in front of traffic and directing it to your website:

First on paid traffic on the top of google
Below-Three pack of local business with reviews and phone numbers-if your mobile it will call right off of Google.
Top of the organic rankings
Video in the organic rankings.
What’s cool is that if you search commercial cleaning websites like this you kind of a get a theme going. When customers see the same guy or company three or four times, there’s a good chance they’re going to call! Repeat views like this build up a tremendous amount of authority!

With these tools, you’re now empowered to “amp up” foot traffic on your web page!