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Marketing for Cleaning Companies
Residential and commercial are two businesses that happen to share a name. The marketing that wins one does very little for the other.
Who this is for
You’re either selling trust to a household or a contract to a building.
The first thing worth settling is which business you’re actually in, because the two halves of this trade share almost nothing beyond the word cleaning.
Residential is somebody deciding whether to give a stranger a key to their house. It’s decided on trust, it’s searched for the same day, and it becomes a weekly relationship worth thousands a year if it lasts.
Commercial is a contract, decided by an office manager or a facilities person over several weeks, usually against two other bids, and usually renewed for years once it’s won. Nothing about that sale is urgent and nothing about it is emotional.
Why this trade is its own challenge
The cheapest bid wins the contract and then loses it.
Both halves of this trade are unusually easy to enter and unusually hard to keep, and that shapes everything. Anybody with a vacuum can undercut you, and most of them do, and most of them are gone within the year.
That has three consequences, and each is a marketing problem rather than a cleaning problem.
They find three, and residential finds them the same day
A household deciding to hire a cleaner searches and books inside a day or two.
Commercial takes weeks, but it starts the same way.
Somebody types what they need and works from what shows.
If you aren’t in the three, you weren’t in either race.
A commercial bid sits for weeks, and you aren’t in the room
An office manager collects three quotes and then does nothing for two weeks. During that gap the bids blur, and the one that gets the call back is usually whoever still looked like a real company on the second look.
That’s the half almost no cleaning company works on. Staying in front of somebody who already looked at you costs a fraction of reaching them the first time, and on a contract worth years it barely has to work at all to pay.
Reviews are about trust in one half and reliability in the other
A homeowner reads reviews to decide whether to hand over a key. A facilities manager reads them to find out whether your crews turn up when the building is empty and nobody is watching. Both are reading for dependability rather than for how clean the desks were. Below about four stars most people simply stop considering you, which BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey puts at 68% of consumers, from 1,002 US adults.
The defensive half matters as much as the offensive one. One unanswered review about a crew that skipped a week is doing more damage than a month of advertising can undo.
Two businesses
Pick one to lead with. Doing both badly is the usual outcome.
The temptation is to market to everybody, and it produces a website that reads as neither. A homeowner wants to know who comes into the house and whether the same person comes every week. An office manager wants to know about insurance, cover for sickness, and what happens when somebody quits.
Those are different pages, different search terms and different proof. Trying to serve both in one voice usually means the household finds you too corporate and the building finds you too small.
That doesn’t mean giving up half your business. It means deciding which half leads, and letting the other one live on its own page with its own argument, rather than diluting both into something that persuades nobody.
Where a cleaning company usually starts
Be findable, be reviewed for showing up, then be remembered.
Almost nobody should buy all of it at once, and for cleaning the split between the two halves sets the order.
In the order it usually makes sense
Everything we do is listed here, and how pricing works is on the homepage, including why we won’t quote a number before we’ve looked at your business.
Client spotlight
Her brand was already good. Nobody could find it.
Melissa Stiers started The Tidy Sister in February 2015 and grew it from one woman to a crew of eight. Then the COVID years took it down to a single crew of two, and it never quite came back.
She came to us with a five-page website that was a fancy business card. She had a Google Business Profile she wasn’t getting much out of. And she happens to be a very good graphic artist, so the logo, the palette and the typography were already right. None of it was visible to anybody.
The business was also bigger than the website said it was. Residential cleaning, commercial work, and home concierge services, and a visitor couldn’t have told you that any of the last two existed.
So the first decisions were about what to lead with, not about design. After studying her market we pulled the commercial side back, led with residential cleaning, put concierge second, and drew the service area around the part of the map where the right customers actually live.
Then the build, and it grew while we were in it. It started as a fifty-page site and finished at eighty-five, because the deeper we got the more there was worth covering. Search & Rescue and Review Patrol went in alongside it.
We also took the paper out of the business. Online quote requests, intake forms that accept a video from the customer so she can price a job without driving across town to look at it, online job applications, and payment details collected online. She’s running hiring ads and expanding her crews now.
In the first month she went from invisible to second in Google for the two searches she cares most about, house cleaning gresham oregon and house cleaner gresham oregon. By the end of the second month her gross revenue was up more than 75%, which she showed us in her own accounting software.
“I don’t know what you consider blowing up, but five inquiries in the first 24 hours is blowing up to me. I definitely need to hire people, because at this rate I’ll be booked out by the end of the week.”
Check it out for yourself. The site is live, you can open it right now, and you can read every page of it.
The Tidy Sister · house cleaning, Gresham, Oregon
An eighty-five page build. See the site
Why eighty-five pages, and not ten
Cleaning is two businesses sharing a phone number, and a ten-page site can only really speak to one of them. A homeowner deciding who to let into an empty house and an office manager renewing a nightly contract aren’t the same buyer, and they don’t ask the same questions.
At eighty-five pages each of them has somewhere to land: the services on their own pages, the neighborhoods and business districts worked in, and the questions that get asked before anybody is trusted with a key. What’s the vetting on the people who come in? What happens if something gets broken? Is it the same crew every week?
That’s what it takes to answer all of those questions before a future client has to ask.
Straight answer
When this isn’t the right call.
If you can’t staff more work
Leave this alone. In this trade the constraint is almost always people, and winning contracts you can’t cover is how a company loses the ones it already had.
If you’re bidding on price alone
The cheapest bid wins the contract and then loses it, usually within the year. Nothing on this page fixes an offer that can’t be delivered profitably.
If somebody promised you the number one spot
We aim at the top three positions in the maps in Google and keep you there, for what people actually search. Nobody can honestly promise the top spot.
The half you lead with, and the contract that comes back.
You show up in the three for the half you decided to lead with, and you’re still there when a slow commercial decision comes back around. On a contract worth years, it doesn’t take many of them to cover what you’re paying us.
You’ll see it in two numbers you can count without us: how many calls came in, and how many contact requests came from your website. Not website visitors, not a bunch of fancy, multicolored charts and graphs in a ranking report.
No long-term contract. You stop at the end of the month on almost everything; search is the one exception and takes sixty days’ written notice, because it’s booked ahead.
Frequently Asked Questions
The things worth asking before you buy.
Can you get us to the top of Google for cleaning in our city?
Yes, into the top three of the local map pack, and we keep you there. That's the block of three businesses that shows above the ordinary results with the map beside it, and it's where the calls come from. You don't need to be first. You need to be one of the three.
The one thing we won't promise is the number one spot, because a position moves with who's searching and where they're standing. Anybody selling you number one is selling you a screenshot.
A ranking promise only means something if it answers two questions: for what, and where. For what, because it's easy to rank a business first for a phrase nobody types, and that's how a ranking guarantee is usually kept. We go after what somebody actually searches when they need you today. And where, because a business ranks in a shape around its address, not everywhere at once. For most that's somewhere between three and seven miles out, depending on how tightly Google draws the map where you are.
And you'll know without taking our word for it. You count the calls and the contact requests from your website. Search takes somewhere between thirty and ninety days to show. If it hasn't, give us our sixty days' written notice.
Read more on this topic: How to test a promise before you buy it
What if we want to reach further than three to seven miles?
That's the right ambition and usually the wrong first move. Widening the shape you already have is most of the ongoing work, and every street that comes inside it's people who couldn't see you before and can now. Reaching past it before the near ground is saturated spreads the same money thinner over people who were never going to call you first anyway.
When you genuinely do run out of room, the next move is another area rather than a bigger radius. We build the same shape around an adjoining town, and that repeats for as many areas as you want to take on. There are more advanced ways to push reach as well, and they're worth spending on at that point rather than at the start.
The only real gate is whether you can take the work. We'd rather hold you at one area that's producing than spread you across three that are half fed.
Read more on this topic: What three to seven miles actually depends on
We do both residential and commercial. Can one site serve both?
It can, but not in one voice. A homeowner wants to know who comes into the house and whether the same person comes every week. An office manager wants insurance, sickness cover, and what happens when somebody quits.
Give each half its own page and its own argument. Trying to say both things at once usually means the household finds you too corporate and the building finds you too small.
Read more on this topic: How one site serves two different buyers
Our competitors keep undercutting us. Does marketing fix that?
No, and it's worth being blunt about it. Anybody with a vacuum can bid lower than you, and plenty will. What marketing changes is who gets considered at all, and whether you're compared on something other than price.
The cheapest bid tends to win the contract and lose it inside a year. Being the company that's still there in year three is a stronger position than being the cheapest in month one.
What if we can't staff the extra work?
Then don't buy this yet. In this trade the constraint is almost always people, and winning work you can't cover is how a company loses the clients it already had. Staff first. This is the one situation where the honest answer is to wait.
Read more on this topic: When we'd tell you to wait
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