How to use Google ads to get monthly cleaning customers and grow your profit

The following article is based on a presentation given by Wesley and Daisy Foster at the 2021 Maid Summit, hosted and organized by ZenMaid.

About the presenter

Wesley Foster is part of the team at Digitool where he teaches cleaning business owners how to use Google ads to grow their business. Digitool specializes in helping service businesses to save money, grow profits and save time.

Google ads and your maid service

How do you take a family-run business that wasn’t making any profit and scale it to a business that gets 800+ leads using Google ads? Wesley and Daisy Foster share their journey of how they did just that.

In today’s article, you’ll learn how to optimize your Google ads and skyrocket your monthly customer base.

Three things to keep in mind as we get started:

Think of Google ads and your business like a thermostat. If you need more jobs, you crank it up. If you’re too busy and you want to slow down just a little bit, you turn it down. You really do have complete freedom to control your design output.
Everything is instant with Google ads. As soon as your ads go live, you receive leads, and therefore, you receive more customers.
You can have a presence in multiple cities. When it comes to Google ads, you can target based on keywords and location.

Let’s start with a Google search of “cleaning services in Miami.” The first three listed business ads are paid positions. The owners of those three businesses are paying Google for their visibility. If you scroll down further, you see the Google My Business Listings. Scroll down further and you find the more “organic” results.

If you click on the “Miami roof cleaning services” link, you are taken directly to their website. The website shows you their local roof cleaning experts, contact number, free quote, top-rated licensed professionals, and their eco-friendly products. If you scroll down on their website you see the different services this company has to offer: roof cleaning, power washing, residential house washing, commercial power washing, gutter cleaning, window cleaning, solar power cleaning, and seal and staining. Everything a customer needs is right there.

This roof cleaning services business is a great example of the importance of keywords. You, as a business owner, really do have complete control to target your audience when it comes to keywords and locations.

If you know your target customer is looking for your services between 10 am and 2 p.m. Monday to Friday, you can turn your ads on at those specific times. How amazing is that?

The second benefit of Google ads is that you completely control your costs.

Each click that comes directly from an ad campaign is deducted from your Google ads budget. The roof cleaning services in Miami may pay $1,000 a month to be in those top few positions on Google, most likely paying per click.

So why is Google ads beneficial? When you apply Google ads correctly, you get more jobs, more calls, and higher profits. You don’t need to be a whiz to understand the basic workings of Google ads!

Want to learn more about optimizing your presence on Google? Read one of our recent articles: How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing and Attract New Cleaning Customers

The journey to generating 825 leads

Learn from someone who’s been in your shoes. A family-run business generated 825 leads in the UK and can help you in your cleaning business journey in the US, UK, or abroad.

The cleaning business in the UK, Vulcan Hygiene, was run by husband and wife, Derek and Laura. Since starting the business, the couple had big ambitions. They wanted to scale a business quickly both in terms of revenue and professionalism. But in reality, they felt as though they were slaves to their own business instead of free entrepreneurs.

Derek and Laura ticked the boxes of what they should do to generate new business. They created a new website, implemented SEO, used Facebook ads, networked — the list goes on. The couple even hired a digital marketing agency, but nothing seemed to really work. They couldn’t figure out why they weren’t making a profit.

When Derek and Laura pumped more money into their marketing and advertising budgets, their revenue went up. But their profits were completely flat. Their business wasn’t getting any sort of return on their investment.

At this point, the couple knew that they needed to seek professional help, but they didn’t know where to go or who to ask.

After contacting professionals, (like Wesley and Daisy Foster) and individual research and reading through case studies and testimonials, Derek and Laura realized two things:

They were wasting money
They were wasting time

So they dug a little deeper to discover the root of their problems.

Derek and Laura spread their marketing budget evenly across all services. Now, this isn’t always a problem. Let’s be realistic though — some services are far more profitable than others.

If you want to see a high return on investment, you need to concentrate on the areas that bring you the most money.

Derek and Laura realized that they weren’t focused on their online reputation. Potential customers who found them online didn’t know if Derek and Laura’s business was trustworthy.

When the couple dove further into their strategy they realized that although they used many marketing tools, they left out Google ads.

Something was seriously wrong here. So, Derek and Laura immediately paused their marketing with Yelp.

Digitool took over their marketing budget of $1400 with a target to increase profit by 50% within 12 months. They created a Google ads campaign with landing pages. These ads only targeted the most profitable and popular services, which in their case, were oven cleaning, carpet cleaning, and pressure washing.

Optimizing your landing pages

Landing pages don’t need to look amazing — they just need to do the job well.

So what are they? Landing pages (often called the lead capture page) are web pages that appear after a user clicks a link from an ad, email, or other digital sources. Once the user “lands” on your page, the user is encouraged to take action to buy your product or service.

Derek and Laura polished their landing page to give users easy access to their services. Included on their landing page are:

Special offers and promos
Quotes
Services
Contact number
Links to reviews from customers on Google, Facebook, and Trustpilot
Location
Their trusted experts
A short description of their business
A five-star review from a satisfied customer
Covid safety standards
Pet-friendly staff and products

One key takeaway from Derek and Laura’s landing page is their quote button and contact number. As a potential customer scrolls down their landing page, the quote and the phone number are always visible. Easy access to information gets you more leads!

Making your pages distraction-free

Over the years, experts studied the data and found what works well and what doesn’t. Want to know what they found?

To convert leads you need to minimize distractions.

On your website, you may have some really engaging content: a few videos, an “about us” page, and even a link to your social media.

What could go wrong?

Think about how easily distracted you are. If a website sends you to Instagram, you can immediately see all of your notifications. Your focus shifts from the services or products of the company to the red icon and messages that you need to answer. Ten minutes pass and you aren’t even done replying to friends and you’ve forgotten why you went there in the first place.

So, it’s important to avoid potential distractions on your landing pages. Make it as easy as possible for your lead to get a quote and request services.

Increasing your five-star reviews to build your online reputation

People call businesses with the most online reviews; it’s as simple as that.

It’s difficult to get targeted customers to trust you without online reviews.

Work with a company that specializes in online presence to boost your business over local competition. Good reviews help with online visibility. The more visible your business is, the more leads you’ll get.

Learn more about using reviews to grow your maid service right here.

What happened to Derek and Laura’s cleaning service?

Vulcan Hygiene now has over seventy five-star reviews!

Derek and Laura’s customer base learned to trust them and booked more and more services.

They generated over 1,100 leads which resulted in $100,000 in revenue. More importantly, the profit was approximately $50,000.

You can do it too!

If you’re losing out on thousands of dollars with a failed marketing strategy, use the tips from this article to boost your profits. You can do it too! Let us know how you get on.

If you found this article helpful for your maid service, you may also like:

For more resources on how to grow and perfect your cleaning business, check out the replays from the 2021 Maid Summit, hosted by ZenMaid. The summit featured more than 60 presentations from other maid service owners who shared tools and strategies to help you achieve the highest levels of success in your business.

Try ZenMaid for free!