Run a Five Minute Check on Your Cleaning Photos Tonight

Twenty past eight on a Sunday night, and a woman is sitting on the edge of a bathtub with her phone in her hand.

She hands the keys back Tuesday morning. The oven still looks like the oven.

So she types move out cleaning into Google, taps Images, and starts scrolling, because she wants to see what clean actually looks like before she pays a stranger to come and do it in a house she no longer lives in.

Forty photos go past her thumb before she stops on one of them. Your kitchens are in three of those, or they’re in none of them, and your camera has nothing whatsoever to do with which.

I’d bet on none. I went and counted.

The line sitting behind your photo

Google can’t look at your photo and see a spotless oven. It’s software. Your picture arrives as a wall of colored dots and nothing else.

So every image on a website drags one line of code along behind it that no visitor ever sees. Alt text, on whatever box your website tool keeps it in.

Google reads that line to work out what your photo shows, along with the picture itself and the words on the page around it, which means an empty box isn’t a small omission. It’s the difference between a photograph that can be found and a photograph that can only be looked at by people who already found you.

The average cleaning company site describes 51.7% of its images, which is 40 of 47 among the trades I audit, and no other check on this trade falls anywhere near as far.

Across everything I audited the average site manages 54.9%, so nobody is covering themselves in glory here. Your trade is doing what everyone else does, a little worse, on the one check where the work itself is the product you’re selling.

Why would the trade that sells clean kitchens be near the bottom of my list on describing them? I’ve got a theory, and it arrives later.

Five photos, five minutes, right now

Do it while you’re reading. Grab a computer if you can, because phones make this fiddly.

1. Open your own homepage.

2. Right click straight on the best photo and choose Inspect from the menu. A panel opens down the side, full of code, with your picture’s own line highlighted in it.

3. Find the word alt in that line. What’s sitting inside the quote marks after it?

4. Do the same thing on four more photos.

Five photos, five lines. It takes about as long as waiting for a kettle.

When did you last read one of those lines on your own website? I hadn’t read mine in three years when I finally went looking.

Now score yourself out of five, and be mean about it.

An empty pair of quote marks is a zero, and so is IMG_2231, and so is the word cleaning sitting there on its own. So is your company name repeated across all five, which is what I find most often on sites that got built over a weekend by someone who was being paid to hurry.

A photo only scores if a stranger could read the line out loud and picture the thing.

What a good one sounds like

“Oven door and racks after a four hour move out clean.”

“Kitchen counters and backsplash at the end of a weekly service in a two bedroom apartment.”

“Our team” isn’t that. Neither is “cleaning services near me”, which someone once told you to type into every empty box you could find, and which reads to a search engine exactly like what it is.

Write the line for the woman on the bathtub instead. She’s the one who can’t see the picture, either because it hasn’t loaded on two bars of signal or because her phone is reading the page out loud to her while she does something else.

Would your five lines have been any use to her at all? Mine wouldn’t have been, on the first website I ever built for money.

What the filled-in boxes buy you

Two things, and the first one is the reason I bother writing about this at all.

Someone in your city is searching tonight for what a properly cleaned oven looks like, or a bathroom after a deep clean, or a kitchen at the end of a move out. Those searches land on photographs that carry words, because a search engine has no way of landing them on a photograph it can’t read a single thing about.

The second is the customer who never sees your gallery, who has a moving date and a landlord and a credit card the same as everybody else. Your competitor’s photo wall is silence to her, and yours could be a sentence.

Neither of those shows up in any report you’ll ever be handed. Which is exactly why the boxes stay empty, in your trade and in most of the others I look at.

So who on your team would you trust to write those sentences? I’d pick whoever answers the phone, every time, over whoever built the site.

Why I trust the number, and where it’s soft

I’d rather you checked me than believed me. Pick cleaning companies in the explorer on my report and leave the city box alone, and it prints every check I ran beside the number of sites sitting behind it, which for this trade is 1,803 websites I could open and read.

Then the soft part, which I’d be annoyed at myself for skipping. Anything typed into that box passes with me, and a filled box can hold absolutely anything.

Plenty of what I scored as a pass is a file name, or the word photo, or a phrase the software dropped in automatically that nobody ever read back.

So the real state of it is worse than the number I published. Does that make you feel better about your own five, or worse?

The strange part is everything else

This trade grades 73 out of 100 in my industry ranking, 17 of 47, off a weighted average of ten checks that I run the same way on everybody.

That’s a respectable place to sit, and it surprises owners every time I say it out loud. Did you assume your trade was worse than that? The industry sitting at the very top of my ranking didn’t clear you by as much as you’d expect, and first place turned out to be a low bar once I looked at what it was built from.

Cleaning companies aren’t behind on the web.

They’re behind on one habit, and it happens to be the habit that turns a clean oven into something a stranger can find at half past eight on a Sunday night.

Nobody ever told them to do it, either. Whoever built the site had forty photos to upload and a deadline on Friday, the box underneath was optional, and optional things lose every single time.

Most of the cleaning sites I open run on WordPress, and it hands you that empty box without a word about filling it, which is about where the software stops and the owner starts on every job I take.

Ten minutes a week fixes it

You don’t need a project for this. No redesign, no quote from me, no meeting about it. Filling those boxes belongs to the quiet, unglamorous side of keeping a website in working order, which is the side nobody sells and everybody needs.

How many photos do you put up in an average month? Six, maybe ten, most of them taken on a phone in a kitchen you just finished.

You need the next ten photos you upload and one sentence each, typed by the person who was standing in the room when the picture got taken, because that person is the only one who remembers what was in it.

Every site I build for a cleaning company goes out with those boxes filled in, and not one client has ever thanked me for it, because nobody can watch it happening.

But when a stranger finds a photo of your work in an image search and calls the number on the page it came from, that’s a customer nobody referred to you. How many of those did you get last year?

Go on, argue with me

Maybe your trade really is different. Cleaning sells on trust, on a neighbor’s say so, on the sister in law who swears by you, and no photo search on earth competes with that.

Your trade is rated better than almost any I audit, so I went and rebuilt the homepage all those stars were pointing people at, and the photos were the loudest thing on it.

I’ll hear it. I’d like to hear it.

So run your five, count them honestly, and if you come out at zero and still think it costs you nothing, write and tell me why. Make the case well and I’ll say so in public.

And if right clicking your own website sounds like a rotten way to spend a Sunday evening, I’ll go and look at yours myself.