The Page Your Cleaning Company’s Stars Send People To

A text message landed on a Thursday afternoon from a woman who runs a six person cleaning crew.

“Best rating in town and my phone still isn’t ringing. Is it the website?”

I’d met her once at a chamber breakfast and handed her a card she almost certainly threw out, so the text was a nice surprise on its own.

The first thing I did was check the rating, because owners are wrong about their own rating more often than they’re wrong about anything else I ask them.

She wasn’t wrong. Gold stars, a long stack of them, the sort of listing that makes the three competitors underneath look like they’re still deciding whether to bother.

Her listing wasn’t the problem, and yours probably isn’t either: cleaning companies average 4.9 stars, which came out 3 of 47 when I ranked every trade by rating, and nobody who has ever hired a cleaner needs that explained to them.

You’re in people’s houses. You either did the bathroom properly or you didn’t, and the person paying you worked that out about four seconds after walking through the door.

93.7% of the cleaning businesses I sampled hold at least one Google review. The hard part, the part every other trade I audit complains to me about, is already finished in yours.

Accountants would swap with you tomorrow, sitting on 24 reviews where the average business holds 179, and tax season keeps handing them the ask they never make.

Then the customer taps through to your website, and I want to describe what she found closely enough that you can see it.

The page as I found it

I opened her homepage at about four in the afternoon, in a browser window I keep squeezed down to the width of a phone, because that’s where her customers are and my big monitor lies to me.

The first screen, the part that shows up before anyone scrolls a millimeter, was a stock photograph of a smiling woman in yellow rubber gloves wiping a window that was already clean.

I’ve seen that same woman on eleven other websites. She has never cleaned anything in her life.

Is she on yours? Go and look, I’ll wait, and I promise not to say anything about it.

Across her, in a script font, it said Welcome To Our Website.

Under that sat a slideshow, three slides wide, sliding away forever, offering me the words Quality, Trust and Value in turn.

Her phone number was in gray type down in the footer. Her form was two taps away on a Contact page. There was not one word anywhere about the reviews that got the visitor there in the first place.

The stars had done their job. They carried a stranger off a map listing and delivered her to a front door, and the front door said Welcome To Our Website.

Would you paint that on the side of your van?

What that page was actually doing

Everybody arriving on that homepage had already half decided. She’d read the rating, skimmed two reviews, and come over to confirm a feeling she was already having.

The page gave her nothing to confirm. No names, no faces, no proof, no sense of what a clean costs, nothing at all to say this is the same company you were just reading about.

So she went back to the map and tapped whoever was listed underneath, and my client never heard a word about it. That’s the part that makes me want to put my head through a desk, because nobody who leaves ever tells you they left.

When did you last arrive at your own homepage the way a customer does, straight off your listing, on a phone, late at night, without typing the address in yourself? Tapping the link cold, seconds after reading a review, is a completely different experience from opening the site you already know your way around.

31.7% of these homepages carry a contact form, which is a shade ahead of the 28% I find across small business sites in general, and hers was not among them.

Restaurants have it worse, where 97.8% of them get talked about and 8.8% of homepages can take a message.

The same page, rebuilt

Same company, same crew, same phone number, same reviews.

The first screen is now a photo of her actual team standing in front of the actual van, taken on someone’s phone in a driveway, slightly too bright on one side.

One line of text sits across it saying what she does and who for. Move out and weekly cleaning for houses and apartments, six insured people, working this city since 2011.

Underneath are two buttons, both big enough for a thumb belonging to someone in a hurry. Call us. Book a walkthrough.

Then, before anything else on the page gets a turn, three of her reviews. Real ones, first names attached, the rambling kind that mention a stove and a dog and a Tuesday in February.

Then a form with four boxes in it. Name, phone, address, what needs doing.

That’s it. The slideshow is gone. The script font went in the bin, and the woman in the yellow gloves went back to whichever photo library she came from.

Whatever photograph you put up instead, someone still has to describe it, and this trade is weaker on that than on anything else I check.

None of that is design, and I want to be honest about it, because nobody hired an illustrator or spent an afternoon arguing about a shade of blue. Which of those six things could your own homepage not be carrying by Friday afternoon?

What changed and what didn’t

The rating didn’t change. She’d earned that years ago, one bathroom at a time, and no website was ever going to add to it.

I rebuilt a page in Washington DC last winter expecting otherwise, and the stars there never budged either.

What changed is that the page finally agreed with it.

A customer who arrives already convinced needs about eight seconds of proof and one obvious thing to press. Hand her a slideshow instead and you’ve quietly asked her to start the whole decision over again from nothing.

Her calls went up. I’m not going to hand you a percentage for that, because I didn’t run it as an experiment and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of a better story.

What she told me is that the people who call now open with the same sentence. I saw your reviews. They were always thinking it, and the old page never once gave them a reason to say it out loud.

The gap underneath all of this

One more number sits under this whole business. 77.7% of the cleaning businesses I sampled have a website at all.

So a good chunk of this trade earns a rating like that and then points it at nothing. A map pin, a phone number, and whatever a stranger decides to imagine about you on the strength of it.

Do you know how your closest competitor’s page reads on a phone? I’d put money on you knowing their rating and not their homepage.

If that’s you, and the stars are already sitting there, you’ve done the expensive half and skipped the cheap one. Have a look at what a decent one looks like in your trade before you let anyone quote you a number.

And when you do build it, the job is to make the page agree with your rating. That’s most of what I do for cleaning companies, and there’s less magic in it than you’d hope.

Send me the text

You know the one.

Best rating in town, phone still quiet, is it the website. If you sent that to me tonight I wouldn’t answer it straight away.

I’d open your listing, then your homepage, in a window the width of a phone, and read them one after the other in the order your customer reads them.

Then I’d ask you a single question. Does the second one sound like it belongs to the first?

If it doesn’t, you haven’t got a marketing problem. You’ve got a page telling a convinced stranger to start over, and a rating that deserves an awful lot better than that.