Questions cleaning company owners ask about marketing

Fewer than you think to beat the average, more than you think to win the map pack. Across 45,428 house cleaning listings the median is 6 reviews and 59.5% have under 10. In a real metro the three companies in the map pack usually sit past 100, which only 7.1% of cleaning companies reach. Aim for two new reviews a week, asked for by text the afternoon of the clean. The reviews guide has the scripts.

They work as a starter, not as a business. Expect $15 to $40 per shared lead on Thumbtack and $25 to $60 on Angi in most metros, with the same lead sold to three or four companies. The math only works if those clients convert to recurring service. If your marketplace clients book one deep clean and vanish, you are paying $200 or more per recurring client and the platform owns the relationship. Details in the agency versus DIY guide.

Recurring, with one-time as the front door. A biweekly client at $160 a clean is roughly $4,000 a year and stays 18 to 36 months. A move-out clean is $250 once. Run the ads and the offers that put a first clean on the calendar, then convert on the doorstep with a discount for booking the next visit before your crew leaves. See the pricing guide.

Most companies land between $18 and $55 per call or form fill on search, with move-out and deep clean terms at the high end. Costs blow up when broad match sends you commercial janitorial, carpet cleaning and maid-service job seekers. Negative keywords, exact and phrase match, and a location radius you actually service fix most of it. See the Google Ads guide.

The data says a website separates the serious companies from the rest. Cleaning companies with a site show a median of 12 reviews; those without show 1. 37.3% of the industry lists no website at all. It is also where Google and the AI answer engines confirm your service area, your services and your prices.

The answer engines read plain text and lean on the same trust signals Google uses. Put your cities, your services, and your starting prices in sentences a machine can quote, keep your name and address identical everywhere, and collect reviews that name the neighborhood and the type of clean. The AI search guide has the checklist.

Yes, more than for most trades, because neighbors ask for a cleaner by name constantly. Recommendations from real customers outperform your own posts by a wide margin, so ask happy clients to reply in those threads rather than posting yourself every week. Facebook neighborhood groups behave the same way. Both are covered in the Facebook and Instagram guide.

No, and this is the one place marketing advice for cleaning companies has to stop and defer to operations. Filling a schedule you cannot staff produces cancellations and one-star reviews. Cap ad spend at the number of new recurring slots your current crew can absorb, run hiring ads with the leftover budget, and reopen the tap when the seats are filled. The slow season guide covers the reverse case.

Normal, not remarkable. The dataset average is 4.8 stars and 89% of companies sit at 4.5 or better, so a high rating does not distinguish you. Volume and recency do. Below 4.0, where 5.4% of companies sit, callers stop reading and move on.

It is public data collected at scale, so read it as accurate within a point or two, not to the decimal. Listings are deduplicated by Google place and refreshed monthly. The category mixes solo cleaners, franchises and small janitorial firms, which pulls the median down. Method is on the about page.

Public Google Business Profile listings found through Google Maps searches for house cleaning services in every state. Only public business fields are stored, never reviewer names or customer information.

Any one service, or several: Google Ads management, Meta ads, AI search optimization, local SEO and Google Business Profile work, website design, social media management, review generation, missed-call text-back and follow-up, email and SMS campaigns, bookkeeping, and cold-call appointment setting. Setup, management and reporting are included. If you choose to run ads, the money paid to Google or Meta is yours and stays on your card.

You choose. Keep the service at the monthly price quoted before the trial started, switch to a different one, or stop. Nothing renews automatically and nothing is billed during the trial. Anything built, such as a website or a reworked Google profile, stays in your accounts.

No. There is no card on file for the trial. What is needed is access to the relevant accounts and about 20 minutes on a setup call. Most services are live within 48 hours of that call; a new website takes about a week to first draft. Start on the free trial page.