Cleaning is two businesses wearing one name. One sells recurring commercial contracts to facilities managers on multi-year terms; the other sells domestic rounds, move-out cleans and one-off deep cleans to householders. They have different buyers, different decision speeds, different margins and almost no overlap in the words people search. A plan that does not choose between them will be measured against whichever is larger and will serve neither.
Commercial and domestic are separate plans
A facilities manager comparing contract cleaners is doing procurement: they want scope, staffing model, insurance, vetting, references from comparable buildings and a price per square foot. A householder wants a price for next Thursday. Pages built for one read as irrelevant to the other, and a site trying to address both at once usually ends up with a homepage that is vague enough to lose both. Decide which is the business and give the other, at most, its own clearly separated section.
The service area is the ranking constraint
Cleaning is delivered at the customer's premises, which places it in the category of business whose visibility is bounded by where it can credibly serve rather than by where it says it serves. Listing a dozen towns you would technically travel to produces thin pages and no advantage. Name the places you actually operate in, describe the work you have done there, and let the service area match the rounds your crews really run.
Recurring revenue changes what a lead is worth
A domestic customer on a fortnightly round is worth many multiples of a single deep clean, and a commercial contract is worth multiples of that again. Knowing those two numbers changes every downstream decision: what you can pay for a click, how much effort a page justifies, whether to chase the one-off jobs at all. Most cleaning businesses have never calculated the average length of a retained customer, and it is the single most useful number to bring to any supplier conversation.
Trust signals in this trade are practical, not decorative
The buyer is letting strangers into a home or an empty building at night. What reassures them is specific: whether staff are employed or subcontracted, what vetting is done, what insurance is carried and to what limit, whether the same cleaner comes each time, and what happens when something is broken. Those answers belong on the page in plain language. They convert better than any amount of design and they are the questions every enquiry asks anyway.
The profile and the reviews do most of the local work
For a service delivered at the customer's address, a complete and accurate business profile with a real service area, genuine recent reviews and correct hours is the largest single lever, and it costs nothing but attention. Any proposal that starts with a content programme before that is in order has the sequence wrong. Get the profile right, get a steady flow of honest reviews, and then spend on the pages.
Questions people ask about seo for cleaning company
Should a cleaning company chase commercial or domestic work online?
Whichever is the business you actually want to grow, because the plans barely overlap. Commercial is slower, larger and bid-driven; domestic is fast, smaller and price-sensitive. Trying to rank for both from one set of pages usually produces a site that reads as generic to both.
How many town pages should we have?
As many as you genuinely serve and can write about with specifics, and no more. Pages that differ only by a place name are recognisably thin, and a handful of substantial ones outperform a directory of near-duplicates.
Do reviews really matter this much in cleaning?
Yes, more than in most trades, because the purchase involves access to a home or premises and the buyer is managing risk rather than comparing features. Recent, specific, plentiful reviews do work that no page copy can do.
What should we know before talking to an agency?
What a retained customer is worth over their lifetime and how long they typically stay. Without those two figures no one can tell you what a lead is worth, and every recommendation about budget is guesswork.