From 18 calls a month to 55 calls per month with SEO – A Top Exterior Cleaning Company Marketing Strategy

A screenshot of Google My Business results for a local exterior cleaning company.

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IMPORTANT NOTE: The data you see above was pulled directly from Google My Business. The year over year increase in call volume does not even take into account phone calls from the website, which are also much higher in 2019…

 

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When Webology took on the SEO management and online marketing requirements of Superior Cleaninga pressure washing and window cleaning company in Birmingham, Alabama, we knew we were taking on a project that would need a dedicated approach and a lot of work. What we found initially was a website rife with problems and Google penalties – more about that later – and very little in the way of local optimization.

When you consider that over half of Google searches are for local services

– which makes sense when you are looking for a services such as pressure washing – it becomes evident how important it is to optimize your online marketing, and your SEO, towards local customers. A business such as pressure washing relies heavily on reaching new customers within a local area, and also on brand loyalty for repeat business.

The Following is an Outline of Our Work with Superior Cleaning

who – as mentioned – were in need of help with their website and search engine optimization (SEO). In short, we re-booted their online presence, helped them create many new leads and conversions, and brought them back to the forefront in terms of online visibility. This is an example of what Webology can do for your pressure washing business, and bear in mind that we treat each client individually, as no two projects are alike.

Customers Background

Superior Cleaning Service is a company specializing in pressure washing solutions for residential and commercial properties. They’ve been operating out of Birmingham for the past 15 years. They have expertise in their field of work that should put them at the top of anyone’s list when it comes to customer service and quality. The problem was that they were not getting the traffic and leads they expected from their website, nor from their advertising campaigns.

For years the brand had benefited from being an established company with an aged domain.

Competition in the local area for the pressure washing niche wasn’t that difficult, so their old website ranked fairly well with thin content and a handful of lower quality backlinks. That all changed when a malicious file infected their website and triggered a Google penalty, sending their traffic and phone calls to nearly nothing overnight.

Webology came on board to see what we could do to help

Starting with our first step, which is to perform a full SEO audit. What we found was quite alarming, and immediately gave us an indication as to the scale of the problem. The malware had altered their meta titles, making it apparent to anyone who actually found their listing on page 2-3 that the site could not be trusted. So, that audit revealed that we needed to work on fixing their website and removing the penalty above all else. We set right to work building them a new website since there was no way to get access to the old one.

It is worth noting that, following our work, the number of calls requesting information on services provided increased dramatically, as shown by this graph you’ve already seen once. The orange shows the volume of calls following our review and relaunch, the blue the volume after 1 year of SEO – you can see the difference is impressive.

The SEO Audit

We will always begin a project by carrying out a full SEO audit. This allows us to check in on how your campaign has been performing in recent months, and to put into place proposals on improving performance. We keep on top of changes to the Google core algorithms in the exterior cleaning niche.

Google, once happy to rank ‘keyword stuffed’ pages, now looks for relevant, new and informative content, so it is important your content plan is up to date, engaging and not overly duplicated. What we discovered when we took a detailed look at Superior Cleaning Service’s website and SEO strategy was a website that had clearly been hacked. The meta descriptions – important for Google searches – were full of foreign characters, and the site had been infiltrated with ‘parasite’ pages, which were creating outbound links of massive numbers.

The result of all this was that the site had been heavily penalized by Google.

This, we should say, can happen to anyone and is a reason why you should have an expert team professionally maintain your website hosting. Our only possible option was to create a new website, free of all the problems and contamination of the old one, and present it to Google for evaluation. Once we had launched the new site, we submitted to Google for reconsideration via Search Console. Then there was about a 60-day period before the penalties were fully lifted. For a pressure washing business – indeed any business relying upon local traffic and leads – 60 days is a considerable amount of potential business lost.

A graphic highlighting the importance of web security and SSL certificates.

What We Did Next – Link Building, Content Writing and On-Page SEO

A decorative image representing a web page.

 

Once we had the new site up and running, we began work on improving the brand’s online presence, starting with on-page SEO on the website. On-page SEO generally just refers to adding code and features to the website which help Google and other search engines understand what your website is about. It’s foundational to everything else you do, and an important first step.

We also worked on creating the most essential element of any website: quality, relevant content. There is an old adage that says ‘content is king’; this is true, but we should add that these days ‘quality content is king’ is a more accurate saying. You need to ensure your content is readable not only by people, but is also acceptable to Google, and as we have seen in this instance, this is a very important factor.

Content is so important, but just publishing content for the sake of ranking won’t cut it.

We took a look at the local competition to see how much content their website needed. None of the competition was blogging at all, so we decided to limit ourselves to one post per month. Instead of blogging, we did a lot of work comparing the copy on their homepage and main service pages against the competition and following what seem to be best practices within the niche. Our work then involved link-building on a monthly basis, which is another essential element of good SEO and website ranking. As controversial as the term ‘link building’ may be, it’s still the most important task an SEO can do to improve brand visibility.

new and lost backlinks chart for a pressure washing company website.

As controversial as the term ‘link building’ may be, it’s still the most important task an SEO can do to improve brand visibility.

Call it ‘link earning’ if it makes you sleep better at night, but the bottom line here is that links are still the most important ranking signal. SEO agencies like ours spend a fortune each month on tools like AHREFS that are designed to analyze and optimize backlink profiles for a good reason. It works…

We can’t stress the importance of backlinks and citations for local search enough. Quality links still move the needle and generate leads. Avoid spammy links at all cost though.

Here’s a few quality sources of backlinks for a local cleaning company:

  1. Local Business Listing Citations
  2. Data Aggregators
  3. Press Release Syndication
  4. Local Media Links
  5. Guest Posts on Relevant Sites

Just keep in mind that no two local markets are alike. You should always complete a backlink gap analysis to determine which ratios of links will work best for your brand.

Small Budgets Can Bring Big Results in the Local Power Washing Service Niche

Working with a small budget, and with the expertise provided by the Webology team, we were able to achieve results very quickly, despite the period affected by the Google penalty. Not only did we help boost calls to the business, our experience in home services SEO also allowed for many more keywords that had been neglected – in fact, 40 new keywords that gave Superior Cleaning Service an advantage over rival service providers when it came to local searches – and remember, local searches are where it’s at in the cleaning service space.

a screenshot of keyword rankings improvements.

Out of the 40 keywords we actively track in SEMrush, many of them are considered to be ‘long-tail’ phrases. Meaning, they get lower search volume, but the people who use these terms are generally more informed buyers. We’re also ranking well for many shorter, more competitive phrases contained within the ‘long tail’. In total, the site now ranks for over 760 new keywords according to AHREFS. Paying Google for clicks would cost the brand an (estimated) total of $1,200 per month, making our SEO work extremely efficient in a very objective sense:

SEMrush tracking works great for an overall benchmark of rankings, but it tracks averages over a 24 hour period within whatever geographic area you setup. So, we often do a few manual Google searches in an incognito Chrome window to show our clients a snapshot of their ranking ‘in the wild’. Here’s a few searches we performed after running the reports:

Why Pressure Washing Companies Should Advertise with Webology

As this case study proves, local SEO and online marketing is essential for a business that provides pressure washing services. At Webology, we took the Superior Cleaning Service website and rebuilt it, recovered the site from Google penalties, and increased traffic in a very short period of time. We did this on a small budget, using our expertise and knowledge, and the results are ongoing. By creating quality, readable and relevant content for your website, we can launch it up the Google rankings giving you greater visibility online, and our SEO practices – such as investigating locally-relevant keywords as we did here – keep up with the changes in Google’s algorithms. Our work helps build links, increase traffic, and provide conversions.

a chart showing estimated traffic gains.

GET STARTED

Yes, we’ve been doing local SEO since before 2018! In this space, that makes us seasoned veterans with our without Blake’s military background 🪖🎖️ If you want to work with a veteran owned and operated SEO company that has years of experience in the exterior cleaning niche, reach out! Let us know a little more about your business by filling out this form. One of our digital marketing strategists will be in touch soon.