What should a cleaning company website have?

A cleaning company website needs a phone number that dials when tapped, the owner's name and real photos of the people who show up, recurring service as the main offer with a starting price, the one-time services listed under it, a quote form that asks about the house, the towns you work, a link to your Google reviews, and the insurance line only if it's true today. A cleaning company sells something no other trade does: a stranger in the customer's home while they're at work, or in their office after hours. Every choice on the page comes back to that. This is what goes on it, and what to leave off.

Two customers. The homeowner, usually pricing recurring service on a phone in the evening, comparing two or three companies, and deciding mostly on whether the people look like people she'd let in. And the office manager, property manager or landlord, who needs an office cleaned after hours, a rental turned over between tenants, or a build cleaned before the walkthrough, and who wants a company with insurance, a crew and an invoice. The homeowner is the volume and the recurring revenue. The commercial account is the one that pays on the first of the month. Serve both, but lead with the homeowner unless your business is mostly commercial.

Before anything about the services, the visitor is deciding whether to give you a key. So the page shows who you are. The owner's first name and a real photo. The crew's first names, if they're comfortable with it. Whether the same people come each time. Whether you do background checks, if you do. Who you're insured with, if you are. Stock photos of yellow gloves and a spray bottle say you had nothing real to show, and a page with no people on it is asking someone to hand a key to a logo.

Be exact about the insurance line. "Licensed, bonded and insured" is on every cleaning site, and half of them can't produce the certificate. If you carry general liability, say so, and say the carrier if you're comfortable. If you're bonded, say so. If you're not yet, leave the line off until you are. A customer who asks for the certificate and gets a pause remembers the pause more than the price.

A deep clean is one invoice. A house every two weeks is twenty-six. The business is the recurring customer, so the page leads with it: weekly, biweekly and monthly service, what a standard visit includes, room by room, and what's an add-on. The one-time services go under it, each with a line and a sentence. A site that leads with move-out cleans gets move-out customers, once each.

• Recurring: weekly, biweekly, monthly, and what the standard visit covers in each room
• Deep clean: the first visit, or the once-a-year one, and what it adds
• Move-in and move-out cleans, for tenants, landlords and sellers
• Post-construction cleanup, if you do it, since it's a different job with different equipment
• Office and commercial cleaning, after hours, on a schedule
• Short-term rental turnovers, if you do them, with the same-day window stated
• What you don't do: exterior windows, carpet shampooing, hoarding, whatever it is, so the phone doesn't ring for it

"Call for a quote" loses to "starting at" on every cleaning site, because the homeowner is comparing three companies on a phone at nine at night and the one that makes her call to learn the price gets skipped. You don't have to publish a price list. Publish a starting rate for a standard recurring visit on a typical house, say what moves it, the size, the pets, the first-visit deep clean, and quote the exact number after the walkthrough or the form. Commercial stays on a walkthrough; an office manager expects that.

A plumber's form should be four fields, because the customer is standing in water. Yours can ask a little more, because the customer is planning and expects to describe the house. Name, phone, town, bedrooms and bathrooms, how often, and a box for anything else, the dog, the stairs, the first-visit deep clean. Six fields, no more. Put a line above it that says when you reply, and mean it. Send the form to yourself the day the site goes live and once a month after; a form that lands in an inbox nobody reads is worse than none.

People first: the owner, the crew, the car with the name on it. Then the work: a kitchen before and after, a bathroom before and after, a finished office at night with the lights on. Take them with the phone level, in daylight where you can, and get the customer's permission before a photo of their house goes anywhere. Six to eight photos is plenty. If the car isn't lettered yet, the logo should pass the one-color test first, because it's going on a magnet, a shirt and an invoice before it's ever on a screen.

Name the towns: Bellevue, Papillion, La Vista, Gretna, Springfield, Ralston, Elkhorn, wherever the car actually goes. Recurring service has a tight radius, because a drive across the metro every two weeks eats the margin, so it's fine to say "weekly and biweekly in Bellevue and Papillion, one-time cleans across the metro". Use the same list you gave Google when you set up the listing; that setup is its own guide.

A homeowner giving a stranger a key reads every review. Link to the Google listing near the phone number so she can see they're real, and so the customer who loved the first visit can leave one. Don't paste quotes with first names onto the page; nobody believes them. If you have five reviews, link to the five. Getting to ten is its own guide, and for a cleaning company it's the fastest thing you can do for the phone.

1. 01

   One page is enough when

   Residential recurring is the business, the one-time cleans are the extras, and the person updating the site is the person doing the walkthroughs. Almost every cleaning company with one or two crews is here.

2. 02

   Five pages earn it when

   Commercial is a real share of the revenue and wants its own page with the insurance, the crew and the after-hours pitch, or move-out and post-construction work is big enough to want its own photos and its own form.

3. 03

   What doesn't earn it

   A blog of cleaning tips, a gallery page with four photos, and an about page that repeats the home page. Put the people on the home page and skip the rest.

• Tap the phone number from a phone and make sure it dials
• Send the form to yourself and check it lands somewhere you read
• Read the insurance line and ask whether you could produce the certificate today
• Check that every photo of a customer's home has their permission
• Make sure the name, the number and the towns match the Google listing and the car
• Confirm the domain is registered in your name, not the web company's

A website is $100 a page, so a one-page site is $100 and a five-page site is $500. Local SEO is $50 a page on top. Ignition, at $375, is the logo, the one-page site with its SEO and the Google Business Profile setup together, which is usually the right buy for a new company with nothing built yet. What each price point buys in general is its own guide; the price sheet has every line, and every line includes the files.

WEBSITES ARE $100 A PAGE ON THE SHEET, SEO $50 A PAGE. IGNITION IS $375 WITH THE LOGO AND THE GOOGLE LISTING.

The business name as it's registered, the phone number you answer, the towns, the services with recurring first, your starting rate and what moves it, the insurance line if it's true, whatever logo you have, and six to eight phone photos with the people in them. If you'd rather write the copy, send it; if not, we write it from what you send and you approve it before it goes live. It all runs by email, and you get a price and a date back.