Your Google Maps listing is a crucial marketing tool for your residential cleaning business. It can help you get discovered by new customers, stand out above competitors, and generate more business—all for free. But just because you are the best cleaning business in town, that doesn’t automatically mean that you will have instant visibility on Google Maps. You need to have to create a strong Google Maps presence for Google to chose to rank your business in the map pack. And showing up in the top results can mean a huge increase in visibility. In this article, we are sharing some top tips you can put into practice today to dominate your local Map Pack.
1. Make sure you have a Google Maps business listing and a Google My Business account linked. You want to make sure that your business stands out. Fill out your business listing completely in the Google My Business Portal. Add high-quality images of your team and your work. Make sure your business hours are updated and accurate. And make sure to update them for holidays. It’s pretty easy to go through and make all the holiday updates for the coming year, and Google usually reminds you to do this from time to time as well. Again. A complete and accurate business listing is critical. So many businesses fail this simple step and miss out on tons of traffic. So being on the map is critical because Google uses the user’s location to help tailor the results they deliver in search. And how close a user is to your location is a critical factor as well.
2. Google rewards businesses that generate new reviews. It’s not just the quantity of reviews you have. It is how frequently you receive them. A business that has one hundred reviews may start to fall off the map pack if there are competitors that are steadily receiving new reviews each week even in they have less. You need to have a strategy to keep getting reviews. MaidCentral users have a couple of options on how to do this. After each cleaning visit, a scorecard is automatically sent to clients. When the scorecard is completed they will be taken to a page that asks them if they would like to leave their cleaning team a review. It is a personalized process that really helps drive reviews. In addition, you can automate review generation by hooking up MaidCentral to tools like NiceJob. Nice Job will follow up with all of your clients and help you increase your review velocity. And remember, review velocity is one of the top factors in determining which businesses Google decides to feature in the Map Pack. Maid service software like MaidCentral and Nicejob compliment one another to help you achieve outstanding results in review generation. MaidCentral user Better Life Maids has average 9 new reviews per week since hooking up MaidCentral to NiceJob.
3. The next thing that Google considers is the quality of the reviews you receive. By quality, I mean the star rating. Not every rating needs to be a 5 star, but you really need to offer quality service if you expect Google to feature you in the Map Pack. Almost 2/3 of all searches for local services are done using maps now. So focussing on delivering a consistent and high-quality experience to your clients is more important than ever. Having the right cleaning business field service software helps with that. If you can consistently deliver a high-quality cleaning service on every visit, and meet your client’s specific requests and scope of work, you will know that when you ask for reviews you will get the kind of reviews that help increase your visibility on Google. One key component you should be implementing right now is surveying your customers after each cleaning visit. If you think of each cleaning visit as a sale, and you have good data on how that sale went you will have confidence that your clients are very likely to review you and give you a 5-star rating. You can read more about how MaidCentral scorecards work and how automating this process will give you the data you need to drive more Google Reviews.
4. While there are lots more things you can do to make your Google Map listing stand out, the last on this list of easy things you can do right now is to make sure that you keep adding high-quality images and fresh content. GMB listings with relevant pictures are much ore likely to be featured in the Map Pack. In addition, posting articles and having them focus on keywords that are relevant to your business is important for being found in search. You should also update promotions on your page. These are often favored by Google to make sure that the intent-based searches of their users are given relevant results.
A few more advanced things you could do include:
- Adding a Google Map to your website. This is often done on the contact page of a website, but if you can place it on the homepage of your website this can help. Embedding a Google map is just another way of telling Google that your cleaning business is located where your listing says. Make sure the address on your listing and the one you embed on your website match.
- Make sure you have relevant local keywords embedded in your website. “House Cleaning Your City”, “Maid Service Your City”. Don’t try to jam all of this onto one page, but instead create a strategy to rank for different keywords on different pages of your site.
- Make sure your website is responsive and gives users a good experience on mobile as well as desktop.
