How to Market a Cleaning Business: Optimizing Your Website for Mobile

This article on how to market a cleaning business was written by Paul Mahony, Editor of Hosting Reviews.

If you’re looking to learn how to market a cleaning business or any other sort of service, you probably already know that your success directly depends on how well you communicate with people.

Increasingly, that means connecting with people on their mobile phones. According to Statista, by 2018, there will be 2.5 billion smartphone users worldwide. It is expected that by 2020, every single phone sold in first world countries is going to be a smartphone. Big brands have already stepped forward in order to win the mobile market. They are optimising their websites, creating applications and using other tools to be as responsive as possible to mobile devices. If you want to win the market, it would be wise to do the same.

What Does Responsive Mean?

Responsive Web design is based on the idea that a website should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation. You’ve already experienced it: Some websites simply shrink to fit the screen, making their buttons and menus too minuscule for your thumb or finger. While others give you a zoomed, full-column view, with menu options designed for clickable fingers. Rotate the screen? The column expands to fit the space. This is the result of responsive design that understands that content will be viewed all kind of devices and screens.

Get in the Game or Miss Out

You may also be losing at the search game if your site is not optimized for mobile. Since so many searches come from mobile devices, Google will bypass your site in searches in favor of sites that are responsive to mobile.

How to Market a Cleaning Business with a Mobile Optimized Website

These are the tips that will help you have your website as functional on mobile as it is on the desktop.

1. Make a Top-Heavy Website

First impressions matter. Compared to desktop, mobile sites display way less information at the same time.

As you can see in the comparison above, a mobile website requires you to use a small space to display as much information as possible. Therefore, the important things, such as your contact information, call-to-action buttons, menus, newest updates, and links should be displayed as high as possible. If seeing something important requires multiple swipes, most of the visitors simply won’t get there.

2. Know your Client

Rules in business – whether it’s cleaning or something entirely different, are simple. You have to know your client. The same truth applies when preparing your mobile website. Is your client looking to buy from you immediately? Or is a client looking to see what you offer and complete the purchase elsewhere? Knowing that could help you decide between putting a “Purchase” or a “Contact Us” link on the top of the page.

3. Have a Clear Call To Action

You also need to know whether you expect more visitors to use the website to call you or to get directions. These type of things will determine how your mobile website should look and the functions you offer clients. For example, if you offer bespoke services and you need a client to call to make a booking, a call-to-action phone number button would be a great option. Or perhaps, a map showing your location if you offer drop off rug cleaning services for example. It’s all about understanding what your visitors are looking to achieve when they visit your site and building it in a manner that will help them accomplish that quickly on their mobile device.

4. Ask for Location Data

By asking permission to see the location of your visitors, you can offer them personalized offers or show how close they are to you. It’s a technical solution that can help you know your clients better, and direct them to the information that is most relevant to their geography, without them having to type in their address or location.

5. Top Quality Performance Only

Most of the visitors will exit your site if it takes more than 3 or 4 seconds to load. This is why it’s important to be certain your mobile website is fast. There are some things you can do to assure that. First up, there is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). It’s a publishing format, developed by Google, which allows the pages to load quicker.

If you use WordPress or any other popular content management system, there are multiple plugins which take advantage of this format. If not, or you are not sure, contact your developer or hosting provider to find out whether they have been using, or could be using this technology to enhance your website.

Performance can be improved in other ways as well. Your website may be very well optimised but the load speeds are going to be poor if the hosting is slow. This is why you need to make sure to choose a hosting provider which offers reliable performance and quick response times. A good host will save you a second or two. When running a mobile website, it will make all the difference. Find out which hosting providers are the best here. Always look for the ones who offer superior performance.

How Does Your Site Score?

Test the mobile performance of your website with this simple test from Google. The test results will tell you the load time of your site on a 3G network (the common denominator of most mobile web traffic, presently) and the percentage of visits you could be at risk of losing due to slower load times.

6. Make the Website Functional and Easy to Use

A mobile website should have as many features and be as functional as a desktop version. Make it respond well to touch, have big icons and easy to read text. Also make sure that whatever is available in desktop, is available in mobile as well. It can be rearranged to fit better, but a mobile website should be as powerful as a desktop one.

7. Cleaning Business Tips

Effectively marketing a cleaning business has plenty of different aspects. The way people are increasingly searching for and booking services with their mobile devices makes it crucial to have an optimized mobile website.

You need to make sure the main content is displayed up high and there are call-to-action buttons as well as personalized offers visible to everyone visiting. Ensuring your mobile website looks good and functions well on mobile is increasingly becoming the status quo. But don’t forget it also has to be quick, easy to use and as functional as its desktop counterpart.