Marketing Your Cleaning Company in a Digital World: The Whys and Hows of SEO

Hello everyone, and welcome to the April webinar of the Cleantelligence Software 2018 webinar series. I'd like to thank all of you for listening to my presentation today, especially those who've registered for this webinar and are listening live. We at cleantelligent hope you will find these webinars useful, and we're committed to keep doing them as long as there's interest. This year there will be a webinar every other month, which of course began in February with Erica Riva's presentation on how to use social media to market your cleaning business. In June, Cortland Driggs, our Director of Customer Experience, will present the next webinar, and Zach Durbay, our new Sales director, will present the one after that in August. Cleantelligence Executive Vice President Kaden Hutchins will present the webinar in October, just before the 2018 ISSA show in Dallas. And finally, I will wrap up the year with the final webinar in December. I want you to know that we welcome your feedback on our webinars and we are open to your suggestions for future topics. To tell us what you think, please reach out to us@webinarscleantelligent.com. As a reminder, this webinar is being recorded and will be posted shortly on our website at www.cleantelligent.com webinar. I encourage you to watch this webinar again. I hope you'll look at some of our previous webinars, which you'll see go all the way back to 2010. These webinars, along with our blog, are an excellent resource for you and your cleaning company, and they're also part of Clean Intelligence commitment to help you and your cleaning company succeed. As a bonus, for those of you who registered for this webinar and are listening live, you will receive a free ebook, which I will tell you a little bit more about at the end of my presentation. And to receive updates about our upcoming webinars as well as access to the accompanying ebooks, please subscribe on our webinars page. As I began this webinar, I wanted to show you a picture we just took outside Cleantelligence main office here in Provo, Utah. Today is Thursday, April 19th, and it's about 50 degrees. It's a calm, partly cloudy spring morning. In case you've never heard of our hometown or don't know where it is, I've marked it on this map. We're south of Salt Lake City and we're surrounded by tall, truly picturesque mountains. We at Clean Intelligent love this community. We love the natural beauty here and we also think that this is a great place to do business. If any of you ever end up passing through Provo, Utah, I invite you to stop by our office and pay us a visit. We would be happy to meet you to meet you the title of today's webinar is Marketing your cleaning company in a digital the whys and hows of SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and I will explain more about that in a minute. My name is Bradley York and I am cleantelligence Director of Marketing. I've been with this company almost four years now, most of that time in my present role. One of my main responsibilities here is to maintain Cleantelligence sales website www.cleantelligent.com I and my team provide content for the website and we do everything we can to make that content easy to find. Making websites and website content easy to find is basically what search engine optimization is all about. I am unfortunately not an SEO expert, although I work closely with individuals who are, and I've definitely learned a thing or two from them. For over 20 years, I've created websites for various purposes, including personal interests, research, and of course, for businesses. The principles I'll be sharing with you today are actually fairly new to me, but they've helped my websites gain considerable visibility. I'm certain they will help you too. This is the seventh webinar I've done and it will probably be the most technical, so I welcome your feedback and questions. I will show you a few resources and a few things you can do on your own, but I also encourage you to seek professional advice if you have not already done so, to improve your cleaning company website's SEO. I should also point out that we have addressed this topic before in previous webinars and blog posts. Here are links to them specifically. One of the consultants we work with, Bruce Rowe of CIBA Marketing, presented a webinar in January 2012 about the fundamentals of SEO. I encourage you to watch it, and I admit I may repeat some of the points he made. On the other hand, January 2012 was over six years ago and the Internet has changed remarkably since then. In my webinar today, I intend to bring some of this previous information together and share some more current best practices. The goal of my presentation is to give you some tools to boost your company's visibility online, to increase your website's appearances and web search results, which should increase the number of visitors to your website, and hopefully Increase the number of leads to your company and ultimately, customers. First, I'll describe what SEO is and why it matters to Google and other search engines. Then I'll give you a few tips for improving your SEO, whether you've done nothing before or or if you just need a little help. I'll also discuss some things that would apply specifically to cleaning businesses such as yours. When I started creating websites over 20 years ago, the World Wide Web was relatively new and search algorithms were much simpler. Search engines of the mid to late 90s, including Web Crawler, AltaVista, and Yahoo, anybody remember these? They used snippets of HTML code called meta tags to identify website content. So if you were launching a website for your cleaning company in say, 1997, all you would have needed to do to make your website show up on search results at the time would be to embed meta tags like this in your source code. Meta name, keywords, content equals commercial cleaning Provo. The thinking was simply to match these meta tags with what people were searching for. So if you were a commercial cleaning company based in Provo and you put this on your website, there would have been a good chance your company would have showed up in a Yahoo search for commercial cleaning in Provo. But that was then. Nowadays, with the worldwide expansion of the Internet and the evolution of computer technology, search algorithms have become far more sophisticated. Obviously, one of the main drivers of search engine optimization is Google, which launched in 1998 and and is the dominant search engine by far. Google and the other leading search engines have not disclosed their current search algorithms, although we do know quite a few things we should and shouldn't do to get our pages to show up. So I hope that explains what search engine optimization is. It's getting your website to appear on search results. But what about the rankings? How high should your company rank in the results? This here is possibly a well known, widely quoted statistic, but I think in our case it's worth some discussion. According to a 2013 study by Chitica, an Internet advertising company, 91.5% of web traffic after a Google search comes from the first results page. That doesn't mean necessarily that 91.5% of individuals never advance to page two, but it does mean that the results on page one are the most important. Let's break this down by rank number. According to the same study, 33% of the traffic after a Google search goes to the result in the first position, 18% goes to the second position, 11% to the third, and so on. Before I continue, I should clarify that when I talk about rank number I am Talking about the 10 unpaid or organic search results here. Some results at the top or at the bottom of the page. The ones that say ad here are paid results and as many of you know, are pay per click or PPC ads. PPC ads are a separate discussion from SEO and I may go into them another time. In fact, as a side note, our colleague Bruce Rowe from Siebel Marketing did a webinar about PPC as well, which you can find here. As you might expect, paid search results get a fraction of the clicks compared to organic Results. According to one study, only 6% of search traffic goes to paid results. 6%. There's still a lot of strategy to PPC though, and if any of you are interested, you can contact me for more information about this. And now for the tips. Keep in mind that unlike ppc, all of the tips I'm sharing with you for improving your SEO are potentially free, meaning you can do them by yourself. However, some of these tips are very technical and will require web design skills. All of these tips require marketing savvy. If you do not have such expertise, I suggest that you hire online marketing consultants not just once, but on a continuing basis. As I've said before in one of my previous webinars, nothing beats professional advice. Here is a list of the tips I'm going to cover. Each tip deserves a lot more discussion than I have time to give and and there is a lot of information about each tip. What I will also do here is relate each tip to the cleaning industry as there are some unique considerations to take into account when you advertise your cleaning business. I mentioned earlier that in the old days of the Internet and SEO, specific keywords were used to match websites and search queries. We put the keywords we wanted in meta tags in the website source code. An obvious problem was that keywords may or may not have matched the actual content of the webpage being indexed, and a lot of people took advantage of this trying to skew search results in their favor. Lucky for us, Google and the other leading search engines no longer index pages with code, keywords and code. But keywords are now more important than ever. We simply specify them in a number of other ways, which I will describe shortly. So the first and most important step to good SEO for your website is to find the right keywords. And in case I haven't made it clear up to this point, a keyword is basically the same thing as a search term for your website. It's the Words you would want people to enter in so that they could find your website. Finding the right keywords can take a lot of research and experimentation, but it shouldn't be too hard if you know your target audience, geographic area and expertise. Let's try a couple of Google searches to show you what I mean. If I search Commercial Cleaning, Utah, one of the results I'll get is bearcom Bear Comm Cleaning Services. Bearcom, by the way, is a clean, intelligent customer and that's why I'm using them in as an example, looking at Bear Comm's homepage, what do you think some of their keywords are? Janitorial services Cleaning Services Commercial Cleaning Co. It's no coincidence that you'll see these words throughout the page. And let me show you something else. The source code of the page. And you'll see these words in a few other places as well. The title tag, the meta description tag, and a few other tags below. In a few minutes I'll show you how to embed keywords such as these in your code. Let's try one more search to show certain expertise. Green Cleaning Provo now, without specifying commercial cleaning, you'll see I get a variety of results, but Google is trying to be helpful by showing me the words that I searched for. So how do you know what keywords to use? Like I said, it takes research and experimentation. There are many online tools to help you find good keywords, although I don't really have time to show you these. Here are three of the most popular ones. Google's Keyword Planner, which is what we at CleanTelligent use for our website Moz, which is limited unless you pay for an account, and WordTracker, which also requires a paid account. To know what keywords are effective, you're going to have to try a few different ones or variations of one. For instance, we at cleantelligent discovered after many months of analysis that the keyword janitorial software brought in more search traffic and leads in the keyword cleaning software. So I encourage you to do similar experimentation. The next tip is to look at what your competitors are doing. If they've done their own keyword research and are using their own set of keywords on their website, try to find out what those keywords are based on their page content and source code. Like I just showed you with bear. Com, you may also want to consider using some of their keywords if they describe their cleaning. If they describe your cleaning company as well, this may sound like copying, but it's not as long as the content of your website is distinct, be sure to include your unique features and benefits in your keywords as you do on your website, so that you don't use all the same keywords as your competitors. This third tip is also very important to current search algorithms. In a nutshell, your website will rank higher in search results if Google and the other search engines perceive that your website is periodically updated. And this is why so many websites post blogs, webinars and other content Let me share with you one of our trade secrets. At cleantelligent, we do blogs and webinars like this webinar not just to share our knowledge with you, although we are happy to do so, but in the hopes that our content will show up in web searches and ultimately attract people to our website. It's good for everyone. You, the audience, get the knowledge and we the content provider, get the exposure. There are a lot of strategies to refreshing your website as well, but basically we try to do what we try to do with our blog is create a post with that keyword sprinkled throughout. You can do the same on your website. All you would need to do are one to two posts a month with a minimum of 300 words each. As I've been saying, keywords are no longer declared in a web page's source code. They are part of the content sprinkled throughout the page. That means you need to use the keyword at least a couple of times in the main text of your page, but you also need to use it in the following places as well. In the page title this refers to what appears in the browser title bar or tab. I'll show you. Example this right here. Page header this is what you see at the top of the page right here. Page image file names and alt tags I realize this is getting very technical now, but you'll need to access the source code of your website to do this. An alt tag, by the way, is the text you see if a page image fails to load, and also the page URL or slug. Search engines really like it if keywords are used in the page URL itself. Now, by now you might be thinking that you have to be a web designer to do all of this. It certainly helps to have those skills or to have access to someone with those skills, but let me show you a fairly easy way. Here's an example of one of our recent blog posts and here's the back end of CleanTelligence website, which is on WordPress, and I hope at least some of you are familiar with this interface. If not, don't worry. Down here you'll see I've used a pretty nifty WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO. Yoast is actually taught me a lot about SEO and basically serves as an SEO consultant for each page. So the keyword of this post about employee retention is employee retention, and I enter that here. And you'll see here in the analysis that I've done almost everything. I've done pretty much everything Yoast wants me to do with this keyword. I've added it to the first paragraph of the text. I've included it in the page meta description. I put it in the page title and URL. And by the way, Yoast lets me edit the page title and URL or slug very easily right here. So again, this is a pretty technical demonstration, a pretty deep dive into SEO, and I apologize if I've lost any of you. But if you have any questions or if you would like me to show this to you again, perhaps in more detail, feel free to contact me after the webinar. Once a visitor is on your website, you should try to keep them there as long as possible. One way to do this is by limiting links to other websites, which includes your social media pages, and by providing as many links as you can to other pages on your website. Let me show you exactly what I mean here. Go back to the employee retention blog. So I try to do this on our blog whenever possible. And at the end of this post, for instance, I give links to a related post and a related webinar. So I encourage you to do the same on your website, and not just with the new pages that you're going to create, but with some of the older pages, the existing pages as well. My last tip is another very important one. Apparently search engines judge a website heavily on how many other websites link to it. This is called link building, and it can take a lot of time to do. I don't have a lot of suggestions, except to start with people you know, your clients and business partners. For instance, ask for reviews or testimonials. See if you can get a profile for your company on review sites such as Yelp. Also, consider submitting a case study or press release to cleanlink.com or another industry news site. And don't forget to include a URL to your website, of course. And in most cases, this is free publicity. Although I just went in depth in a couple of areas, I've really only scratched the surface of search engine optimization as a whole. I know I said a while back that these best practices are essentially free in contrast to pay per click campaigns which can be expensive. On the other hand, if you lack marketing expertise or technical expertise to modify and update your website, I think you would benefit greatly from professional help from consultants. And when I say consultants, you may think of cleaning company consultants and their help is definitely valuable in many aspects of your business. But if you're online marketing, I would recommend that you find an Internet marketing company that specializes in SEO, website design and PDF. There are many such companies and they work with businesses of all sizes and budgets. If you're interested in hiring an Internet marketing company or consultant, I also recommend that you find one who is local so that they can meet with you one on one and one who has worked with cleaning companies before so that they fully understand your needs. The Internet marketing company cleantelligent has worked with is CBOE Marketing, which is also based in Provo, Utah. CBO has done a lot of good things for us over the years and I highly recommend them. They've helped us revamp our website, improve our SEO, and refine our PPC campaigns. Bruce Rowe, who I mentioned has collaborated with us on webinars before, is happy to talk about you or happy to talk to you about your needs and you're welcome to contact him at this number here. 801227, 7326. That's 8012278 sebo let's now recap what I have talked about today. Search engine optimization means getting your company's website to appear higher on Internet search results, which should lead to more website visits and hopefully more leads. That is the ultimate goal of SEO to boost your lead count. Consider your target audience, your location, and your niche when you determine the right keywords, remember it may take a lot of research and experimentation. And don't forget to compare your keywords with your competitors. A lot of businesses don't update their websites often, if at all, and this can hurt your SEO. Make it a priority to post a blog or add new content to your website at least once a month. Don't overdo this, of course, but make sure your keywords appear throughout each page. Use coding expertise, whether from yourself or with someone you know, to put the keyword in the page title, URL, and meta description. Remember that one of the most important ways to promote your website is to get other websites to link to it. And remember that this link building must be ongoing. And finally, get professional help from individuals who know SEO and who are familiar with the needs of cleaning companies. Meet with these individuals periodically. Before I conclude, let me briefly mention cleantelligence software as well. Obviously, cleantelligent isn't for SEO. However, it can indirectly help your SEO by giving your company the extra productivity which you can tout on your website. If you're not a cleantelligent customer and would like to learn exactly how the software can help your business, Please go to www.cleantelligent.comdemo to request a free demo brief consultation and our team of software consultants will be happy to speak with you. If you're already a customer and would like to know how to use the software better, don't hesitate to contact the customer support team. As I said at the beginning, there are a lot of materials about SEO and here is a list of the resources I used. I encourage you to find more if you're interested in this topic. Also the cleantelligent website with our regular blog and webinar posts we address many topics including SEO as I said that you may find useful, so I encourage you to check out our blog and webinars as well. As I mentioned earlier, all live listeners of this webinar will receive a free ebook which will go into more detail about SEO. We need to prepare that for you. Expect that in your inbox in one or two weeks. And if you aren't listening live, you can still get a copy of this ebook by subscribing to our webinars which you can do on our website www.cleantelligent.comwebinars or you can send us an email at webinarscleantelligent.com if you're interested in reaching out to me directly, here is my contact information. Feel free to email me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I've also included contact information once again for clean intelligence, sales and support. So thank you for listening to the April 2018 webinar. It's been my pleasure to talk to you today. Again, visit cleantelligent.comwebinars to view this and our other webinars and please follow us on our social media pages, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn where we'll share the latest best practices, tips and other exciting things. So I wish you all good luck in your business and your endeavors. Thanks again.