8 Website Mistakes That Are Costing You Leads (And How to Fix Them Fast)

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Introduction

Hello, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the filthy rich cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie from Serene Clean, and in today’s episode, I’m going to be going over eight mistakes that you may very well be making when it comes to your website, and the quick fixes that we can do to change these things. Goal being that we are getting one, more leads, and two, we are doing some pre selling to those leads so they’re more likely to convert when you do get them on the phone, or get them by email or however you communicate with your leads, hopefully, all of these things, right?

Mistake #1: No Clear Call to Action

First and foremost, number one, is what I am doing, consulting calls, and I’m looking at your guys’s websites and your online presence. Very often there is no clear action that you want the website visitor to do when they get to your homepage. It’s very confusing what I as the visitor am supposed to be doing, because there is no clear thing that draws my eye, or you’re trying to get everything to stand out, meaning everything’s bold, there’s lots of colors and all of this stuff or nothing is and so when the page first loads, that’s called the above the fold. And in that above the fold, we want it to be very clear what the ultimate goal for the visitor is. And that should be, of course, getting that estimate, booking a cleaning whatever it is, that how you phrase it.

So for us, it’s, you know, get your free estimate, get a cleaning estimate, those types of things, whether you’re residential, commercial, vacation rental, we want them to be filling out our form. So that is the ultimate goal. So if you just have a menu bar across the bar, and every single category is the same, and there’s no clear call to action, it’s not direct enough. It needs to be immediate. As soon as that page loads, they know what to do. And of course, you know, the whole website is built in a way to try to convert them to a lead and have them take that action. And they may peruse around, go to the About Us, testimonials, all of that good stuff, right? However, at the end of the day, the ultimate goal is they fill out our quote request form or our booking form, right? So it needs to be clear.

Adding Enticing Offers

Secondarily, most of you do not have any enticing type of offer to incentivize them to say, Oh, let me go fill that form out. And as you guys know, ours is book your first cleaning and get your second 50% off. Caveat that we explained during the estimating process is it must be done within one month of the initial clean being completed. We don’t want to be giving you 50% off a year later on their second clean, because that’s truly an initial clean. But you guys are welcome to steal that offer. We call it no brainer offer, because it’s so obvious they should be filling out that form. So those are a couple things related to calls to action on your website. Make it very clear, it should be all over on every page, if possible. What you want them to do is go fill out that form.

The Power of First Impressions

That’s a very quick fix. I’ve also seen that first image across the top, again, that above the fold section, it’s so important. And some of your guys’s pictures, they don’t make me feel anything. They don’t make me feel anything at all. So just make sure when it loads, that has a high impact. What are we looking at here?

Mistake #2: Generic About Us Section

Number two mistake that you guys can avoid, and this is a very easy one, you could change this right now in, you know, five minutes of work, perhaps maybe even less with chat GPT, we need to add a personal about us section. I prefer this to be on the homepage, but most certainly, you need to have an about us page and don’t just say something generic. You are unique, and your story is unique, and you should be utilizing that to talk about your business, regardless if you are your ideal client profile or your avatar, all these different ways we call our clients, even if you’re not them, you have something about you that can make them feel connected to you, and so it’s very important to explore YOUR Story.

I’ve talked to so many of you, and I’m like, tell me about yourself. Why’d you open this business? And you guys go on these tear jerking, beautiful life stories, and I’m like, where do I sign? Why is this not on your website? Why? Why are we not talking to clients like this? This all has to do with trust built. And we want our clients to feel like they can trust us. They know us. We’re friendly, we understand them, all of these things.

Crafting Your Origin Story

So why did you open your business, and if it was just a make money, don’t put that. Let me caveat that, right? We want to help people we love this. We’re overwhelmed. We understand their pain. We were fed up with the lack of quality or consistency in our area. And I’ve always wanted to be a business owner, and I get to help people. There’s a million ways we can say why we opened our business. And a lot of you guys are parents, so you really connect to our ideal clients, which most likely is, you know, a busy parent, dual income household, all that good stuff. You may have a wildly different ideal customer profile, but most likely, if you’re watching this or listening to this, we’re kind of in the same realm, right?

But the biggest thing is, I wanted to offer something professional and something that people can count on, as well as all of the emotional feel good stuff, of what we do and how we can help and giving to our community, all of that good stuff. So think about your story. Think about what would you tell me if I asked you, if Stephanie asked you, why’d you open your business? Why is this important to you? You can absolutely tell me your story. So just blurt that out into chat. GPT have them make it more concise and nicely written, and then Bing, bang, boom, put that on your homepage, about the founder, our story, our mission, whatever you want, and get that on there. Additionally, get that on an about us page as well.

Professional Photos Matter

Get a photo of yourself. My very first headshot that I did, I actually just set it up in front of a white wall and took it. So I just asked online how do I get myself a professional headshot? I couldn’t afford, and nor was I going to go get headshots taken to make sure, obviously, that it’s going to look professional. Ideally, not a selfie. If you’re in a bathroom. I mean, if you’re an owner operator, I get it. But again, the goal is to look bigger than we actually are. Right? If you remember Mark Lineberry’s conversation with us about commercial we really want to seem big but still friendly and relatable, and that’s where that personal touch comes in, with a bunch of shots of professionalism infused in it. So get your about us section on there.

Mistake #3: Underutilizing Social Proof

Number Three mistake is you guys are not prioritizing social proof enough, whether it be way down at the bottom or kind of sprinkled throughout in various ways, you really could be utilizing those reviews in a better way. A lot of you guys have a lot of great reviews, but you’re not putting it on the website in a really beautiful manner, whether that be in a scroll bar or something like that. It’s just a generic list.

The Power of Video Reviews

Really, what I’m getting at here is you don’t have video reviews. You don’t have video reviews, and you’re not putting that on the homepage, on the booking page or service pages. You guys know I’m gonna beat this dead horse until it’s crying for help. It comes back alive and Please, no, no more Stephanie. But I’m like, no. You guys need to understand, get video reviews and put them on your website, put them on your Google My Business and Your phones will be ringing off the hook. That’s how important the social proof is and video reviews are. You gotta do this. You gotta do it, even if your website is really basic. But if you’ve got some video reviews on there, that’s it. You’re gonna be booked out. Trust me, you’re gonna be booked out.

Making Reviews Look Professional

So really prioritizing that social proof and sprinkling it throughout, make it esthetic looking. Go to Canva and make some pretty graphics. It’s not hard. It’s very simple, to make things look prettier than just plain text, even adding, you know, little star graphics, or whatever you need to do, or hop on Fiverr and ask somebody to do that. Or again, Canva, they have a really lovely AI technology in it so that you can create photos and really pretty stuff. So there’s also a bunch of templates on Canva, again, Canvas, totally free, guys, you don’t have to pay for it. The paid version is fantastic. We do pay for it, but we didn’t for years. So you can go on Canva make some really beautiful testimonial templates and just use the same thing over and over again. So just search review template or testimonial template, and you can get some more visual addition to that for us, we actually add the cleaners photo to the testimonial of their works to help connect and again, add that personal touch.

Mistake #4: Using Stock Images

So that brings me into point number four, and Mistake number four. You guys have heard me say it before, but you are using stock images. Knock it off. Stop using stock images of cleaning products or cleaners that are not you. I see so many of you using stock images of some people that you found online, of happy, smiling cleaners that aren’t your cleaners, or aren’t even you, in the About Us section, I’ll come to the page, and then I hop on the consult and I’m like, Oh, I thought you looked like that, but you don’t look like that at all, which doesn’t matter what you look like, but it’s not the same. So we want to be authentic, and even if it’s not the most perfect, you know, professional photo shoot, you know, as long as everybody’s in uniform, you know, taking photos of your staff on the job, have them submit photos of them happy and cleaning you cleaning.

The Shoe Incident

Make sure you have shoes on. That was one photo I saw. There’s a stock image of a cleaner, very happy, but they didn’t have shoes on in the house. So, yeah, immediately I was like, No, get that photo off, because that would immediately be like, Nope, I’m not hiring them. They don’t wear shoes in the house, and that’s a safety hazard. And just, you know, have shoes, have cleaning shoes, guys. But it wasn’t even the actual person. It was just a stock image that they chose, and it looked like a happy cleaner, but it wasn’t her.

Authentic Photos Make the Difference

And that’s my point. Is we need to infuse some personality into our online branding, and we can do that with photos of our cleaners. And if you don’t have cleaners, do it of yourself, get to cleaning and get some photos of you cleaning happy, you know, wiping counters, looking pretty, all of that good stuff. Just the point is that it’s not a stock image of, you know, a mop bucket and a sponge on your website.

Mistake #5: Not Embedding Booking Forms

Mistake number five is you guys are not embedding a booking form in to the website. You might have a generic contact form, or you might be linking to some other site in order to have that. I’m a big fan of embedding, so they’re not leaving your website at all. And obviously I’m using fully these ZenMaid booking forms, and we are embedding that on the specific pages that are appropriate. So you can have as many booking forms as you want for your various services, or you can just have one, whatever you prefer.

Getting More Information Upfront

With those booking forms, we can customize those to reflect the information that we want. But a lot of times, what I’m seeing you guys do is have a very simple booking form where it’s maybe their phone number, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, they’re already invested in filling out a form, and if we’re only asking them that we’re not getting all of the information that we could that would make the sales process so much easier, because it’s a lot easier to sell to somebody if you know a bunch about them, how many pets, how many kids? What’s stressing them out in the home? Any rooms we shouldn’t be doing all of these things allow us to give a better, more accurate price, and gives you guys fuel so that when you do get this person on the phone, you already feel like you know them bit and understand where they’re coming from.

Disqualifying Bad Fits Early

We ask if they’ve ever had a cleaner before, and if so, what happened? We also ask things that would help us disqualify if we want to work for them. As you guys know, we do not clean homes that have been smoked in. So that’s actually on our booking form. We don’t want to waste time going back and forth and then realizing after the fact, oh, this whole house has been smoked in for 10 years, because we’d rather just recommend them to our partner, Servpro, who handles that type of thing, because we don’t want to do that.

Robust Intake Process

Serene, clean.com. You guys can see what our booking form looks like and see how robust it is and how many questions we’re asking, and that’s really allowing us to sell better, to give them the things that they need. For example, we don’t tell them, allow them to pick a date per se. We don’t have a little calendar, because you’re most likely to disappoint not be able to do it, or from a scheduling perspective, you’ve got a better day. So we just don’t even want to open it up. But we will have them list a couple days, if does it need to be done by a certain date, especially if we’re talking a move out or a move in, so that we even know if it’s possible, or do we need to wait list these people.

So again, this allows for a lot less back and forth. So it solves a lot of things operationally, but then from a sales perspective, it really helps, and from a function perspective, for your clients, they are not having to go to a different website, or you needing to pester them with a million questions on the phone or whatever, or you simply not asking the questions, which is most likely the case, and you guys having a tougher time at the cleaning possibly price too low because you didn’t ask the right stuff, all of that good stuff. Because, as you guys know, we don’t go do a walkthroughs for residential so we have to have a robust intake process so we know what the heck we’re getting into.

Easy Implementation

So that is an easy mistake. ZenMaid booking forms are very easy to embed on your website, whatever website builder you use, super duper easy to insert them. And I know that a lot of you guys sometimes will just use a Google Form too. If you don’t have a scheduling software, which Why don’t you have a scheduling software? Trust me, it’ll make your life 10 times easier.

Mistake #6: Unclear Service Offerings

On to mistake number six, it is not very clear what types of services that you offer, and so what I mean by that is commercial and residential. A lot of you have expressed that you really want to get into commercial or you want more commercial, but when we visit your website, it looks like you are just a residential cleaning service, and you might have a page that says commercial, but the homepage doesn’t make me feel like you actually know what you’re doing. It’s almost like a side note.

Making Both Services Equally Important

So if you’re going to offer both, and you want to grow both, I really think that we need to make it very clear that we can do both equally well. This is something in I’m working on a website rebrand right now. This is something especially that I’m focusing on, because right now, serene cleans website, is it? It feels pretty residential, heavy, even from the banner that I chose in the image. And that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, if you guys are mostly residential. But I’m really keeping in mind, you know, if I want to sell to both equally, what I’m going to have them do is they are going to be able to select on the homepage what they’re interested in, and then once they click that, it will take them to a new page. That kind of is the selling for that more specifically.

Demonstrating Expertise

So I think that we can all do a little bit better job if we want to offer both, to make it really seem like it on the website, and not just a house cleaning company that happens to dabble in very light commercial. And that might be who you are, that’s totally okay. But if you want to be like us, where we are, 5050 commercial and we’ve got, you know, 64 commercial accounts that are active, commercials just as important to us as residential so it needs to look like it and and in part, that we can actually do this when they get to the website, and that we are the clear choice for that.

Mistake #7: Confusing Service Descriptions

Mistake number seven kind of plays off of that. And this is something that I noticed the other day when I was looking at a website that one of you guys had sent me a message and asked, and I was like, Hey, can I, you know, provide a little feedback? And you were like, Yes, please. So this was the feedback. The tip is here, put yourself in the shoes of somebody who is coming to your site blind. I want you to put on a client goggle and take away all the things that you know and think in your head about the services that you provide and erase that act like you’re coming in blind, or better yet, ask somebody to do this because they are coming in blind that doesn’t understand the inner machinations of your business.

Clarity in Package Descriptions

It is very confusing. Sometimes on some of our websites, what it is the types of services that we offer for residential specifically, I see often where you know, you have your different packages, and it’s a very basic explanation of what the difference is. And then I get to the booking form, and oftentimes what you’re doing is you’re saying, oh, select if this is move out cleaning, but do they still have to select all the add ons, or is that included already because it’s a move out cleaning I just feel this sense of confusion and or even if your basic package, whatever that is for you, you’re using that word, or the standard package or whatever. But it is pretty robust, and I find it very useful, from a sales perspective, to really spell out in detail all of the different tasks and checklist items that you are going to complete, and make it very clear the differences between your packages, because otherwise it just, this is your opportunity.

Differentiating from Competition

People are looking at your website, and we are trying to differentiate ourselves away from the competition, right? Because they’re going to the websites of all of our competition and saying, Well, they offer this. They offer this. And your competition very well could be explaining, every single line item that they do in every single space, and you just have a dust all your stuff, I’ll do all the floors, and we’ll clean the bathrooms, right, it’s just it’s not robust enough. And even though that may be accurate, we could go into more detail. And I think the more detail on the scope of work that we can give on the front end, the better the expectations are of what what is going to happen. And of course, during the estimating process, we provide our actual cleaning checklist so they know exactly what’s going to be performed.

Selling Before They Contact You

However, I think that we should be selling before they even reach out to that reach out to us, and that includes explaining the full scope of work and the different types of things that you offer, because a lot of you guys do offer multiple different, I guess, detailed levels, and so just making it really clear what every, every single package is, or what’s included, what’s not, so that there is less confusion going into it, because we don’t want them to get to the booking form again.

Pricing Logic Issues

This is something I experienced the other day where I was coming at it from a client’s perspective, and I was filling out the booking form, and the prices were adjusting. And I was this, just This doesn’t make sense to me, because if I change this, it doesn’t adjust this. I was almost scared away because the prices for some of the add ons, all windows or baseboards. For example, it didn’t change when I adjusted the size of the house. Well, that doesn’t make sense. So you’re telling me that 1000 square foot house baseboards is as expensive as if I had 3500 square foot house baseboards or Windows. So we really want. Think about that, guys, and every time you have a hiccup when you’re giving pricing, or this should be some reflection time to say, looking at that intake process and looking at if you do pricing on your website, is it adjusting appropriately, or are we actually shooting ourselves in the foot by having that happen on our booking forms? And obviously you all know my opinions. I don’t like pricing on websites, but if you do, it’s all good, but you always know how I feel about it.

Mistake #8: Lifeless Google My Business Profile

And finally, number eight is your guys’s Google, my businesses don’t make me feel alive. I want to feel alive when I look at your Google, my business, and what makes me feel alive but pictures of other people and video testimonials. So I know I touched on this kind of but the point is, we need them to be on our Google, my business, you can upload videos and you can upload photos there, so if all of your photos are just of before and afters, that’s great. But if you start searching cleaning services in XYZ, your town, cleaning services in Sparta, Wisconsin, and all of the competition pops up, and all I see are pictures of bathtubs on yours, but the other one shows friendly faces as humans, we are totally drawn to photos of other humans, so I’m already more intrigued by that or a video review, catching my eye an office tour, if you have an office all of these different things we can do as content.

The Human Element

Videos of you talking about your services, these are going to draw my eye a lot more. And even if you have less reviews, I’m gonna at least check you out, because I’m like, ooh, trust you. Just trust a company where you see real people and real faces. So that’s gonna be my final tip, guys, obviously, keep working on getting those reviews, because people aren’t even gonna click on your website if they’re if your Google My Business is not attracting eyes.

Google My Business Comes First

So I said all of this stuff about websites, but at the end of the day, if your Google My Business is not attractive and not eye catching and not properly filled out, they’re not even going to go to your website. So you’re not even capturing them. And that’s how people are looking guys. They’re searching online. And obviously a lot of you guys have gotten all of your business from word of mouth and just that, that local feel and 100% that’s wonderful. It is not as constant as Google will be. So no matter what, we always will have word of mouth leads 100% but we can’t really control that very much. Where we can control are we getting reviews? Are we getting social proof online? Are we updating our website? Are we making sure it reflects who we are as a brand and who you are as an owner? And it’s very clear the services that we provide and what makes us special and different and how we solve the pain of our clients.

Final Thoughts on Website Optimization

So if you’re just very generic on your website, you’re not adding that human element, and it’s just not clear exactly what you can do for me as a client and showing that you understand my pain, then I might go to the other guy, right? And so that’s the point here, is to make these little adjustments, and most of these are pretty easy, and it is a process. Obviously, when you’re talking about getting video reviews, you’re talking about taking photos. I understand it’s not just that. I get that, but these are all little things that we can work to to improve. Some of these are very quick to change, especially, again, with chat GPT, to update things.

So these are just the mistakes that I have been seeing over and over on different websites as I’m doing consulting calls. And I wanted to share that with you all today. You have any questions or anything, follow up, just leave them in the comments below, and I’ll be happy to answer them otherwise. Guys hit that subscribe and I will see you on the next episode.

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid Booking Forms
• Canva
• Fiverr
• ChatGPT
• Serene Clean
• Google My Business
• Filthy Rich Cleaners Episode Featuring Mark Lineberry

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