The order Jen and I go in, taken from Day 4 of the 22-Day Blueprint.
Your website, your online booking, your scheduling, your payments and your client reminders all running out of one place. That's what Jen and I picked ConvertLabs for, and it's why we've stayed on it.
The name is the clue. Anybody can put a website up. Ours has to take a booking.
Our ideal clients book online, because we built it that way on purpose. Ian has never spoken to us. He booked online, the reminders went out, our cleaners showed up, and he left a five-star review that walks through the whole process, right down to the first-time clean and its extra charge. Our booking widget turns about 33% of the people who fill it out into paying clients.
Nobody else in our city offered online booking when we launched it. We'd bet the same gap is sitting there in your market. Ian's review is here, and the reason we built for him is in the customer journey.
The templates are built for cleaning companies, so you start from a page that already knows what one needs. Here's the order we set them up in.
Day 4 of the 22-Day Blueprint. Every step below is in here, in this order, with my screen shared. Twenty-two minutes.
convertlabs.io/blueprint gives you 30 days free instead of the usual 7, which is enough time to build the site properly and find out whether you like working in it. It's $197 a month after that.
That is an affiliate link, so Jen and I earn a fee if you sign up, at no extra cost to you.
Websites → New site
Most of the themes are built for cleaning companies. A few are for lawn care, carpet cleaning and painting. Blue Dream and Cool Clock are the popular picks in our community. Oak Bay Clean runs on Orange Fruit, which is the question we get asked most often.
Choose one and move on. You're building on a subdomain, so treat it as a sandbox. When the site's ready, use find or point a domain and ConvertLabs maps it across in about five to seven minutes.
This takes more than a day, and the trial gives you thirty.
Both of them tell a stranger, and Google, what this business is and where it is.
Pages → Homepage → Edit → Title
Delete the line that's there and write what the business is and where it is. Ours reads An exceptional cleaning service in Victoria, BC. The words cleaning service and your city both have to be in it. Say it however you like: Victoria's premier cleaning service, an exciting new cleaning service in Scarsdale. Someone landing on your site should know what they're looking at without spending an extra second on it, and Google reads that line too.
Then the Subtitle underneath. The theme ships with book in 60 seconds, which is your edge, because a ConvertLabs site takes instant bookings with no quote and no phone call. Change it to Book online instantly or call and put your number after it. Online booking is what you're after, and some people are still going to want to phone.
Use the little square-and-arrow button while you're editing to open the live page in a new tab and check your work.
Appearance → Customize → Site Identity
Site title is your company name. Tagline is your keywords and your location. The tagline appears nowhere on your website, it's for Google only, so skip the full sentence. Cleaning services plus your city covers it.
One exception. If your city or neighbourhood is already in your domain name, put the larger city in the tagline instead. A domain like nottinghillclean.com will already lift you for Notting Hill searches, so use the tagline to reach for London.
Location plus keywords is how you get found, and it's the same rule we use for naming the company. Hit Publish.
Pages → Homepage → the Mobile tab
It says book on the run, download the app. There's no app. Every tab except the header has a visible tickbox, so untick it and hit Update.
Pages → Homepage → the Clients tab
That row is for awards and press. Turn it back on the week you win something or get written up somewhere. Until then, untick and Update.
Appearance → Customize → Footer
Email, phone number, address. Your home address is fine unless you rent an office.
Come back and update this the day you get your professional email and your business number. Your name, address, phone number and email have to match across your Google Business Profile, your Yelp listing and your Stripe account, and those all come later in the Blueprint.
Appearance → Customize → Menus → Service Areas
Three neighbourhoods ship by default. Rename them to yours. To add more, hit Add items, search booking page, add it, then change the Navigation label to the neighbourhood name.
Every service area link takes a reader to your booking page. Publish, then click one to check it lands where it should.
Pages → About Us
Click into the rows and write your own. If you add a sixth row, the tick marks beside each line are images, so go Add image → Media Library → checkmark → Select, or your new row turns up bare.
Pages → Terms and Conditions
This page ships empty. Fill it. There's plenty of boilerplate online, a lawyer can draft you some, or you can adapt another cleaning company's and swap the name for yours. Google likes to see terms on a site, and your clients will refer to them the day something goes sideways.
Dashboard → FAQ
The questions aren't edited on the Help page. FAQ has its own item in the dashboard menu. They come preloaded and sorted into categories, and they're close to standard already. Read them once, delete the ones that don't match how you run things, add the questions you keep getting asked.
Pages → Contact → the Form list tab
Put in your email and your phone number, with the text link and the URL for each. Remove the Twitter link.
Any page → the image element → Add image
Put happy, smiling people on your pages. That's what people trust enough to book from.
I use pexels.com. Search something like happy family in a kitchen, set the orientation filter to horizontal, and pick the Large download rather than the original, because the biggest file will slow your page down. Upload, then use the pencil button to crop, save the edits and update the page.
Show the community you serve. Different ages, different backgrounds, families that look like the families on your street. Your cleaners should see people who look like them on your site too.
This takes a while and it's worth it. I'm still swapping images on our site.
Appearance → Customize
The preloaded colours work well together. Change them if you want to.
The booking widget is separate from your website, so once you've settled on a colour, message the ConvertLabs team and ask them to match it.
Email hello@convertlabs.io, or click the chat bubble at the bottom of your ConvertLabs dashboard. Kevin, Gianfranco and Isabel are on the other end, and helping you is what they're there for. Sometimes it takes a day.
Jen built the Oak Bay Clean site before I came on board. I asked her why she took a month over it, on a live with Kevin from ConvertLabs.
"I had time and I was scared. I know other people have taken a year, they've worked on their website for a year. That is not necessary. It's not necessary to spend a month either. It was something to do and I felt like I was making progress and it felt good."
Jen walks through the design on our site, with Kevin from ConvertLabs on the call. Twenty-seven minutes.
Rohan is the one who told us about Pexels, and it's where Jen got every image on our site. She made our logo herself on Pixlr with a transparent background, because when we started she didn't have $40 to spend on one.
Her advice on colours: Google the age group that's your target demographic and find out what colours they care about. It changes. Millennial pink was her example.
Pricing and the booking page live in a different part of ConvertLabs, and they come together, because your prices are what the booking page is made of. That's Day 5 of the Blueprint. Your logo is Day 6.
That is an affiliate link, so Jen and I earn a fee if you sign up, at no extra cost to you.