Picture a receptionist who answers every call with the same script. The caller moving out Friday, the one who hasn't dusted the ceiling fans since spring, and the office manager asking about nightly service all hear the same thing: "We offer a full range of cleaning services."
Nobody books from that script. A lot of cleaning websites read exactly like it, and Google notices.
This chapter explains how Google decides where a cleaning ad shows and what it pays, and why the fix is mostly out of your competitors' reach and inside yours: one ad group, one ad and one page for each service you sell.
The Cleaning Company With the Best Ad Can Outrank the One With the Biggest Bid
Type "move out cleaning" into Google and, in a fraction of a second, every cleaning company bidding on it gets scored. Google calls the score Ad Rank, and the highest one wins the top spot as long as it clears a minimum bar. Google's help page names six ingredients:
- The bid you set, which caps what one click can cost you
- How good Google judges your ad and your service page to be
- A quality floor every ad has to clear before it can show at all
- How tightly bunched the other cleaning ads are in that auction
- Who is searching and how: the exact words, where they are, phone or laptop, the hour
- What your extras should add, like a call button or links to your move-out and deep-clean pages
Only one of the six is money. The second one, the quality of your ad and page, is the one a small cleaning company can move without outspending anyone, and Google says higher quality ads tend to pay less for the same click.
You'll also see a Quality Score in your account, a grade from 1 to 10 for each keyword. It's a report card, not the exam: Google shows it so you can find weak spots, and the auction itself doesn't use the number. Three things feed it: the odds someone clicks your ad, whether the ad fits what they typed, and whether the page delivers once they arrive. Keep those three in mind. The rest of this chapter is about the last two.
Why bother if you'll just raise your bid? Because the top of the page gets the clicks, and a cleaning company competing with franchises and booking apps can't buy its way there on every search.
A Move-Out Searcher and an Office Manager Are Two Customers With Two Budgets
Here's what Keyword Planner shows for a few cleaning searches in our example market, Seattle. Your own market's numbers will differ; the gaps between services usually won't.
- "house cleaning seattle": 2,400 searches a month, $7.42 to $25.86 at the top of the page
- "move out cleaning": 880 a month, $7.62 to $25.77
- "deep cleaning service": 590 a month, $5.11 to $16.19
- "office cleaning services": 110 a month, $9.35 to $58.77
Those are four different people. The move-out searcher has a deadline and a landlord. The deep-clean searcher has a house that got away from them, or a first visit before recurring service. The office manager wants a walkthrough, a contract and after-hours crews. They use different words, expect different answers and are worth different amounts to you.
One ad can't speak to all four, and one page can't answer all four. When a move-out searcher sees an ad that says "Professional Cleaning Services" and lands on a page that lists eleven services in a paragraph, both parts of the Quality Score that you control take a hit.
Most Cleaning Competitors Build a Page for Each Service. A Single Services List Starts Behind.
We checked the eight residential cleaning companies among our Seattle example advertisers, from a one-office green cleaner to three national franchise locations. Six have a separate page for deep cleaning. Seven have a separate page for move-in and move-out cleaning. The eighth doesn't have a page for every service; it lists them all on one services page. But when we searched "move out cleaning seattle," that company ranked first, and the page Google chose was the one page on its site written for apartments and moves.
That's the whole argument in one search result. Google's free listings reward the page that matches the job. Your ads work the same way.
Six of the eight also have a page for offices or commercial clients, including all three franchises. That matters because commercial searches carry the highest bids in the example market. A company that takes office contracts but sends those clicks to a house cleaning page is paying the most for the worst match. Chapter 15 covers commercial accounts in depth; for now, if you sell it, give it its own page.
Ad Relevance Is the One Quality Grade You Can Fix This Afternoon
Ad relevance is Google checking how well your ad fits what the person meant by the search. It's the easiest part of Quality Score to improve, because the fix is organizing, not spending.
The structure looks like this:
- One ad group per service. Recurring house cleaning, deep cleaning, move-out cleaning, office cleaning. If you do Airbnb turnovers or post-construction cleans, each gets its own too.
- About five or six close keywords in each. "move out cleaning," "move out cleaning service," "move in cleaning," "apartment move out cleaning," and your city versions. Not forty loosely related phrases.
- Headlines that repeat the service. A move-out ad says move-out: "Move-Out Cleaning, Deposit-Ready Checklist." A deep-clean ad says deep clean. Chapter 8 writes these properly.
- A final URL that goes to that service's page. Not the home page, not the general services page.
Think of each ad group as a cubby in a mail room. A search drops into the cubby whose label matches it, gets the ad written for it, and goes to the page built for it. When the match is tight at every step, Google has little reason to doubt that your ad fits.
Your brand name stays out of these groups. It goes in its own campaign, as Chapter 2 laid out.
Already running one ad group with every cleaning keyword in it? You don't have to start over. Open the keywords list, sort it by the service each keyword describes, and move each set into a new ad group named for that service. Write one ad for each group that says the service in the first headline. Point each group's ads at the matching page, or at the closest page you have until the right one is built. Check back in a few weeks. The keywords view shows an Above average, Average or Below average status for each of the three parts, so you can see which ones moved. Ad relevance is the grade this reorganizing speaks to most directly, so watch it first.
A Move-Out Page Earns Its Click When It Answers the Deposit Question
Landing page experience is Google judging whether your page helps the person who clicked: whether it's relevant, easy to use and delivers what the ad promised.
For a cleaning company, the easiest way to pass that test is to write each page for the question its customer is actually asking. Move-out customers make it obvious. In the Seattle reviews we read, they write about one thing: "I got my full deposit back." Another: "We got our full deposit back! Very affordable when I did research around Seattle." On Reddit, one person weighing whether to hire a move-out cleaner did the math out loud: the service would cost about $300 and the deposit was only $500.
So a move-out page should show, near the top:
- A headline that matches the ad, word for word where it can
- The move-out checklist, room by room, because that's what a landlord inspects
- A starting price or a clear explanation of how the price is set
- The next date you can do the job
- One booking button or one phone number, not six ways to get lost
Then check it the way the customer sees it: on a phone. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool shows how long the page takes to load on mobile and what's slowing it down. And click through your own ads now and then. In the example market, one company's move-in and move-out page, the exact URL Google was ranking for a move-in search, returned an error when we opened it. Every click sent to a broken page is money spent on a dead end.
The same thinking applies to every other service page. A deep-clean page shows what "deep" includes that a regular visit doesn't, because customers ask exactly that. An office cleaning page shows how you schedule around business hours and how a walkthrough works. Each page answers its customer's first question before they have to ask it.
Expected Click-Through Rate Isn't Something You Buy With a Higher Bid
The third part of Quality Score, expected click-through rate, confuses a lot of advertisers. It sounds like it rewards whoever sits highest on the page, since top ads get more clicks. It doesn't. Google strips out where the ad sat and which extras it carried before it scores those odds, so outbidding a rival can't lift this grade.
What raises it is the same work as the rest of this chapter: an ad that plainly matches the search, written in the customer's words. An ad that says "Move-Out Cleaning" to someone who searched "move out cleaning" gets clicked more than one that says "Quality Cleaning Services," at any position.
Assets such as sitelinks, call buttons and price assets still matter. They count toward Ad Rank as the sixth factor in the list above. They just don't change the click-through grade.
Next: Keyword Planner Can Read a Competitor's Cleaning Site for You
Once each service has its own ad group and page, the next question is which searches go in each group. Chapter 5 shows how to point Keyword Planner at a competing cleaning company's website and turn what it finds into those groups, while keeping out the job seekers, dry cleaners and do-it-yourselfers who share your words.
Earlier chapters: counting every call, text and booking, where cleaning customers search and what a recurring customer is worth. All sixteen are on the guide's home page.
Every cleaning account in our Google Ads management starts with a walk through its service pages side by side with its ads. A page that doesn't match its ad drags down every click after it.
