Mike
people with website are marketing
people without are selling
People with both are doing the right thing
as I said before when the market slows you start selling.
its my view that we have done a poor job of selling carpet cleaning as a regular thing to people. unlike take away that has done a much better job of the same years. having a take away is a thing in most peoples lives. unlike having carpet cleaned. I think its because marketing (internet) has made it so easy and the fact that we have lots of movement of people over many years. with the banks having problems thats slowed down.
I remember when your called yourself a specialist because you only cleaned carpets and sofas. now many clean other things and have adapted slowly to be more a general cleaner.
we need to sell much more. That does not mean competing on price all the time. we need to show the value that each of us give to people that become our customers. Value is where focus our sales message, because like it or not people expect clean carpets so price is the only way they have to judge us apart. in their mind its oranges with oranges. what machine, method, etc you use does not matter because they are buying clean carpets.
value can be added in many ways from free stuff, maintenance plans, after care, insurance, and as most already do other services that are bundled in. just like the phone and utility companies are trying to do now. lets face it if oven and window cleaners can clean carpets then we have no choice.
with regards site the big problem is google and seo. google just does not know the longtails. it thinks it does. My adwords i get hundreds of these longtails suggestions. with adwords there are three ways to use keywords, broad, phrase, and exact. but when you import their suggestions as exact you get little or no impressions from them. this shows that these words have been compiled over many years and do not reflect whats going on now.
now if you look at the bottom of the results page you see the real currant keywords. only problem here is if you use them to much your site becomes very spammy, because there are so few. The answer to this is that we all need to write good copy more. this is what google asks for, good articles. then the seo keyword base would grow and the results change to give people answers that are information rich.
carpet cleaning articles can never be sexy and people get motivated by them but they can be informative. Just look at youtube for the lack of reviews on carpet cleaners (machines) and cleaner products. Misinformation is taking hold. I was looking for videos on febreze and found some with some real mad negative claims. there is a massive area here that we can use to our advantage.
The more people buy carpet cleaners and find out how hard and limited they are the more it promotes our position. how many times have you been on a job and seen them sitting in the corner? these people are our customers, but why did they choose buying over using us first? maybe the fact these machines are sold to them.
My message is we need to sell much more. we already know we can get more money just by quoting in person than over the phone. because we are selling our self and people have the added advantage of being able to look at us and make judgement that they cant over the phone.
I know I go on Mike but I just dont understand why others are not talking about this stuff? Good Luck mate
