The Edge Marketing

If you type into the search engines the phrase ‘cleaning tips’ you get a choice of something like 14,800,000 websites to choose from and many of those websites will redirect you to scores of other websites. There are specific sites that are dedicated to giving hints, advice and tips on a variety of topics with seemingly no vested interest. Many of these tips are useful. However many cleaning companies include on their websites a cleaning tips page. I would argue that many of these are useless both to the visitor and to the company.

Why do they do it? To attract more visitors to their site? To gain more customers? The purpose of the website is to provide information to potential customers on the services and products the business provides. Every visitor should be a potential customer. If a visitor leaves without making an enquiry then you have to improve the website and or the services you provide. Or you are not using the right keywords so are attracting people in by default. It is not really your type of services that the person actually wants. No matter what you do you will always attract a certain number of these. What you actually require is lots of high quality visitors. The best way of achieving this is to provide the surfer with as much high quality content as you can whilst still accurately describing your own companies products and services accurately. Good content will go down well with the search engines and raise your profile on them, which in turn should drive quality visitors to your site. Hence improving sales.

This is the whole purpose of the website. For businesses it is purely a marketing tool and another method of gaining customers. So how do cleaning companies produce lots of high quality content? Many go for ‘frequently asked questions’ which is quite a legitimate way of producing content whilst informing potential customers of things they are likely to want to know about you and your products and services. So we come to the ‘cleaning tips’. A little research has demonstrated to me that well over half the cleaning companies with visible websites have at least a page on cleaning tips and some have multiple pages divided up into different categories. Try reading through these sometime. Carpet cleaning companies are the biggest users of these types of pages. How useful are they? Some of the tips provided by these carpet firms are quite useful, but the general cleaning companies leave a lot to be desired. Their cleaning tips are akin to those you might see on the TV reality programmes about cleaning. For example ‘make a paste with baking soda and vinegar and smear over your taps; wrap cling film around and leave over night. Scrape off in the morning.’ It may work but why would anybody want to do that when two minutes using phosphoric acid with the minimal of effort would achieve much better results? Do the cleaning companies themselves make use of any of these tips? You can bet your life that very few do. The object is to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible so for each job you choose the most effective and efficient cleaning product available. So why do they have these pages? They attract people who are not likely to be turned into customers because they are looking for ways to do it themselves. So it can only be for the purposes of attracting any visitor type. It is content and content about cleaning but very few companies are going to give away their actual methods of doing something quickly and efficiently which would be beneficial to the visitor instead they perpetuate old style cleaning methods which bear no resemblance to the modern world. So for the web browser I would suggest that if you are looking for cleaning tips look elsewhere than at those provided by cleaning companies except possibly the carpet-cleaning firms. If you are a cleaning company looking to increase your content on your website look elsewhere than at providing a ‘cleaning tips’ page. You can produce better and more relevant content than that unless you are prepared to give away your trade secrets!

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