How To Get Leads For Pressure Washing
Pressure washing leads are the lifeblood of your business. At The Social Media Pros, we know a thing or two about the importance of getting pressure washing leads, and we want to share that knowledge with you.
There are hundreds of ways to get more pressure washing leads, but in this guide, I will share with you my favorite eight. Some of these tips won’t cost anything and some will. So no matter where you’re at in your business, you’ll be able to take something away.
It can be tough getting pressure washing leads, especially if you’re just getting started. Just know that anyone with a pressure washer can call themselves a pressure washing company. One of the most frustrating things you’ll likely run into when trying to grow your pressure washing company is that, in the beginning, it can be hard to find leads and even harder to deal with those leads when the neighbor down the street will do your service for half the money. So how are you ever supposed to grow?
Read on, and I will show you how. Also, if you want a video version of this article, you can find it below.
1. Google My Business For Pressure Washing Leads
I made this my first tip mainly because Google My Business is the best way to get free pressure washing leads, and everyone can do it.
Most of you already have a Google My Business page. If you don’t, stop reading this article and go handle that now. If you do, congratulations! You’re one step closer to getting more leads.
Google is the largest search engine on the planet. Google owns 90% of the search engine market share to date. This is important because, right now, homeowners in your service area are going to Google and searching for “pressure washing near me”. When they do, if you’re not on Google, they can’t even find you.
Global search volume for the search “pressure washing” taken from SEMrush.
However, it doesn’t end there. Not even close. The question I get asked all the time is, “My business is on Google—when will I start getting phone calls?”
If you don’t use the platform, never. Just creating a Google My Business account doesn’t mean you’ll be in the top results and people will start calling you. You have to work to get that ranking.
Screenshot from an article at White Spark.
So the tip here is to use the platform. This isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of thing. You should be posting updates, pictures, videos, or some other form of content to your Google My Business listing every day. On top of that, the most critical part of your Google My Business ranking is your reviews.
I’ll say it again. If you want more free pressure washing leads, focus on your Google My Business reviews. If you’re not booked out with pressure washing jobs, your number-one focus should be to get as many Google reviews as possible. Beg if you have to. It really is the difference between getting pressure washing leads versus the opposite from your Google My Business profile.
The main factors when it comes to ranking up your pressure washing business in the Google Map Pack and getting more pressure washing leads are:
Primary GMB Category
Keywords In GMB Business Title
Distance From Business
Address In Search
Additional GMB Categories
Google Reviews
This is pretty self-explanatory, but when you create your profile, Google will ask you what category you are in. Pressure washing is one of the options, so make sure this is selected.
2. Use Facebook To Get Free Pressure Washing Leads
This is a tip so many pressure washing businesses get wrong. I’ll preface this by saying no one wants to be sold to on Facebook. Homeowners don’t get on Facebook because they want to know that you’re giving 20% off soft washing to new customers. They just don’t care. You should avoid posting graphics and promo content like you see below. That kind of marketing should be reserved for things like EDDM, door hangers, and flyers.
When we start doing social media management for our pressure washing clients, one of the first things we do is post a selfie of the business owner, a picture of their kids, or their dog. But why?
To prove a point: if you go back and look at your Facebook business page insights, you will see that a lot of your posts probably aren’t seen by many people. You might have well over a thousand page likes, but when you make a post, it’s only seen by sixty-five people. Why is that? Because, again, people don’t want to be sold to. Facebook knows this, which is why they developed the EdgeRank system.
In a nutshell, here’s how Facebook posts work. You make a post. Facebook shows it to fifteen people, and depending on how those fifteen people interact (or don’t interact) with your post, Facebook determines if it’s content worth pushing. If a good portion of those people comment, share, or like the post, Facebook will send it to another fifteen people—and so on and so forth.
So what’s often happening for a lot of pressure washing businesses is that they share a side-by-side, before-and-after picture, it gets sent out to fifteen people, and those people don’t care, as it doesn’t provoke enough emotion for them to click on it. But if you were to post a picture from when you were working in the field, or about what you had for lunch while on the job, this does provoke emotion, especially if you come up with a witty caption.
Take a look at this before-and-after picture from one of our clients, Eternal Pressure Washing. Notice on the image on the left, where the before-and-after picture is, and the calls-to-action of “Call” and “Free Estimate”. If you look at the bottom of the image, you’ll see how many people it reached. Now, compare that to the image of one of his employees at work and the number of people that post reached.
Remember, the goal here is to get more pressure washing leads, and in order to get pressure washing leads on Facebook, you need people actually seeing your posts. The biggest takeaway here is that if you really want to start getting more pressure washing leads from Facebook, you need to stop selling with your posts and start documenting your day as a business owner.
3. Use Instagram To Get Pressure Washing Leads Near Me
Many pressure washing businesses use Instagram, but do they use it correctly? In case it wasn’t obvious, the above point about not selling on Facebook posts applies very much the same to Instagram. I just recently made a video on this topic, and it’s loaded with tips on how to leverage Instagram to get free pressure washing leads.
First, yes you should be using Instagram. You should also be posting on your pressure washing business’s Instagram page at a minimum of once a day. Note: be sure to convert your business’s Instagram account to a business account. There is a great walkthrough about this that you can find here.
One of the biggest benefits of posting and using Instagram for your pressure washing businesses is location tagging. Location tagging is where, while in the process of making a post on Instagram, you can “tag” the post by typing in the address or city where the picture or video was taken.
This is huge because, for example, if you were running a pressure washing business in Columbus, Ohio, you could take a picture while on a pressure washing job, post it on Instagram, and use the tag feature to show that the post was made in Columbus, Ohio. Now anytime anyone clicks on “Posts in Columbus”, they may find your post.
This is the key—the secret sauce, if you will—on how to win and get a ton of pressure washing leads from Instagram. The other nice feature of using Instagram is that you can use hashtags, but here’s where pressure washing business owners get this a bit backwards. Oftentimes, I see pressure washing posts on Instagram where the hashtags look like this:
#pressurewashing #businessowner #softwashing #mybusiness #housewashing #washon
Hashtags like this will never get you any business. If you’re not aware of how hashtags work, here is an example. When you click on a hashtag, Instagram will show you all of the posts made using that hashtag. You need to put yourselves in the shoes of your customers. The customer is likely a homeowner, frequents places like Lowes and Home Depot, and is a bit of a DIYer. They will most likely never be perusing the hashtags I’ve mentioned above. So you need to start using hashtags that your customer would likely be searching for. Doing hashtags well is an art in itself. Here is a guide to pressure washing hashtags.
4. Pressure Washing Business Directory Sites
One of the best ways to get free pressure washing leads is to make sure your business is on as many business directories as possible. Examples of sites like this are: Yelp, Yellow Pages, Angi, Thumbtack, Super Pages, etc. There is a really cool service we use here at The Social Media Pros that automates all of this, and it’s called Bright Local. If you want to get your business on ninety-plus business directories and have a couple hundred bucks, they’ll do it for you.
But why is this important, and how will it get you more pressure washing leads? Two ways. First, it may be a Google ranking factor, and although Google hasn’t confirmed it, lots of data supports this.
Screenshot from an article at Search Engine Journal.
So, if it is, this can, in fact, help your Google ranking by a ton. Secondly, it just adds more places where potential homeowners can find your business, thus getting you more free pressure washing leads. So while the free route might take some time to set up and get a handful of listings, it’s well worth the effort.
Paid Ways To Get Pressure Washing Leads
The first four points of this eight-point guide are all things that you can start doing as soon as today, and it won’t cost you a cent. Now, it’s time to get more serious. In these next four pressure washing lead generation tips, I will be going over things you can do to accelerate this process. The catch? You’ll likely have to pay for these things.
I always tell potential pressure washing clients of mine that just like I pay to have my taxes done and pay someone to fix my car, it’s worth paying to get pressure washing leads. Sure, I can do those things on my own. However, it’s going to take me longer to figure out how to do it right, and not only that, but it will likely cost me more money and take time away from me and my business. So while you can learn how to do all of the things I talk about in these next points, from my very biased perspective, I would advise just outsourcing it.
5. Pressure Washing Website For Leads
When it comes to pressure washing website design, we know a thing or two! We actually created a fourteen-point guide about things to make sure your pressure washing website has. Having a solid pressure washing website is the foundation of all future marketing efforts. Now, I’m not referring to a website your sister, who also does web design, made you on Wix, Google, or some other website. I’m talking about a platform for professionals. There are many out there, but our agency uses WordPress.
Here are a couple of examples of what a professional website should look like.
Something to note: when it comes time to hire a company to build you a professional website, make sure that you have the ability to own it. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! Before you ever hire a company to build your pressure washing website, you need to know and ask these questions.
- Will I ever own my website?
- Will I be able to take it from your company?
- How much will the website cost?
The second point is important because much like our pressure washing website pricing model, most companies offer monthly plans to build a pressure washing site. But a lot of them offer a price like $100 a month—forever. You may never be able to take your website with you, pay it off, etc. But assuming you’ve found a good company, or know a really good designer, what should the website have? Refer to our pressure washing website building guide.
As for the design, two of the most important factors that I will focus on for this article are conversion and SEO. While Point 6 is dedicated to pressure washing SEO, building a website that is SEO “out of the box” is critically important. As for conversion, if you look at your existing site maybe you find yourself asking, “I get a lot of pressure washing traffic, but never any leads,” this is likely a result of conversion placements.
There is a science around structuring a website so that when a potential pressure washing customer comes to your website, they feel compelled to submit their info or call. Just take a look at all of these call-to-action buttons on one of our clients’ websites.
We have built enough pressure washing websites to understand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to conversion: where to place call-to-action buttons and phone numbers, and how to intentionally make potential customers navigate your website and land on the contact page. The reason all of this matters so much is that as your pressure washing advertising efforts increase with SEO, Google Ads, and Facebook ads, you’re going to be paying for that traffic, and you need to make sure that traffic converts into leads.
Take a look at this pressure washing website we just designed for Eternal Pressure Washing, pay attention to the calls to action on the pages. All of this leads us to my next tip for getting more pressure washing leads, and that’s finding someone to do pressure washing SEO.
6. Get More Pressure Washing Leads With SEO
As I have briefly explained in the point above, SEO is a very important marketing tool that, if utilized properly, can drive more pressure washing leads to your business than you will know what to do with. If you’re not aware of what SEO (search engine optimization) is, it’s the process of optimizing a website: using backlink building, content optimization, and speed, all in an effort to increase the viability of specific keywords.
For example, let’s say you have a pressure washing website. If you have a “concrete pressure washing” page on your website, you would want to make sure that every aspect of the concrete pressure washing page was optimized for the keyword “concrete pressure washing”, as well as other long-tail keywords like “concrete pressure washing company” and “concrete pressure washing companies”. While there are many things that go into SEO, here are the big ones.
Page Titles
Keyword Depth
Meta Descriptions
Alt Tags
Website Speed
Individual Service Pages
One of the biggest-ranking signals is the title of your page. If you’re trying to rank higher for “roof washing”, your roof washing page title should look like this: “The #1 Roof Washing Company In Columbus”. The page title is what people see first, and it’s also one of the first things Google sees when they scan your site.
Doing all of this is an effort to increase the organic ranking for pressure washing related keywords on Google and other search engines. Remember, you want more pressure washing leads, and you need to rank higher on Google to get the traffic that will eventually earn you those leads. So if you do SEO when you build the site, what’s the point in doing it monthly, or paying someone else monthly to do it for you?
When we do pressure washing SEO, we build a large set of keywords to track, and on a weekly basis, we go into your website and optimize for those keywords, doing all of the things listed previously and then some. Oftentimes, we are able to rank our pressure washing clients in the top three Google spots within ninety days for a large part of the keywords we’re tracking.
Why this matters to you as the business owner is that you go from not getting any Google search traffic to getting hundreds more hits a month—all from people looking for the service you provide. That’s just from learning SEO or hiring someone to do SEO for you! For pressure washing business owners wanting to avoid paying someone, I would suggest finding a handful of courses on YouTube and spending the next few months dedicated to learning the topic. Unlike “boosting a post” on Facebook, this is probably the most complex part of digital marketing when it comes to pressure washing. (Speaking of boosting posts, don’t do that. Save yourself some money.)
7. Leads From Facebook Ads
When it comes to getting pressure washing leads cheap, Facebook Ads is the way to go. There are many Facebook ad strategies for pressure washing you can use. However, I will talk about the three main ones. If you want to watch a live training I did on how to set up, run and manage a pressure washing Facebook ad campaign, check out this video.
Let’s start with the dreaded “boost a post” feature on Facebook. boosting a post on Facebook may seem like a good idea… as long as you don’t want to get pressure washing leads from it. As a brand awareness feature, it’s pretty good. The biggest pro about boosting a post is that anyone can do it, so that makes it easy to do! The con is that it is very limited when it comes to creating an effective pressure washing lead generation campaign.
Some of you might be wondering: how else do you run pressure washing Facebook ads? With the Facebook Business Manager. There are essentially two ways to give Facebook your hard-earned money for pressure washing leads. The first is by boosting a post, and the second is by running ad campaigns using the Facebook Business Manager.
If you’re not aware, if you own or manage a Facebook business page, when you make a post on that business page, Facebook gives you the option to boost the post. Basically, you can give Facebook as much money as you want and they will show that post to people in the area and demographic you have selected. The more money you give them, the more people see the post. With the boost post feature, you do have “some” targeting capabilities, but it is very limited.
The Facebook Business Manager, on the other hand, has a ton of different features, from custom audiences to follow-up targeting and so much more. The biggest benefit of using the Facebook Business Manager is retargeting. We use this with almost every pressure washing Facebook ad campaign we run. Essentially, what this entails is creating campaigns targeting the customer after they’ve visited your website, interacted with a previous post, or possibly saw an old ad.
So, why is this so important? When a homeowner goes to Google and searches “pressure washing near me”, even if your SEO is on point and you show up at the top, you’re still not going to convert all of that traffic. On average our clients have a 4% first-visit conversion rate.
So for every one hundred people that come to our clients’ websites, four of them become leads. (Most of our clients see upwards of 1,000 to 2,000 hits a month just from SEO.)
What about the other 96% that still need pressure washing services? They’re not sold on you yet. These are the people who want to weigh their options, so they go to your site and two of your closest competitors. This is where Facebook retargeting ads come in. When they go to you and your competitors’ sites, they’re still “thinking about it”. But what happens when later that day, they’re relaxing on Facebook and they see your video ad? Intrigued, they may start to think to themselves, “I just visited this company’s website today.” They check out the ad, which triggers more ads in the days that follow until they likely message or call you.
I am sure all of you have experienced this—going on Amazon or any other big website only to be hit with their ads later in the day. The reason they do this is because it works really well. However, features like this and many others are only available when you run pressure washing ads in Facebook Business Manager.
The biggest reason why most people opt to boost a post over the business manager is because of the complexity of it. It took me two years and almost $200,000 in Facebook ad spending to become really comfortable with the platform. Most people don’t have the luxury to test with their own money. So the next best thing you can do is either hire an agency or take to YouTube and put some long hours into perfecting the craft of Facebook ads.
8. Leads From Google Ads
The holy grail of getting pressure washing leads is the use of Google Ads. Google Ads is a process where you pay to be number one in the Google search results. If you look at the image below, I have outlined how the first page of Google is broken up.
The holy grail of getting pressure washing leads is the use of Google Ads. Google Ads is a process where you pay to be number one in the Google search results. If you look at the image below, I have outlined how the first page of Google is broken up.
As you can see, the first couple of results are Google Ads, followed by the Google Map Pack, and then the organic SEO results. A question I get asked all the time is, “If I pay for SEO to be number one, why would I run Google ads?” There are two reasons we run Google ads. The first is to get traffic on keywords that are taking a long time to win, and the second is to get pressure washing leads now while we wait for SEO to kick in.
So what are some tips for pressure washing Google Ads? Learn the platform really well, or you could waste a lot of money really quickly. I’ll say it again. Learn the platform really well, or you could waste a lot of money really quickly.
The biggest issue with Google Ads in the pressure washing world is the fact that pressure washing equipment exists. So imagine paying for the term “pressure washing”, but every time someone searches “pressure washing repairs”, you get charged money! The same thing happens for “honda pressure washer” or “dewalt pressure washer”, too!
I have seen pressure washing business owners who have spent thousands of dollars on searches that were from other pressure washing companies needing repairs and supplies. This is why the negative keyword feature and the exact match features of Google ads are so important. You don’t want to lose money paying for searches that won’t convert.
In Conclusion
I hope this guide helps! Its purpose wasn’t to teach you how to use all of these methods of pressure washing digital marketing. It was for you to be aware of the impact that they could make on getting more pressure washing leads. If you were to implement even four of these by this year, you would see a significant increase in your pressure washing leads.
If you want a free consultation from us here at The Social Media Pros, click the button below!
