Almost every piece of advice written about cleaning company marketing is aimed at domestic cleaners, and almost none of it applies to you. A householder searches “cleaner near me”, looks at reviews, and books. A facilities manager searches “commercial cleaning contractors [city]”, opens nine tabs, checks accreditations and insurance, and builds a shortlist for a tender that closes in three weeks.
Those are different buyers with different behaviour, and the second one barely uses the map pack at all.
Sell to the sector, not the square footage
| What the buyer needs to see | Page worth building | |
|---|---|---|
| Offices | Reliability, out-of-hours access, DBS checks | Office cleaning + city |
| Schools and education | Safeguarding, DBS, term-time scheduling | A dedicated education page |
| Medical and dental | Infection control, clinical waste, CQC awareness | A healthcare cleaning page |
| Industrial and warehouse | Machinery, COSHH, working at height | An industrial page |
| Food production | HACCP, audit readiness | Specialist — high value, few competitors |
| Post-construction | Sequencing and speed | A builders clean page |
Each of those sectors has a buyer with a specific anxiety, and a page that names the anxiety wins the shortlist place. “Commercial cleaning” as a single page addresses none of them.
What a facilities manager checks before they call
Public liability cover and the amount. Employer’s liability. Whether staff are DBS checked. Whether you hold CHAS, SafeContractor, Constructionline or an ISO certification. Whether you are a Living Wage employer, which now appears in a meaningful share of public-sector and charity tenders.
Put all of it on the site in plain text, not in a PDF and not only in a logo strip. These are the details that get you through a pre-qualification stage, and they are also exactly what an AI assistant needs when a manager asks it to suggest contractors that meet a specification.
TUPE is a page nobody has written
When a contract changes hands the existing cleaning staff usually transfer under TUPE, and this worries buyers considerably — it is the single most common reason a manager delays switching supplier. A page explaining how you handle TUPE transfers, what the timeline looks like and how you keep service continuous will be read by every serious prospect and is written by almost nobody.
Where the map pack still matters
It matters for the smaller end — a two-office business looking for a cleaner, an estate agent needing end-of-tenancy work, a gym. Keep the Google Business Profile complete and categorised as a commercial cleaning service, but recognise that contract work is won on the website, on accreditation pages and increasingly in AI answers, not in the local pack.