Many cleaning business owners know the importance of having a website, but many don’t know how to optimize it so that the local community can find them online. Here are some tips to keep in mind when optimizing your website for local search.

Do keyword research to make sure you’re targeting phrases that people search for every day. Are people searching for “Des Moines Iowa cleaning services”, “Des Moines Iowa cleaning services”, “Des Moines Iowa commercial cleaning services”? Once you figure out what people are searching for, use those keyword phrases in your website title, description, and text.

Take a look at your competition. If you want to rank higher than your competition, do what they are doing, only better. Also find out what incoming links they have to your site. For example, in Yahoo do a link search: mysite.com.

Optimize your web pages for location searches (see the example above, where the search contains city and state). Then use the phrase at the top of the web page text, or a slight variation of it.

Create an account on Yahoo Local and Google Maps to make sure you’re on the map when your prospects search for a cleaning company in your city.

If you have a business office, put your physical location and phone number on every page of your website. If you work from home, you may want to skip the street address and just use the city and state.

Get local businesses and associations to link to your site. If you belong to the Chamber of Commerce, be sure to get a listing on their website.

Write a blog, which is hosted on your website. Search engines like to visit websites with changing content. If you write a blog and update it regularly, search engines will come back to see what you are writing about and index those posts.