Watch a homeowner book a cleaner and the pattern is consistent: search, open three or four profiles, read the newest reviews and the owner replies, look at the photos, then send a quote request to the two that felt safest. That quote request almost always goes to more than one company, which means the game has two rounds — look trustworthy enough to make the shortlist, then answer faster than the other name on it.
Referrals are genuinely strong in this trade — neighbors, local Facebook groups, Nextdoor threads asking “anyone know a good cleaner?” — but they are not a separate channel so much as a head start. Nearly every referred prospect still pulls up your Google profile before texting you, and a thin profile with stale reviews can lose a client your best customer already sold for you.
Free, and it moves more than anything you can buy. Fill in every field: primary and secondary categories, the full services list, accurate hours, the real service area, and ten-plus real photos. An incomplete profile silently sits out searches it should win. For cleaning, list every service type separately — recurring service, deep clean, move-out, post-construction — and use real photos of your crew and finished rooms, never stock images, which homeowners spot instantly.
Velocity beats total: a steady stream of recent reviews with owner replies outperforms a big stale pile, for Google and for the customer checking the dates. The bar is lower than most owners fear — in SitePeek’s 2026 study of 4,604 local businesses, 21% had fewer than 10 reviews. Ask after every single job, and answer every review within a day. Ask at the end of every job while the clean house is right in front of them, and reply to each review by first name — prospects read the replies to judge how you handle problems.
Most competitors make this easy: in the same 2026 study, 43.7% of local businesses had no website at all. A fast, mobile-first site that answers the price, service, and coverage questions turns profile visits into calls instead of losing them to the next result. A cleaning site earns quotes by answering the price-anxiety questions: what a deep clean includes, roughly what it costs, and whether you bring supplies.
Most jobs go to whoever answers first. Speed-to-lead is the discipline of responding to every inquiry in seconds — by text, not voicemail. An instant text-back on missed calls and web forms wins jobs that rankings alone never will. Cleaning quotes go out to two or three companies at once — the one that texts back while the homeowner is still on the couch usually wins the walkthrough.
Here is the honest comparison. Costs are ranges because real prices vary by trade and market — anyone quoting you an exact cost-per-lead before knowing your city is guessing:
| Channel | Typical cost | How fast | The honest verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile + organic | Free to do yourself; $200–$400/mo managed | Months to build, then compounds | Where most local calls start. Slow at first, keeps working after you stop pushing — the only channel on this list that compounds. |
| Google Local Services Ads | Pay per lead, roughly $25–$100+ each by trade and market | Days | Real calls fast, with a screening badge. Stops the moment you pause, and per-lead costs never go down. |
| Google Ads (search) | Typically several hundred dollars a month minimum to matter | Days | Works with a fast landing page and call tracking; burns money without both. Most owners should try LSA first. |
| Yelp ads | A few hundred dollars a month and up | Days to weeks | Heavily trade- and city-dependent. Check whether your customers actually use Yelp before paying, and read the terms closely. |
| Lead marketplaces (Thumbtack, Angi) | Pay per shared lead, roughly $15–$100 each | Immediate | The same lead is sold to several pros at once — a race on price and response time. Usable as overflow, bad as a foundation. |
| Postcards + door hangers | Roughly $0.50–$1+ per piece printed and delivered | Weeks | Low response rates are normal. Best tightly targeted — the streets around a job you just finished, not a whole zip code. |
| Referrals + repeat customers | Near zero | Slow, steady | The highest close rate on this list. Ask systematically after every good job instead of waiting for it to happen on its own. |
Ranges reflect widely reported 2026 prices. Confirm current quotes before budgeting — platforms change pricing without notice.
A cleaning-specific angle: density is profit. Ten clients on two streets beat ten clients scattered across town, so referral asks, door hangers on the houses beside a job you just finished, and neighborhood Facebook groups punch above their cost — they cluster your route, while purchased leads scatter it.
If you hire the work out instead: a Google-profile-only service typically runs $200 to $400 per month, a website agency $200 to $500 per month, and a full local-SEO agency $500 to $1,500 per month. The complete market-rate breakdown is in the pricing guide.
That is what SitePeek is for. Local Pro is $300/month flat — $0 setup fee, no contract, cancel anytime by text — and it runs the first three fixes on this page as a weekly service: your Google Business Profile managed every week (posts, review replies in your voice, fresh photos), a mobile-first website built and hosted for you, and every website lead texted back in seconds.
The honest caveat: nobody outside Google controls rankings, so no provider can promise you a position — what a provider can promise is the work, on a schedule, every week. Compare that against doing it yourself or hiring an agency on the pricing guide, and see the local SEO playbook for house cleaning businesses for the deeper dive.
Free audit: your local-pack rank, your review gap, and the three competitors outranking you — from public Google data. No credit card.