I wish I started SEO sooner...
Thankfully I found a great SEO agency!
My company, Impact Cleaning Services, has been operational for 72 years. We have over 1,000 cleaners and we clean some of the most well known, highest trafficked, properties in Canada. And yet, I still meet prospects every day who say “we’ve never heard of you…”
I don’t just mean prospects in new sectors we’re pursuing. I’m talking about commercial real estate professionals involved in BOMA, an association we have been involved with for decades.
This used to bother me. But then I looked into why more people don’t know who we are and I think it boils down to two main factors:
we’ve never had a sales and marketing team
you couldn’t find us on google
One of the things we’re really proud of at Impact is that we’re typically early adopters of new trends and technologies. Clearly we missed the boat (more like massive freighter) on SEO… In May 2024 we finally gave our heads shake and realized we needed to fix this fast.
We got introduced to this SEO Agency led by 3 siblings. As someone who works with his siblings I liked this. Then they started walking me through how they work and what it will take to get Impact from invisible to the top 1-3 results in Google across dozens of keywords we want to rank in.
They seemed scrappy and creative, entrepreneurial, and they made it clear that we had an uphill battle because we were so late to the party. These are the kind of people I like to work with. I was in.
For those not familiar: SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic through organic (non-paid) search engine results.
We’ve chatted at least once a month for the almost two years now and every time I meet with them I get so fired up! It definitely took some time to get us moving up the Google ranks but they started delivering some low hanging fruit wins pretty early on. The low hanging fruit was not our ideal customers but we saw early signs of inbound life. Nice!
By the end of 2024, about 7 months in, we started to see some big wins. Our name was appearing on the first page for a lot of valuable key words and in the map pack, which is super valuable. By early 2025 the return on marketing investment (ROMI) really started taking off. By May 2025, one year into working with them, we closed over $3M in annual contract value via inbound leads from our website. Extra nice!
Beyond that it appears that they were ahead of the curve on AEO which is wonderful because I knew for dang sure I wasn’t missing that boat. I’ve seen a few leads come in via people finding us on ChatGPT which is pretty sweet. Even sweeter is the fact that they searched “best cleaning company” and ChatGPT told them it was Impact. NICE!
For those not familiar: AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It is a digital marketing strategy focused on structuring and optimizing online content so that AI-powered platforms—such as ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and voice assistants (Siri, Alexa)—can easily discover, understand, and cite it as a direct answer to user queries.
I caught up with them last week for our monthly check in. Again, I was fired up! Here are some notable wins:
Night Cleaning - #12 to #1 on Google (high-value keyword)
Toronto Office Cleaning - #4 to #1 (one the most sought after in janitorial)
Shopping Mall Cleaning - #8 to #1
Commercial Cleaning across British Columbia - unranked to top 3 in a few cities
Appearing in AEO results in some US cities (cool!)
I’ve worked with a bunch of agencies and contractors for a variety of marketing functions and I can confidently say our SEO Agency is the best external partner we’ve worked with thus far. They keep finding new ways to get our name and website in front of more people in more cities.
Pundits are saying AI and AEO is going to kill SEO and website traffic. That might be true. I have no idea. But what I do know is for now SEO still works because I’m still seeing inbound leads come in almost daily.
If you have no idea what any of this meant and you too were late to the SEO party don’t stress. Just find yourself an SEO Team and get started asap.
Remember: the best time to plant an SEO tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today.
PS if you don’t know where to find a good SEO Agency I’m happy to put you in touch with mine. Under 2 conditions:
You’re not a competitor
You get at least 5 people to subscribe to this newsletter
Thanks and have a wonderful day :)