Hiring marketing help for a carpet cleaning company without getting burned
What to do yourself, what to hire out, fair prices for a carpet cleaning company, the red flags in a pitch, and why a trial beats a proposal.
Carpet cleaning owners get pitched constantly. Lead resellers, directory sales reps, a franchise's preferred vendor, three agencies a week on LinkedIn, and whoever bought your number from a business list. The pitches are near-identical: page one, a number of leads per month, a twelve-month agreement, and a setup fee.
Most of it is not a scam. It is just sold before anything has been proven, to an owner with no way to evaluate it. Here is how to evaluate it.
Do these yourself, always
Some things are cheaper and better done in-house, permanently.
- Asking for reviews. No vendor can make your technician stop at the door and walk the rooms with the customer. That habit is worth more than any service you can buy. The reviews guide has the script.
- Filming before-and-after video. Thirty seconds on every third job. An agency cannot be in the house.
- Answering the phone, or paying somebody to. Covered in the missed-call guide.
- Your prices. Never let a vendor set an offer you cannot honor. This is how companies end up advertising "$99 whole house" and collecting one-star reviews.
Worth hiring out, usually
- Google Ads. The negative keyword discipline in this category is real work, and the difference between a managed and an unmanaged carpet cleaning account is typically 30% to 50% of the budget.
- The website. A five to ten page site with real prices, before-and-after galleries and fast mobile load. Most owners can build something, but the thing they build loads in nine seconds.
- Technical setup. Schema, call tracking, conversion imports, the AI-crawler and llms.txt work in the AI search guide.
- The past-customer reminder campaigns. Simple to describe, and nobody running a truck ever gets around to it.
What fair looks like
For a one to three truck carpet cleaning company in a normal US metro:
- Google Ads management: $400 to $1,000 a month, or 12% to 20% of spend, whichever is higher. Ad spend is separate and should be billed to your own card by Google.
- Meta ads management: $350 to $800 a month plus spend.
- Local SEO and Google profile work: $300 to $800 a month.
- Website build: $1,500 to $5,000 one time, or $150 to $350 a month all in.
- Review generation and missed-call text-back: $100 to $400 a month.
- Full package for a small operation: $1,000 to $2,500 a month, plus ad spend.
If someone quotes $5,000 a month to market a two-truck carpet cleaning company, they are selling you a plan built for a restoration franchise. If someone quotes $199 a month for everything, you are getting an offshore template and a report.
The red flags
A guarantee of rankings or leads. Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee of a specific position is either a lie or a plan to rank you for a phrase nobody searches, like "eco friendly carpet cleaning services in [suburb]."
A twelve-month contract with a setup fee. Fine for a website build. Not fine for management. If the work is good, month to month keeps them honest.
They own the accounts. The Google Ads account, the Meta ad account, the Google Business Profile, the website domain and the phone number must be in your name, with you as owner and them as a user. This is the single most common way owners get held hostage. Ask directly, before signing: "Whose name is on the ad account, and what happens to it if we stop?"
Shared leads. Any service selling the same lead to three or four carpet cleaners is selling you a price war. You will meet the homeowner who already got two other quotes at $20 less.
Reporting on impressions and rankings. The only numbers that matter are calls, booked jobs and cost per booked job. A report full of impressions and keyword positions is a report designed to avoid the question.
They cannot say anything specific about carpet cleaning. Ask what they would put in the negative keyword list. If "rental," "shampooer," "machine" and "how to" are not in the first breath, they have not run this category. The list is in the Google Ads guide.
A "$99 whole house" offer in the proposal. They are optimizing for a lead count they can report, not for your invoice or your rating.
Questions to ask before you sign anything
- Who owns the ad accounts, the profile, the site and the number, during and after?
- What is the notice period, and is there a cancellation fee?
- Which specific person does the work, and how many other accounts do they run?
- What will you report, and can I see a real report from another local service client with the name removed?
- What do you need from me each week, and how long does it take?
- What happens in January, when this trade's volume drops?
- Can you show me a carpet cleaning or home service account you have run for more than a year?
The answer to question five matters more than owners expect. Marketing that requires four hours a week from an owner who runs a truck does not get done.
Doing it yourself: the honest version
Doing it yourself is genuinely viable for a one-truck operation. The realistic time cost, once things are set up: 30 minutes on Friday for Google Ads search terms, 20 minutes a week on posts and photos, 10 minutes a day on review replies and follow-up texts. Call it two hours a week.
The failure mode is not capability, it is the fifth week. Spring hits, you run six jobs a day, and the Friday habit dies. Then the account drifts for four months. If you know that is you, hire it out and spend your energy on the walk-through and the reminder list.
Why trial-first
The reason we offer every service as a free 14-day trial is that no proposal can tell you whether a channel works for your company in your metro. Two weeks of the actual work in your actual accounts can. You watch the phone, you keep whatever was built, and you decide with data instead of a pitch deck.
Before you hire anyone, read the benchmark report and find your own numbers. An owner who knows the trade median is 12 reviews, that 45.1% sit under 10, and that they are in the 30.4% with no website, is much harder to sell the wrong service to.
Frequently asked
Should I use the vendor my franchise recommends? Read the account ownership terms first. Franchise-preferred vendors often hold the accounts centrally, which is fine while you are in the system and painful when you leave.
Is a freelancer better than an agency? For a one-truck operation, often yes, and cheaper. The risk is that a freelancer gets a full-time job and disappears. Ask what happens if they go quiet for two weeks.
How long before I judge results? Sixty days for ads, ninety for local SEO and AI search. Anything faster is luck, in either direction. The FAQ covers the rest.
Every service we run is available as a free 14-day trial, no card. Text or call (385) 832-6175.