The State of the Laundry Industry

Episode 2: The Laundromat Website

August 27, 2021 Laundry 'Matt' Season 1 Episode 2

Your #1 marketing tool for your laundromat is your website.  Learn how to check your online presence, ways to make it better, and how not to lose your investment.

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https://www.curbsidelaundries.com/blog/archive/state-of-the-laundry-industry-the-laundromat-website/


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the state of the laundry industry with laundry mat. And this is episode two, the laundry mat website, your laundry mats. Number one, marketing tool is your

Speaker 2:

Website. The website is how people find you. So of course, it's going to be super, super important. You do have people who drive by your laundry mat, especially if you're in a good location and people walking by and they find you. They may even tell your friends, but there's even more people who are using their phones and using their computers to find a laundry mat near them to find wash and fold surfaces, to find laundry, pickup and delivery almost without fail. If you do not have a strong web presence, the most you'll make in Washington fold is between 520$500 gross per month. I rarely have talked to anybody making over 2,500 when they don't have the strong web presence. Meanwhile, if you have a strong web presence, you could be making tens of thousands of dollars per month because especially those big commercial accounts, they're not driving through the neighborhood trying to find you and residential customers. Aren't either they're using their phones. Just like when you look for a restaurant, usually when's the last time you just blindly walked into a restaurant without looking for it online. So that's how people find businesses. That's how they've determined, where they're going to spend their money. And it's really important to take some time and do a search and see what type of see how your laundromat website shows up. So do different search terms like wash and fold and laundromat near me and laundry service, laundry pickup, and delivery. All those different keywords that customers are typing in. See how you show up. So that's referring to domain authority. So domain authority means how well you're ranking for different key words. So it is as Google again, to refer your laundry mat website. And that's something very important. And that's something we help our clients out at curbside laundry is to increase their domain authority, do a search, see how you show up, see what the competitive landscape looks like. In 2010, we had a real simple website is a single page and it, because nobody else had a website, we ranked number one and we still do, but our website's gotten a lot better and we've made many iterations of it because we know this is a source of traffic. You know, in fact, last month we got about 4,900 people to our website, 4,900 unique visitors to our website. So you could imagine how much money that turned into. And no, it's not a one-to-one ratio of new customers, but you need a lot of traffic for each new customer. You bring in it's really a numbers game. So if somebody is offering you a free website, the my best advice is just to say no, because you get what you pay for. So Google values, unique content. And if you're getting a free website, chances are, it's just a copy and paste of somebody else's website and that's not going to rank very well. Um, also you want to go with a website made specifically for the laundry industry. So we have specific needs. Consumers are looking for certain things and there are, and you want to rank well for those. And there's also certain things that help laundromat websites rank better than anywhere than, than other laundromat websites. So we paid, um, SEO experts, a whole team of them. They spent several weeks researching what brings laundromat websites to the front page of Google. And we took those lessons before we even started developing, you know, the website that we have today and the ones that we make for our clients. And nobody else is spending that type of time to make a top notch website. The other thing is, if you're replacing your existing website, you want to make sure they don't just put up a brand new website and your old website goes goodbye. The reason being is you're going to have a lot of missing broken links because every page of your website has its own unique URL, its own a web address. And if you just get a brand new website, you need to remap all those old pages and redirect them to the new pages on your website. One at a time, it takes time. But it's really important because your website, if you have one, it has been building up domain authority for different key words and you don't want to lose that. So you want to redirect it to the new page that talks about something similar. Finally, the final tip I got right here is don't let your credit card expire. So what I'm referring to is we see this every year because we've got hundreds of clients using our software and website and all those things, but you own the URL, right? So we're super suds.com. You've got your own website for your laundry mat. And I see this all the time. Where, how often have you logged into GoDaddy or the registrar that you have, whether it's Bluehost or GoDaddy, how often have you logged into when was the last time you logged in and when is the last time you updated your credit card? So imagine you built up all this web presence, your domain authority, it's the number one marketing tool for your web, for your laundromat and that credit card expires. And then you lose your URL. Your website goes down and your competition snatches up your URL. And there it goes. So after the, after you finished listening to this podcast, or maybe you want to hit stop right now, go into GoDaddy, make sure your payment information is up to date. So that way you don't lose all of that investment. So once again, I hope everybody walks away from this podcast where the realization and the focus and too of how important the website is. Go ahead and do a search on your own, check your card or check your credit card and make sure it's up to date with GoDaddy or your registrar. And finally, um, just a little bit of a plug. Whoever makes your website check to see how the other websites that they've made are ranking, because that really is the litmus test. If somebody says I can make a really good laundromat website, that's great. It is so easy to check. You just do a Google search. So I advise everybody before you spend any money on a website, do a search, check out their past credentials. And if your website does need updating, that's where I'd spend my money. I would rather have the best website out there than spend$1 on Google AdWords. Now Google ad words are great, but you have to pay for that every single month. And the nice part about having a good website is it brings in customers where you don't have to pay every single time somebody clicks on your link. So that's really the number one secret to growing your business, whether it's self-serve business wash and fold or laundry pickup, you want a strong website. And that's why it's a central to our package. That includes the point of sale, the pickup and delivery solution, and also a website because you need all three in order to make that a go.