Helder Cristal is a cleaning company in Eindhoven. They came to us in 2024 with 30 teams, 1000+ projects in the pipeline, and a website that didn't match the leadership they'd already earned in the market. The work was the work. The problem was the storefront.
Fourteen months later they're the #2 result on Google for “schoonmaakbedrijf Eindhoven”, the quote calculator handles 60% of inbound enquiries without a human, and they've scaled to 42 teams. Here's how it played out.
Numbers as of October 2025 · all organic
The brief: not another cleaning website.
The owner had a specific anti-brief: don't make us look like a cleaning company. Most cleaning sites in the Netherlands lead with stock photography of someone in rubber gloves, a list of services, and a phone number. They wanted something that read as a business, not a service. Trustworthy from the first scroll.
We started with a half-day on-site, sitting with the planning team, watching them quote a job, watching them open and close the same three tabs (their old site, Google Maps, a calculator on paper). The brief sharpened: this isn't a website project. It's a sales-and-ops project. The site is just the part the public sees.
Brand first: an honest blue.
The old identity was a clipart bubble-water logo and an aggressive cyan. We replaced it with a calmer palette: a serious navy, a small accent green to signal “trust”, and a single italic accent we use exactly twice on the page (once in the headline, once in the testimonial pullquote).
Above: hero, services index, structured contact form
No mood boards. No three-options-pick-your-favourite. One direction, presented with confidence, refined twice. We use a different process when the client is a designer themselves, but most aren't, and asking a non-designer to pick between three good options is a waste of everyone's afternoon.
“The italic word on the homepage. That's what made me trust them. It looked like someone had thought about it.” — client, six weeks in
The quote calculator that pre-qualifies.
Before us, the planning team spent ~14 hours a week on the phone qualifying enquiries that turned out to be too small, too far, or out of scope. The quote calculator is a five-step form that takes the same questions a human planner asks, and routes the lead. Three outcomes:
- Quote sent immediately: standard cleaning, in-zone, no surprises. ~60% of leads.
- Booked for a site visit: calendar slot, sent to the right planner. ~25%.
- Politely declined: too small, too far, or specialised cleaning we don't do. ~15%, with a referral.
The polite decline was the controversial bit. The owner pushed back on us automating a “no.” We argued: the alternative is that the planning team spends 14 hours saying no by phone, badly. After two months of data, the “no with a referral” emails were getting thank-you replies. People genuinely appreciated being told quickly and pointed somewhere.
Dutch SEO: structured, slow, durable.
Most Dutch local-SEO advice is from agencies who've never read a Schema.org spec. We did the boring stuff: LocalBusiness with proper service-area markup, real Service entities per offering, internal linking that follows the planning team's actual mental model of who-does-what-where.
Then we wrote. One nieuws post a week, in Dutch, about a real job they did. Not generic “5 tips voor schoonmaak” content. Specific posts: how they cleaned a 4,000m² warehouse after a fire. What changed in their VCA process last quarter. Why their VCA certification matters to a client they almost didn't win.
Month six: where the numbers landed.
By month six we were on the front page for the target keyword. By month nine, top three. By month fourteen, #2 and stable. The site does six things: it handles the calculator, it captures leads, it ranks, it lets them publish, it shows social proof, and it stays out of the way for repeat customers who just want the phone number.
Internal metrics from Helder Cristal's planning team
We're still on the project. First Wednesday of every month, we look at the numbers together, decide what to add for the next four weeks. Most of what we add now is small: a new service page, a tweak to a calculator question. The big work is done. The arc continues.
— A.B., from the studio, after the October numbers review.