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As a painting contractor, you want your website to do two major jobs for you – get you found online and get potential customers to give you a call or fill out a form. Your website should be one of your major sources of lead generation.

In order to get you found online your website has to search well in Google search. In order for it to search well you need to practice the key principles of Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Thankfully, SEO is not considered a mystical practice or a black box like it was 5-10 years ago. But there are still many common mistakes that are being made by painting contractors when it comes to their websites. We are going to highlight three of the biggest SEO mistakes for painting contractors and give you tips on how to recover from them.

SEO Mistake #1 – Setting it and forgetting it

We see a lot of websites that were probably built three to five years ago that have not been touched since. That’s a significant mistake. Google likes freshness. They like to see that you are an active business. When you don’t update your website that sends a signal to Google that you are not an actively operating business and it will absolutely hurt your search results.

Your website is not a destination or a one-time event, it is a journey. When did you last update your website?

If it’s been more than six months, now is the time for an update. Take a look at your website and consider what you should update? Has something changed about the way you do business? Are you still offering the same services? Do you still have the same team?

Add updated photos to your website. Highlight big jobs you’ve completed and/or those that are different from the other photos you have on your website.

Finally, set yourself a reminder to post something new once a month going forward – new photos and at least one update to the content on your home page.

SEO Mistake #2 – Not having enough content

The number one factor Google is looking for when it comes to the organic search results is quality content. They want to provide the highest quality and most relevant results for their users. One of the ways they determine quality is by the amount of content and one of the ways they determine relevance is by keywords and closely-related keywords.

A one-page website is not going to cut it. Google wants you to demonstrate your expertise and it’s pretty hard to do that with enough depth on one page. How many pages are on your website? If the answer is less than five, you definitely want to add more. Set a goal to reach 10 pages. Even if the answer is 10, you will likely be better served with 15-20.

Create a page for each of the different services you offer. Create interior and exterior house painting pages. If you’ve already got those, perhaps you can get even more specific with a kitchen or cabinet painting page.

It’s important to remember that each page should include quality content that demonstrates your expertise. Adding five more pages with two sentences on them will not help. You want to create relevant content for somebody who is searching for those services. The more specific you can get the better your website will likely search.

Once you set your goal, create a schedule to help you reach it. If you have five pages and your goal is to get to 10 pages, give yourself a month to create each new page. In five months you will have reached your goal. Take a month off and then set a new goal.

SEO Mistake #3 – Not highlighting areas served

Chances are good that you serve several cities and towns. Are you representing all of those cities and towns on your website?

We see far too many painting contractor websites where we’ve really got to work hard just to find one location they are serving. That’s not good. The areas you serve should be one of the easiest things to find on your website.

When it comes to local business services (like painting), every search is a local search. If you are not sending signals to Google by including each of the cities and towns you serve on your website, then Google will never show your website in the search results for potential customers who are searching for a painting contractor in those cities and towns.

You need to include your target cities and towns multiple times in multiple places on your website. How do you do that well?

If the total number of cities and towns you serve is five or less, or you really want to highlight five or less, you could include them in the header of your website. You should include them in places that make sense in your content such as a list in your footer. You can create captions for your photos that include the location of the job. Ask your customers to include their city or town in their review, or you can append it on to the review along with their name and type of service.

Another great way to highlight the areas you serve is to create an individual page for each city and town. Try to make these pages as personalized to the city or town as possible. Mention landmarks. Include photos from jobs you’ve done in that city or town. Highlight the services that are most popular in that city or town.

In Conclusion

If you’ve made one, or even all, of these SEO mistakes it’s not too late to recover. Just follow the recommendations above and stick with it. Don’t try to eat the elephant in one bite. Break it up into accomplishable goals and take it on one bite-size piece at a time.

If you’d prefer to just hand your website and SEO over to somebody that you can trust to take care of it for you, call us at 919-424-6121 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.

“The best way to earn a customer’s business is to think like one.”

That’s a lot harder than it sounds.  For instance, you know how to tell if a paint job is a good one – but do you know what customers look for?  They might not even be looking for the right things – but whatever they’re looking for, you want to make sure you’re doing it!

Here’s a potentially tougher question:  where do customers go to find a painting contractor?  If there’s one thing you probably haven’t looked for recently, it’s someone to paint your house.  But you’ve got to get into the customer’s mind to know where to find them.

Or, you could just read this article!  Here are the five main places people go to find painters – along with advice on how to be the contractor they choose.

#1 – Friends, Family and Co-Workers

Word of mouth is still some of the best marketing out there, and it doesn’t cost anything at all!  Any good marketer would tell you to always ask for referrals from happy customers after you’re done painting their home.  But here’s the problem: odds are, they don’t know anyone who needs a painting contractor right then.

The key is to stay “front of mind” for your customers, so that when someone does ask them if they know a good painting contractor, they’ll remember you.  This doesn’t mean pestering them to death with referral requests.  You could send former customers an email a couple of times per year offering specials for them and their referrals only.  You could also ask with a mailed card – but make sure it’s not a generic postcard ad!  Most people throw those away before they even look to see who they’re from.

#2 – Google

This one is obvious.  When people want to find something, they Google it.  There are three ways to get on that first page, and there is intense competition for all three.

The first way is to buy ads from Google – and the odds are high that you will spend thousands of dollars before you make a return on your investment, if you ever do.  There are too many multi-million dollar companies paying handsomely for these spots, including the companies listed in #5.

The second way is to show up in the local pack – the small set of businesses that are nearby the person conducting the Google search.  You can’t really control how close your business address is to someone’s phone or computer.  But you can control whether you have a business address listed in Google My Business, and whether you have dozens of great Google reviews from previous customers.  (We’re happy to help you with both of these!)

The third way to show up on Google is to have a great website – one that details the services you’ll perform, has pictures to show your work, lists the specific areas you serve and makes it easy to get in contact with you.  Google’s search algorithm AI “reads” each website’s content to determine if people are likely to find value in the website, and only a small handful of them make it to the first page.  (We help with this, too!)

#3 – Social Media

Depending on who you ask, the average person spends from 30 minutes to more than an hour per day on Facebook.  People talk about all sorts of stuff on Facebook – including asking friends who they’d recommend for home services.

It’s a great idea to be present on Facebook (or Instagram).  But it’s not a great idea to only post coupons, specials and other advertisements on there.  Remember, people are using Facebook to laugh, learn or relax, but not to buy.  If you’re providing painting tips, personality and humor on your Facebook account, people will interact with you, but if it’s being used only as a sales tool, Facebook will keep your visibility very low and your followers will have already tuned you out anyway.

#4 – Nextdoor

Nextdoor is a website for communicating with other members of your neighborhood.  In less than 10 years, this site has gone from its first user to a major source of local business referrals across the country.  (It’s also a great place to hear people complain about loud dogs, fast drivers and anything else that irritates them.)

Each Nextdoor member can only view posts made by people in their own community.  It’s not really one social network – it’s more than 270,000 private social networks across 11 countries including the United States.  So you won’t be able to use a Nextdoor profile to reach anyone outside of your own neighborhood (although you can buy advertising outside of your community).

What you can do is to encourage happy customers to recommend you on Nextdoor if anyone is looking for a painter.  Just make sure that you also have great reviews on Google.  That’s because people don’t trust a referral from a “neighbor” they haven’t met as much as they’d trust a referral from a family member or even a Facebook friend, and they’re likely to check out your website and your online reviews before calling you.

#5 – Frenemies

There are plenty of sites that connect painters with customers – HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List, Thumbtack, Porch, Houzz and more.  Each of them connect thousands of customers to service providers every day.  But they don’t always do things in the best interests of painting contractors or of painting customers.

Like any company, they’re trying to make a profit. The way they do that is to “vacuum up” as many leads as possible, and to sell them to painters.  They spend millions of dollars building world-class websites and buying Google ads to attract home services customers, taking some of the top search spots in Google results that would otherwise go to local painters.  Then they make even more money by selling those leads to contractors like yourself.

Most of these matching services don’t guarantee that the leads they sell are good leads – nor do they guarantee that their leads will turn into customers.  Some contractors find ways to use these sites as a major source of profitable company growth, but a much higher percentage of contractors end up spending thousands of dollars on leads that don’t go anywhere.  Just make sure you know what you’re getting into before diving into these sites!

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help your painting contracting business earn more customers, call us at 919-424-6121 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.