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Have you recently heard a news report about a large company suffering a cyber attack and thought to yourself, “I’m glad that our painting business is too small to worry about those types of attacks”? Unfortunately, the truth is that you do need to worry about cyber attacks.

Now that cyber criminals have gotten as much as they could from large companies, they are turning their sites onto smaller businesses. With increased security defenses built up for medium and large companies, they are much more likely to get what they want from hitting thousands of small companies with no security measures in place.

What does this mean for your painting business? You are much more likely to be in their cross hairs. The good news is that by implementing basic security measures and by practicing caution you can greatly reduce the chances that a cyber attack will be effective.

Avoid these cyber security lapses to protect your painting business and your finances:

1. Using weak passwords

Don’t use the same password for everything. In fact, you should never use the same password twice. Don’t pick a password that someone could easily guess. Create passwords that include capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. Please change any passwords that currently violate these recommendations right now, or at least tonight.

2. Storing passwords where they can be found

Be careful about storing your passwords in your web browser or on a personal device. If you do store passwords that way, be sure that you lock your device (computers and phones) when you are not actively using it. You should lock your device (or devices) every time you walk away. Do not write passwords down and leave them in plain view.

A much better plan is to use a password manager. Bitwarden, Dashlane, Zoho Vault and NordPass all offer free versions that are recommended. The paid versions include features that are even more important for business owners.

3. Posting answers to any “About Me” threads on Facebook

These types of posts are a gold mine for cyber attackers. They can use them to try to figure out your passwords and impersonate you online. Think about it, what security check questions does your bank ask you to be sure it’s you…high school mascot, first pet name, mother’s maiden name…

4. Leaving your computer unlocked when you step away from it

This was also mentioned in #2 and it’s worth repeating. It may not apply to you if your business computer is at home and stays there. But, if you use a laptop or a tablet that you travel with, it would be pretty easy for somebody to pull all of the data they need to ruin your business off of that device.

You go to a coffee shop. Place your order. Grab a table while waiting and open up your laptop. Hear your order called. Walk over to get your order. Get distracted by somebody who talks to you. When you start walking back to your table you realize that your laptop is gone…and access to all of your business accounts are on there. Lock your computer every time you step away from it.

5. Clicking on links in suspicious emails

If you get an email that looks suspicious, don’t click on any links in it. If it claims to be from somebody you know or a potential customer, call them to verify. Think before you click!

6. Opening attachments in suspicious emails

Tell me if you’ve heard this before… if you get an email that looks suspicious, don’t click on any attachments. Many file types can hold malware, including PDFs and Microsoft Office documents.

7. Fulfilling requests from suspicious emails

We can all now laugh about the emails that we used to get from the Prince of Nigeria who needed our bank account info so he could wire us a million dollars. But there are similar modern schemes that are going around that are much trickier.

What would you do if you got an email from a subcontractor that says that their billing information has changed and you should now send that $10,000 check to this new address or use this new bank account info for ACH? If you know the sender, call them to verify the request. If you don’t know the sender, you should probably just delete the email. If something seems too good to be true it almost definitely is.

8. Not educating your team about these important security measures

While it’s very important for you to know these things as a business owner, your cyber security is only as strong as your weakest link. Be sure to share all these security measures with your employees. Make sure they understand the key points and how important they are. Tell them that if they see something they think might be suspicious they need to report it as soon as possible. This won’t only help protect your business, it can help protect their personal finances.

I encourage you to treat all eight of these security measures as if your business depends on them…because it does.

I had the great opportunity to facilitate Brain Meld sessions on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at the PCA Expo in February. One of the key topics that kept coming up during the discussion with painting contractors was local links.

As I emphasized the importance of local links, I got several questions. They really boiled down to two questions. #1 – What are local links? #2 – How can they be obtained?

I briefly covered local links in the recent What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? blog. But I’ll take a deeper dive into their value and how painting contractors can get local links in this blog.

What are local links?

The three core pieces of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are Architecture, Backlinks and Content. The acronym is ABC, making it pretty easy to remember. Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. Sometimes these are also referred to as inbound links. Going forward for this blog I’m just going to refer to them as links.

Google uses links to assess the credibility and focus of a website. That is what makes them so important. To simplify it further, Google sees links as endorsements for your website. The more inbound links your website gets from other websites that have proven to be credible, the higher the credibility ranking Google gives to your website.

Local links can come from the websites of local businesses, organizations, associations, events, media and more. Really any legitimate website that is based in your area and focused on your area can be a good source of a local link.

Local links are especially important for service area businesses like painting contractors. That’s because local links prove to Google that you have credibility in your service area. If you are doing business in Orlando, Florida you aren’t trying to get homeowners in Montana to find your website. Depending on which area of Orlando you are based in, you want homeowners in Kissimmee, Celebration, Winter Park and Oviedo to find your website.

How can painting contractors get local links?

To help you show up in the search results for the local towns and cities that your painting business serves, here are great sources of local links:

• Chamber of Commerce in your town or city
• Local organizations (community or nonprofit)
• Youth sports teams
• Community events
• Local media
• Other local businesses

Most Chambers of Commerce automatically include a link to their members’ websites on their website. These hold a lot of credibility for Google. If you haven’t already, you can join your local Chamber of Commerce. If it will work in your budget, you may want to consider joining the Chambers of Commerce for all of your key service cities.

If you support local organizations or are a member of a local association, ask them to put a link up on their website to your website. Make the same ask if you are sponsoring a community event. Many of these groups are happy to include the link but you may have to ask them for it or make sure that they have your web address.

If you sponsor a youth sports team or dance team ask them to put a link to your website on their website.

If you partner with another business in town, you should each put a link on your website to the other business’s website. These could be from realtors, general contractors, restoration companies, etc.

If you are a member of a church or do charity work for a church, ask them to put a link on their website to your website. These types of links won’t help big national businesses. But for painting contractors, they can be the key to your website being found when local homeowners search for your services. Don’t stop with my list. Seek out any additional local entities that could be helpful.

Even if you are using a provider like ProPainter Websites to optimize and manage your website, you should take the initiative to seek out local links to help ensure it searches well. You don’t need hundreds of local links. If you can get a dozen, or a couple dozen, you can quickly surpass your competitors, and it will absolutely help your search results.

If you have questions about anything I covered here, please feel free to reach out to me at martin.morgan@propainterwebsites.com or 919-600-5166. If you’d like to learn more about how we can support your business with a fully-optimized website and other web services, please schedule a meeting with us at a time that’s convenient for you!

A great way to define SEO for painting contractors is – all of the actions taken to get your website to show up at the top of Google search results when somebody searches for the services you provide in your service area.

Building on that definition – some things will be done when building the website while others will be done afterword. Some things are done once and others need to be a continuous effort.

And to continue to stay at the top of the search results you have to stay tuned in to changes that Google makes in what they want to see. And I’m going to stay focused on Google because they carry such a massive amount of search volume. Google’s changes often will make things more difficult for you, but sometimes they do work in your favor if you’ve worked to give them what they want.

A great way to think about the foundation of SEO is to use the acronym ABC. A stands for Architecture – the structure and technical aspects of the website. B represents Backlinks or Links as they are more commonly thought of now. The focus here is on the links coming into your website. C is for Content. You may have heard the term “Content is King.” This is the words and information you have on your website.

In this blog I’m going to break down each element of ABC without getting too technical. I’m also going to include action items where possible to help you in your efforts.

But first, a note – no human knows exactly how Google’s algorithms work anymore. They have turned the final results over to AI. It is also a moving target as they make adjustments consistently. However, if you want the most recent thoughts from SEO experts on what matters most, check out our blog from last year – Top 10 Organic Search Ranking Factors for Painting Contractor Websites in 2022.

Architecture

Here’s the good news – almost every system, provider or platform you will use for your website is built to achieve the success factors for architecture. If you decide to use WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or another similar platform, you will have everything you need to achieve almost all of the architecture best practices built right in. They are almost, but not completely, failproof.

You will want to look for plugins that could give you an additional boost. You’ll also want to be aware of changes Google makes.

In the early days of SEO, Architecture was a big differentiator. Before Google built up the ability of the algorithm to use content as a top factor, Architecture was nearly everything. That enabled some SEO experts of the time to completely game the system and dominate the search rankings. That is no longer the case.

Things to Consider

Menu navigation – Plan out every page on your website. Where should they be placed in the menu navigation of your website? Is your navigation easy to follow for people who get to your website? Will they know right where to go if they are looking to see what services you provide? Will the Google spiders that crawl your site understand how to categorize your business and your services?

URLs – URLs are the web addresses for the pages on your website. You should be able to adjust them to be what you want them to be. You will want your page on House Painting to include house-painting in the URL. You will also want to be sure your location or serving area are included, for example – memphis-house-painting.

(Back)Links

Depending on which experts you listen to or read, links are either the most important element of SEO or the second most important element, right behind content. Think of it this way, Google wants to understand the credibility of a website. The more inbound links that exist to that website the more credible the website appears. The more inbound links the website gets from websites that have already proven to be credible, the more credible the website appears. The more inbound links the website has from other websites in the local area, the stronger the credibility that website has in the local area.

Google sees links as endorsements for the website. They are like actionable reviews. So your goal is to get as many quality inbound links as you can for your website.

Things to Consider

Quality industry links – you want to get inbound links from other websites that have proven authority and credibility in the painting industry. That might vary slightly depending on your specific mix of services. But for most painting contractors that means organizations and associations, paint providers, painting media and other painting-related sources. The PCA (Painting Contractors Association) is a great link to have to your website. If you have a profile on platforms like Porch, Angi or other sources, you’ll want to be sure it has a link to your website. Industry publication websites like American Painting Contractor and inPAINT are a great source of quality links.

Local links – local search is more significant to you because of the nature of your business. You don’t want a homeowner five states away to find your website, you want homeowners in your service area to find your website. Local search works differently from basic search because it is tuned much more for local signals. A national website will get very little juice from a link from the website of a small church in a small town, but a painting contractor who does work in that town can get a solid lift from a link from that church website. Great local links include chambers of commerce, not-for-profits, other businesses, community events, local media. If you do work for a local business, asking them to include a link to your website on their website can pay off in a big way. It’s important to note that even if you are using a provider to manage and optimize your website, this is one of your action items that is necessary to make it search well.

Content

Content is King! Google has continued to fine tune it’s algorithm to understand content and be able to rank it’s value. While it’s not perfect, it has come a long way. Having rich descriptive content throughout your website will significantly help you in SEO. You especially want to focus on content that shows expertise, authority and trust.

How do you do that? It’s pretty similar to links – the more quality content you have, the more credibility you will have in Google’s eyes. Showcase your expertise in the field. Include a significant amount of detail about the services you offer. Demonstrate authority by writing about your years in the business. Highlight any accolades or recognition you’ve received, and don’t forget to mention your contributions to the community. You can prove trust by featuring customer testimonials and reviews – the more specific the better.

Things to Consider

Home page – in most cases this will be the page that Google considers for most searches that occur in your immediate area for services you provide. Be sure to include details about your services. Tell the story of your business. Highlight your accolades and community organizations and events you’ve been a part of. Showcase reviews. Review the page to ensure you are focusing on expertise, authority and trust.

Service pages – you should have a separate web page for every service that you offer. Be detailed and specific about the service. If you can, cover your process, what the customer can expect, how long it usually takes and any other details that will demonstrate your expertise.

Areas served pages – in Google’s eyes, painting contractors are considered service area businesses. That basically means that you work in a broad area instead of having a brick and mortar location where customers go to get work done. Because of the wide coverage area, it can be difficult for painting contractor websites to show up in more than two or three towns or cities that they serve. By creating specific pages for each town or city you serve you can give yourself the best chance to search well in that town or city. Include some highlights of your services on those pages. Of course, the more specific details you can include about the town or city the more likely that page will search well there. If you can, include photos of work you’ve done there, as well as reviews from customers.

With this solid understanding of the foundation of SEO and what you can do to help your website perform well, I hope you’ve taken some action items that can help you dominate search in your area. Like with nearly everything, there is more you can do but it all starts with a strong foundation.

It is important to note that when it comes to the overall success of your website you also need to factor in design, user experience and calls to action. Even a website with stellar SEO will be a failure if a visitor clicks away every time they get there.

If you have questions about anything I covered here, please feel free to reach out to me at martin.morgan@propainterwebsites.com or 919-600-5166. If you’d like to learn more about how we can support your business with a fully-optimized website and other web services, please schedule a meeting with us at a time that’s convenient for you!

We have spoken to quite a few painting contractors who have told us that they don’t like to bother their customers by asking for reviews. Is that feeling justified? Do homeowners dislike being asked for reviews?

Thankfully the good people at Moz recently conducted a survey of 1,300 consumers as part of their Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior Report. The survey asked a number of really good questions about how often consumers are asked by local businesses to leave reviews and how often they do so when asked.

Before we dig into the results of those questions, I want to share a word of warning. You should not be providing rewards (money, discounts, etc.) to people for giving you reviews. This is unethical at best and could qualify as illegal.

There was a question in the survey, “Has a business offered you money, discounts, or gifts in exchange for writing a review?” 40% of the respondents said yes, a business has offered them money, discounts or gifts. I urge you to not do this or try to manipulate your reviews in any way. It only takes one “fake” or “bought” review to completely destroy your credibility.

Now, onto the questions…

Has a local business asked you directly for a review in the past 5 years?

61% of the survey participants said that they had received at least one direct request for a review during the past five years. That leaves 39% of consumers who were not asked a single time by a local business for a review over the past five years. To me, that’s a lot of missed opportunities. Think about how many local businesses those 500+ people did business with over five years with not a single one of those businesses asking them for a review.

If you have been consistently asking your happy customers for reviews, then you have a substantial advantage over your competitors. If you haven’t been asking for reviews, you can start today and still be ahead of most of your competitors.

When asked by a business to leave a review, how often do you do so?

As you can see on this chart, it is very much worth your time and effort to ask for reviews. More than 50% of consumers will “always” or “usually” leave a review when asked to do so. On top of that, 34% will “sometimes” leave a review when asked to do so by a business. The quick summary – when you ask your customers to post a review for your business, most of them will do so.

How do you prefer to be asked for local business reviews?

Email is the preferred method at 53%, with being asked in person coming in second with 46%. Text comes in third at 29%. It is important to note that this is a “select all that apply” question.

Of course, the better you know your customer, the better you can modify your approach to fit their preference. If you’ve been using text to communicate with a homeowner, there is a high likelihood that they are going to be good with a text request for a review. We encourage our customers to ask for a review during the final walkaround, which would work well for the 46% of people who prefer to be asked in person.

Why do you write local business reviews?

This question relates directly to the title of this blog – “Do homeowners dislike being asked for reviews?” Many painting contractors have told us that they don’t like to ask their happy customers for reviews because they don’t want to bother them. However, as seen in the answer to this question, 73% of consumers said they write local business reviews “To let others know my experience.” These consumers see providing reviews as part of their civic responsibility. It is important to them to be able to guide others to good businesses and away from bad ones.

If you have provided great work and delivered excellent service to a customer and you ask them for a review, you are helping them fulfill their mission to let others know of a good quality painting contractor that they can trust. Consumers are not just writing a good review for you, they are writing a good review to help other homeowners in the area identify a trustworthy and dependable painting contractor for their home painting project.

If you’ve hesitated in the past or been resistant to ask for reviews, I hope that seeing the results of this survey question will encourage you to start asking your happy customers more consistently.

Our Integrated Reviews platform helps our customers get more online reviews. To learn how we can help do that for your painting business, call us at 919-424-6121 or schedule a meeting with us at a time that’s convenient for you!

We have not been shy about emphasizing the value of customer reviews. The recently released Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior report by Moz features a survey they had conducted with 1,300 people in September 2022 that sheds even more light on the impact of reviews. This will be the first of two blogs in which we will highlight the pieces of the survey that we think are most important to painting contractors.

First, here are some of the major points which mostly reinforce previous findings:

• 96% of consumers read online reviews
• 56% of consumers read online reviews at least weekly
• 36% said the star rating matters most to them when looking at reviews
• 28% said the written content of the review matters most
• 17% said recency of the reviews matters most

It’s safe to say that almost all of your customers and potential customers are reading online reviews for your business. What’s most interesting to me about these five data points is that 28 percent said the written content of the reviews matters most to them. That goes to show that when you can you absolutely want to encourage happy customers to write a review that includes details of the services you provided and the customer service they experienced.

The rest of the questions we’ll cover in this blog are very valuable questions about how people look at reviews that I’ve either never seen asked or haven’t seen asked in this specific way.

How many positive reviews do you normally read before deciding a business is worth a try?

Wow! I would never have thought that 57 percent of people want to read 10 or more positive reviews for a business before they are willing to give it a try. I see many painting contractor Google Business Profiles that don’t even have 10 reviews total.

How many reviews do you have for your business? If it’s less than 20 you should definitely put some urgency into your efforts to ask happy customers for reviews.

Who do you trust more, the business or customers?

This is not a surprising number, but I have not seen this asked so directly in such a high quality survey before. Think of it this way – 1 in 3 potential customers are going to trust what you say while the other 2 are going to put much more stock in what your customers say about the business. And of course, where do they most often go to find that information – reviews.

After reading enough positive reviews to be interested in a business, what do you most often do next?

As a painting contractor you may not have a “place of business” for the potential customer to go to. But that’s okay, that 27% will probably be split between visiting the website and direct contact.

The website point is important. Potential customers want to see additional proof of a business’s credibility and having that website can play a significant role in providing the proof.

Apart from visiting review sites, what else do you do to understand a business’ reputation?

It’s no surprise that consumers ask their friends and family about a business. But look at how close the second and third most popular choices are. Looking on social media for feedback about the business is only 12 points lower than asking friends and family. Looking at reviews/testimonials on a business’s own website is a little further behind than asking family and friends but it’s still relatively close to 50 percent.

So, while people are still turning to friends and family, they are also looking for additional social proof on social media and your website. We will often talk to painting contractors who take for granted the opportunity to include reviews/testimonials on their website. They will say that those reviews don’t really matter on a website. But as you can see here, they absolutely do matter.

If you are not currently asking consistently for reviews from happy customers I hope seeing this data will convince you that it is really important to do so. If you are in a market where the competition doesn’t have a lot of reviews you can very quickly get a huge competitive advantage on them by building up your reviews. On The Sharp Edge Podcast we highlighted how to ask for Google reviews and what to ask for.

A massive thank you goes out to Moz for commissioning this survey and producing this report that can help so many small businesses make good decisions about how they approach reviews and marketing. They also created the cool graph images featured above.

Our Integrated Reviews platform helps our customers get more online reviews. To learn how we can help do that for your painting business, call us at 919-424-6121 or schedule a meeting with us at a time that’s convenient for you!

Are you taking enough photos of your work? We talk to a surprising number of painting contractors who don’t have photos of their most recent jobs. This is a missed opportunity! Here’s why photos can be your best selling tool.

1. Homeowners make emotional decisions

It’s true – the vast majority of humans make emotional decisions and then seek to justify them with facts and logic. A picture can evoke many emotions. Seeing a breathtaking photo of the beautiful work you’ve done is a great way to influence a potential customer. They see that and say to themselves, “Wow! That’s beautiful – I want something like that.”

Even if it’s not the type of job they are looking for, just seeing your beautiful work and the really cool jobs you’ve done over and over again will evoke an emotion that convinces them that you are a true craftsman. They want great work done on their house and they are going to want you to do it.

A good comparison for this is pictures of food. Whether you like fancy food or comfort food you have almost definitely seen a picture of a specific dish and thought that you wanted to eat that as soon as you could. Homeowners can experience the same thing when seeing pictures of your work.

So make sure you’ve got photos of all your best work and of those jobs that were a little beyond what you typically do.

2. Homeowners want to see proof that you’ve done the job they are looking to get done

For the smaller percentage of homeowners who are more logic or fact focused, they want to see pictures that show that you’ve successfully delivered on the type of job they have. That’s also true for those emotional decision makers who are now looking for facts to justify their emotional decision that you will delight them with your work.

If your bread and butter work is residential repaints, make sure you have a lot of pictures of residential repaints. That’s true for whatever specialty you may have. You’ll also want variety and comprehensiveness. Make sure you’ve got many pictures of all the different rooms in a home.

It’s also important to remember, in most cases whether it’s through your website or social media, your prospective customer is going to see these photos before you even get a chance to talk to them. Make sure you’ve got pictures of all potential jobs.

With that in mind, here are some to-dos:

• Make a list of all the types of work you do and the photos you need to show your work. Focus on the details and be specific – rooms, specialties, exterior, etc.
• Next, make sure you have at least five photos of everything you put on the list.
• If you are missing some, make sure you start capturing photos of those specific things in upcoming jobs. Create a plan to ensure this happens.
• Take photos after you complete every job. Make it part of your closing process. Catch up on the photos you need. Take pictures of especially interesting elements. And don’t overcomplicate it – your phone can take pictures that will work great on your website and/or on social media.
• Make sure you’ve got updated photos on your website. As you get in the habit of taking photos, make sure you post those photos on your website or send them to your website provider to post. You don’t have to post every photo of every job, but be sure to post at least three to five.
• Post a steady stream of photos on your social media channels. I will always say that you are better off focusing on one channel than spreading yourself too thin. If you can post daily on Facebook and Instagram it would be ideal. The good news is that through your business account you can schedule out posts. If you can’t do that, try to post at least two to three times a week on one of those platforms.

A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s absolutely true when it comes to communicating the value you provide and the great work that you do. Use that to your advantage and leverage photos to bring in your target customers.

We can help you use your best photos to attract new customers through your website and Google Business Profile. If you’d like to know more, please contact us today at 919-424-6121 or schedule a meeting for a day and time that is convenient for you.

Unfortunately the marketing industry is overloaded with businesses that thrive on using fear and misleading tactics to get the attention of small business owners with the sole intention of selling their services. Painting contractors are definitely one of the businesses they target.

We hear from clients all the time about an inquiry or warning they got from somebody making a claim that scared them into action. Here’s what to look out for and how you can investigate the claim yourself.

“You need to renew your domain immediately!”

Companies doing this are one of the worst offenders. They try to scare you into thinking your website will be going down very soon if you don’t pay them to renew your domain.

Yes, domain renewal is important. If you don’t keep your domain actively renewed your website will go down and you could even lose your domain quickly in an auction. But, in almost all cases the companies that are sending you these notices don’t hold your domain. They may be able to renew it for you, but they are going to charge you a significant premium to do that.

What to do

Check with your current website provider about the status of your domain. If they don’t manage it for you they should still be able to tell you who does the hosting and help you check on it.

If you manage your own website, you want to be sure that you keep track of who you originally selected as domain host and have login information available. If it’s too late for that, reach out to the platform you are using for your website to see if they can help you identify who you have registered your domain with.

You can also go to https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup. Under Domain Information and then Dates, you should be able to see when your domain registration expires. You may also be able to get the contact information for the hosting company there.

Once you’ve got this information be sure to store it somewhere you will remember so that going forward you’ll know exactly where you stand.

“I found errors on your website!”

As a company that builds and manages websites for painting contractors, this is one of the most irritating tactics. Very rarely are there actually “errors.” When I think of “errors” I think of misspellings, incorrect information, maybe bad links, those types of things.

The follow up to these red flags usually takes one of two approaches neither of which are actually highlighting “errors”:
         1.   They highlight a bunch of things that are truly not affecting the website’s ability to search well and draw in customers
         2.     They hold your website to a standard that can only be met by the biggest brands.

Before mentioning the specific issues with both of these approaches, it’s important to note that what matters most is results. For almost all small businesses, the main job of your website is to get you found when somebody searches for the services you provide in your area. There are other things that are important like branding/reputation and conversions, but ultimately you want your website to show up toward the top of the organic search results.

If your website is showing up toward the top of the search results for the services you provide in your area, then there are no significant SEO or content issues or errors on your website. Case closed.

It’s important to note that there are very few “perfect” websites. It’s really easy for a marketing agency to nitpick and point out things that are wrong. And the worst of them will do that without any regard for the search results the website is producing.

Let’s dig a little bit further into the two approaches that I mentioned that are usually taken in these misleading efforts.

The deceiver will highlight a bunch of things that are truly not affecting the website’s ability to search well and draw in customers.

Some of the favorite focus areas here are load speed, citations or listings, and AMP.

Is load speed important? Yes, it is a known factor that Google uses in the search algorithm. Some predatory marketing or SEO agencies would have you believe that load speed is the number one factor in search. That is absolutely not proving to be true.

As far as citations, otherwise known as listings, there are really only a handful of these that are relevant anymore and you are probably already focused on them. They are Google, Facebook, Yelp, Bing and Yahoo. Why would Google care what City Search says about your business? Google owns search. Nobody has used City Search to find a local business in at least 10 years.

AMP is just not relevant to painting contractors.

What to do

First, check your search results. If you are showing up on the first page of the search results for the keywords related to your most important services, then disregard any of these claims.

If you are not seeing the search results you would like to see, load speed could be an issue. Reach out to your website provider to ask them to take a look at your search results and ask if load speed could be affecting them negatively.

When it comes to citations/listings, make sure your business information is accurate on Google, Facebook, Yelp, Bing and Yahoo. You should also check industry sources that you currently have profiles on (HomeAdvisor, Houzz etc.). Don’t be concerned about the rest.

Predatory marketing companies will hold your website to a standard that can only be met by the biggest brands.

Usually the biggest “errors” they highlight here are backlinks (links from other websites going to your website) and social media.

We recently looked at a report that was sent to one of our clients that gave them an F for Links and an F for Social Media. The F for links highlighted that they had 365 external backlinks. For a localized painting contractor, that’s pretty good! It is just plain deceptive to give them an F for that and shows no recognition of the true competition for the business.

The F for Social Media was given because they only had a Facebook page and didn’t have Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn profiles, or a YouTube channel. If you are a painting contractor who can consistently use those social media channels then that is great. If you don’t have the time, you are far better off putting the time you do have into one channel and not spreading yourself too thin by trying to use multiples. As for social media’s impact on SEO, it’s believed by experts to be minimal at best.

“Nobody can find your business on the web!”

The technique the evil companies trying to exploit you using this lie typically fall back on is to say that they didn’t find you in the Local Pack. The Local Pack is the box listing 3-4 businesses that shows up high on Google’s search engine results page right next to the map. There are several things that are deceptive about this approach:
         1.   The Local Pack results are significantly impacted by location. Most of the people perpetrating this lie just search for something like “painting contractor Milwaukee” from wherever they sit and then use those results to scare you. These are not the same results that somebody who was actually in Milwaukee searching for a painting contractor would see.
         2.   Somebody looking for a painting contractor is likely to click on the “More businesses” button at the bottom of the Local Pack to see the full list of options. Google’s treatment of service area businesses is notoriously fickle so you can get a better read on your results by looking at it that way.
         3.   Probably most important – more searchers click on the organic search results that show up below the Local Pack than do on the Local Pack results. If your website is showing up in the organic search results, that is what is most important.

What to do

Check for yourself. Search for “painting contractor” when you are in your number one targeted town or city. Are you showing up in the Local Pack? When you click on “More businesses” do you show up in the top 10? Is your website showing up in the organic search results?

If you don’t see your business anywhere, reach out to your website provider and ask them to take a look at how you are doing in local and organic search. If you manage your own website, ask somebody you trust in your network that knows a thing or two about websites if they can find your website and what they might suggest to help you search well if they can’t.

The Good News

I promise you, not all marketing firms are manipulative, self-interested jerks that only care about taking your money. I’ve seen a number of quality providers at PCA events and heard them on PCA podcasts and APC’s Paint Radio podcast.

If you have questions about anything I covered here, please feel free to reach out to me at martin.morgan@propainterwebsites.com or 919-600-5166. I love to help small businesses and I hate to see business owners get taken advantage of by deceptive practices.

You may hear many people talking about how reviews are important. But how important are they and how often do consumers use reviews to help them decide what painting contractors to reach out to?

Thankfully we have data from BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2022 to help us better understand how often consumers look at reviews and some of the specific things they look for when they need a local service provider. This very well-done survey offers great insight. We’ll cover some of the key points and what you can do to best position your painting company for success.

98% of people at least ‘occasionally’ read online reviews for local businesses.

77% of consumers “always” or “regularly” read reviews when browsing for local businesses (up from 60% in 2020).

These two stats go hand in hand and help us understand how often consumers look for reviews for local businesses. With 77% of consumers “always” or “regularly” reading reviews, you should assume that everybody who is looking for a painting contractor is going to be looking at reviews. So if you don’t have good reviews for your business, now is the time to ask happy customers to post a review.

This response further solidifies the previous insight and makes it even more important for painting contractors to have good reviews. Consumers pay even more attention to the reviews for service-area businesses and tradespersons than they do care services or healthcare!
 
More consumers use Google to evaluate local businesses than ever before. In 2021 81% did, up from 63% in 2020.

Google plays a huge role as the main platform that consumers use to evaluate local businesses. Yelp (53%), Facebook (48%), Tripadvisor (36%) and the Better Business Bureau (31%) also are used fairly significantly by consumers. However, you can make the biggest impact by asking your customers to specifically leave reviews on Google.

Consumers care most that the review describes a positive experience. That’s because consumers like to see themselves in the reviews. They want to be able to picture themselves as a happy customer that is pleased with the job that was done. The more reviews you have that highlight a great experience, the more likely a potential customer is going to be to find one that fits their situation.

Also highly important are the star rating and that the business owner has responded to the review. The survey had additional questions on both those points that shed further light…

54% would want to see an average star rating of 4-star or more

When you read that 58% said that it’s important that the business has “a high star rating” you may have asked yourself what qualifies as a high star rating. For most consumers it would have to be an average star rating of 4 or more.

89% of consumers are ‘highly’ or ‘fairly’ likely to use a business that responds to all of its online reviews.

57% say they would be ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ likely to use a business that doesn’t respond to reviews at all.

These numbers paint a clear case for the importance of responding to reviews. If you haven’t been doing that you should probably start today – 89% is a huge number and a great chance to win business.

48% say that a review must be left within the last month or more recently to impact their decision to use a business.

Recency matters. With all that has changed in the past two and a half years, many consumers feel that only the most recent reviews can give an adequate representation of the service the business provides. Consider restaurants, if you’ve gone out to eat you’ve probably experienced a number of ups and downs based on requirements, supply chain, staffing, etc.

The best way to ensure you have recent reviews is to consistently ask for reviews.

Much of the data from this recent survey echoes the information that we shared in our blog Online Reviews – 5 Key Factors. The main point remains this – reviews are one of the most important factors for who a consumer decides to call when they are looking for local services. To give your business the best chance to get that call, you want to consistently ask your happy customers for reviews.

Our Integrated Reviews platform helps our customers get more online reviews. To learn how we can help do that for your painting business, call us at 919-424-6121 or schedule a meeting with us at a time that’s convenient for you!

Social media can be tricky to use effectively for any small business. It can be a massive time suck. It’s easy to confuse activity with progress. And one controversial post can ruin a reputation you spent years (and maybe decades) building.

In this blog we are going to share some advice based on questions that we often get asked by painting contractors about social media.

The first question you should ask yourself is: what are you trying to achieve on social media? Are you using social media deliberately to accomplish something for your business? Or, are you really using it for personal use?

If you are on there because you just enjoy it and it’s fun for you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. You might enjoy being a part of a community of painting contractors, or your local community. Both of those are great.

However, if you are doing it with the hopes of attracting customers, whether you are targeting new customers, repeat customers or both, you have to think through your approach. The first step is to build your audience, your second step is to increase engagement of your audience.

What social media platform(s) should I use?

American Painting Contractor (APC) conducted a really interesting survey recently where they asked painting contractors what their social platform of choice was. Here are the results:

The question doesn’t distinguish whether it’s for personal or business use but we can probably assume that most people who answered the survey factored in both.

However, if you want to utilize social media to help you attract new customers you should use the platform that is going to give you the opportunity to connect with the most potential customers. Who is your target audience? What is their social media platform of choice? That’s where you want to be.

Should I just try to use every social media platform I can?

No! What usually happens is you spread yourself too thin trying to do it all and end up using them all poorly. You will be much better off focusing on one or maybe two social media platforms at most.

How do I grow my social media audience?

Encourage everybody you interact with to follow you. Provide content that informs, entertains and engages your followers.

What types of things should I post on social media?

This depends partly on the platform you are using, but as mentioned above you want to inform, entertain and engage your followers. Notice that I didn’t say “sell to.” We recommend using the 80/20 rule with at most only 20% of your content being sales-type messaging. That may include a special promotion or a new service. Feel free to do less than 20%. If you hit a new follower with buy, buy, buy then they will turn you off and you’ll never have an opportunity to reach them again.

The quickest way to build your audience beyond asking everybody you interact with to follow you is to educate or entertain your followers. Share your painting techniques with them. Tell them how to identify signs that the outside of their home needs to be re-painted. Share trends in homeowner color choices. Poll your followers to see what their favorite color is for kitchen cabinets. This is the type of content they will be most likely to share with their connections.

You can also feel free to post great photos of your best work and new jobs you complete – those could inspire your audience. Providing inspiration to pursue those renovation projects they’ve always wanted to purse is another way to engage them.

How often should I post?

We recommend posting consistently three to five times a week. However, stick to the plan and make sure your posts meet a certain quality level. If you are just going through the motions to check off a box then reassess whether you should be posting at all. Fewer posts of a higher quality are better than many posts that stink.

How long should it take before the customers start rolling in?

This depends on many things including how active you are, the size of your market and how well you are able to engage your audience. That being said you would hope to have gotten a new customer by the six month mark of your consistent efforts.

There are several other things that we could cover but hopefully these tips will at least get you started or provide you some new guidance to improve your current social media efforts. Different things will work with different groups in different markets. Pay close attention to the posts that get you the most interaction and try to do more of those types of posts.

To learn how ProPainter Websites can help you attract more customers, call us at 919-424-6121 or schedule a meeting for a day and time that is convenient for you.

With 93% of consumers using the internet to find local businesses, painting contractors with websites that show up high on Google’s search engine results pages are highly likely to receive lots of calls from potential customers. But how can your website consistently achieve strong performance in search?

We recently wrote a blog highlighting the Top 10 Organic Search Ranking Factors for Painting Contractor Websites in 2022. This is part two of that blog, covering ranking factors 11 through 20. To begin, let’s take another look at the chart of the top 20:

A big thank you goes out to Whitespark for their 2021 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey. Now let’s look at each of the factors ranked 11 through 20 and how they apply to painting contractors.

#11 Quantity of Inbound Links to Domain from Industry-Relevant Domains

This is the number of links you have coming into your website from other painting industry websites. Websites that would qualify and help you here include the PCA (Painting Contractors Association) and American Painting Contractor, as well as other website platforms that you may have established a profile on including Porch, Houzz, Angi, HomeAdvisor, etc.

How to Improve
Create profiles with links to your website on any of the web platforms that are free. Do what you can to get more links to your website from these sources and additional industry websites. Ask for links from all industry-related organizations you are a part of.

#12 Mobile-friendly/Responsive Website

The only reason this factor isn’t higher is because it’s been a factor for long enough that almost every website is built with responsive design. That means that your website will adjust to look good on (almost) all devices that somebody might use to access it.

How to Improve
If you are unsure about your website, use your phone to access it. If it looks different than desktop and you can read the words easily because the font is bigger you should be good to go. If it looks like a miniature version of the website you see on your computer and the words are tiny then you want to get it fixed as soon as possible. The penalty for not having a responsive design/mobile-friendly website is that you likely won’t show up in any searches.

#13 Volume of Quality Content on Service Pages

This is another emphasis on the importance of having a website that is well built out with rich, relevant content and lots of well written pages.

How to Improve
Make sure you have individual web pages for all the services that you provide. Make sure you’ve got good, quality content on each of those pages that describes the service in as much detail as possible, along with the experience that the customer can expect when they choose to work with your painting company.

#14 Diversity of Inbound Links to Domain

This is part of proving your credibility to Google. The more websites that have links to your website, the more Google sees you as a credible expert in your field. Think of it a little like reviews. The more strongly positive reviews you see from more people for a business, service or product, the more likely you are to decide that business, service or product is high quality. Google looks at links to your website the same way.

How to Improve
Get more links to your website from other quality websites. Similar to #9 and #11, ask all of the businesses and organizations you are involved with to post links to your website. Don’t try to take a shortcut and pay somebody who tells you they can get you hundreds of links in a matter of days or weeks. Those will be very low quality links. They may even be considered “toxic” by Google and then your website is at risk of a significant penalty.

#15 Keywords in GMB Landing Page H1/H2 Tags

This one is a little bit technical. Your GMB landing page is the page that the website link on your Google Business Profile goes to. H1 and H2 tags are the headlines that you have on that page. You want to have relevant keywords in those headlines.

How to Improve
Take a look at the H1 and H2 text you have on the page linked to your Google Business Profile. If needed, edit them to include your one or two most important keywords.

#16 Quantity of Inbound Links to Domain

Pretty simple here – this is the number of links to your website from other websites.

How to Improve
The same thing that helps you on #14 helps you with this one – get more links to your website from other quality websites.

#17 Click-Through Rate from Search Results (General)

Google does factor in user interactions to determine future search results. When Google sees that users are clicking on a specific website in the organic search results it will move that website up. Google is seeing that as a very good answer to the search the user is conducting.

If users are not clicking on a specific website in the search results then Google sees that as a sign that the website is not what users are looking for when they conduct that search. That website will fall in the search results.

How to Improve
Pay attention to your title tags and descriptions. These are your opportunities to get users to click on your website in the search results. You want these to include marketing language, but you don’t want to mislead users. If you do mislead users you are much more likely to get an immediate bounce, meaning they’ll click on your website but then almost instantly hit the back bar. That’s a big negative in Google’s eyes.

#18 Keywords in Domain

In this instance your domain refers to what is before the .com, .net, .biz or whatever other extension you may use for your website. So, for example our domain is propainterwebsites.com.

How to Improve
At this point you likely have what you are going to have. But, if you are able to include topical and location-based keywords in your domain it could definitely benefit you. Something like atlantahousepainters.com would absolutely help. If you haven’t already, take a look at what domains are currently available that could help you here.

#19 Quantity of Inbound Links to Landing Page URL from Industry-Relevant Domains

For this one, take #11 and specifically apply it to the web page that your Google Business Profile links to.

How to Improve
Most painting contractors will have their home page linked on their Google Business Profile. They’ll also have their home page linked to from their business profiles on industry web platforms and other websites. In those instances, this will take care of itself. However, depending on the nature of your business, you may want to have your Google Business Profile link to a different page on your website. If that is the case, you’ll want to work to get industry links to that same page, as well as your home page.

#20 Keywords in Text Surrounding Links to Domain

You have no real control over this one – this is the text before and after the link on another website to your website.

How to Improve
While you can’t control it, you can help your chances of doing well on this by getting links from the types of websites that have been mentioned earlier in the article.

There is a lot of information contained in these two blogs and it could definitely be overwhelming. One of the best things you can do is to chop it into small chunks, prioritize based on the rankings, create a project plan and then start chipping away at it little by little.

If you want to hit the easy button and work with a provider that can take care of most of these things for you, we can help! Please call us at 919-424-6121 or schedule a meeting for a day and time that is convenient for you.