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Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Ask your friends and neighbors in the Triangle area which house painters they recommend. Chances are they have heard of the high-quality results achieved by CPM Painting Inc. We pride ourselves on being the best house painters in Raleigh, Wake Forest, Cary, and Apex. We are conveniently located near you and have been serving the Triangle area since 2000 with interior and exterior services including wall painting, deck refinishing, cabinet painting and refinishing, and more. Call us today at 919-720-8088 for a free estimate!

Monday, January 23, 2023

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!

Thursday, December 22, 2022

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!

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

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!

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

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.