Tradespeople, including painters, must appear on Google to consistently generate leads, since that’s where most customers find and research local businesses.
Recently, BrightLocal polled several consumers to find out which platforms they trust to learn more about local businesses before making a purchase decision. Two Google platforms—Google Search and Google Maps—took first and second positions, respectively.
Google’s lead-generating potential attracts many businesses to the platform, making it highly competitive. That’s why Google has developed an algorithm that ranks websites based on their SEO performance.
Websites that end up on the first page by adhering to the algorithm’s ranking factors attract organic traffic. Others are left to rot away on Google’s other pages, which people rarely visit.
Below, we’ll share SEO strategies you can use to keep your website on Google’s first page and boost its online visibility.
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What Is SEO for Painters?
SEO (search engine optimization) encompasses strategies that help your company appear high on search engines, rank for painting keywords, and attract website traffic.
Generally, painting SEO strategies are subdivided into:
On-page SEO, which involves creating high-quality content, optimizing service pages, etc.
Local SEO
Off-page strategies such as attracting backlinks and link-building
Technical SEO
Advanced SEO
These strategies ensure your website is favorably positioned to earn Google Search’s top spot or to be one of the few websites considered for the position.
On-Page SEO Strategies for Painting Companies
On-page SEO is simply optimizing the content on individual pages with the relevant keywords so that the pages rank and attract traffic from your target audience.
Implementing On-page SEO does three key things:
Gets you on Google’s radar for business-related searches
Fulfills your target audience’s search intent
Attracts relevant traffic to your website, which may lead to conversions
Here are some basic ways to implement on-page SEO to improve your search engine rankings:
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Keyword research
If SEO is a building, then keyword research is the foundation. This is the case since Google uses keywords to understand your web page and determine if your website fulfills searchers’ search intent and is relevant to a query.
Keyword research is finding the search terms potential customers use when looking for your online painting services.
For example, let's say you offer interior painting services in Texas. Some of your main keywords could be:
House painters Texas
Interior painter Texas
Best interior painter
House painting company
The fundamental way to perform keyword research is to use Google Autocomplete, People Also Ask (PAA) boxes or Related Searches.
This means entering your seed keyword and waiting for Google to suggest other keywords. Then, scroll down each keyword's search engine results page to find other suggestions in the PAA and Related Searches boxes.
If that seems like a lot of work, consider using free keyword tools like Google Console and Google Keyword Planner. Or premium ones such as Ahrefs, Semrush, and Surfer SEO. Simply enter your seed keyword, and the platform will produce keyword suggestions alongside their monthly search volume and difficulty level.
The next step after keyword research is finding ways to insert the keywords into your web page’s content.
Optimizing website content
To create optimized website content, you must find ways to naturally include your target keywords without disobeying Google’s anti-keyword-stuffing policy. That means placing a keyword where it logically aligns with the text around it.
For example, consider these two sentences optimized for the keyword ‘house painting’:
Homeowners seeking professional house painting services look for the website of a professional company.
We offer the best house painting services, so if you need house painting done to your house, choose our house painting company.
The second sentence is a great example of unnatural keyword placement. It's obvious that the writer is trying too hard to insert the keyword, and the sentence doesn’t sound like normal speech.
After finding the right keywords, use them when you write:
Blog posts
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) sections
Copy for service pages and your website’s home page.
URLs
Lastly, interlink web pages with similar themes. For example, you can link an article on painting DIY ideas to another on choosing a color palette. This will enhance user experience by guiding visitors to related content.
Title tags and meta descriptions
Title tags are the web page titles Google displays on search engine result pages. Meta descriptions are condensed summaries of a web page.
Both elements play critical roles in your website's on-page optimization. Searchers use them to determine whether a web page contains what they need.
To optimize your title tags and meta descriptions, include the keywords for which the page is supposed to rank. You can take a cue from this article that ranks for the keyword ‘exterior paint color ideas’:
The meta description and title tag for the article above are okay because they:
Match the content on the web page
Are catchy and concise
Contain the web page’s main keyword
However, the only issue is that the meta description is incomplete because it exceeds Google’s allowed character count. You should keep your meta description between 120 and 158 characters. This way, searchers will get a complete summary of your article and, hopefully, be convinced to click.
Local SEO for Painting Contractors
Local SEO is a set of strategies designed to help your company appear prominently on local search result pages. This helps home service companies to target people living within their local service area.
To excel at local SEO, painting contractors need to obey and implement some basic principles, such as:
Optimizing their Google Business Profile (GBP)
Ensuring NAP (name, address, and phone number) consistency across all online mentions and business listings
Building citations and registering in local directories
Reputation management
Google Business Profile optimization
Optimizing your GBP (formerly Google My Business) is a vital aspect of local SEO, especially since Google uses it to get information about your business and determine your website’s relevance to local searches and ranking.
The first step to optimizing your GBP is to claim your listing. If you’ve already done that, follow these tips to ensure it's optimized:
Fill it with details such as your company’s name, address, phone number, service description, and operating hours.
Always ensure it's accurate and up to date. If not, Google will think it's not the same business captured in your other listings or that you’re trying to fool searchers, which will hurt your local SEO rankings.
Add high-quality media files—images and videos—to further enhance your profile and help potential clients locate your store.
Fill it up with reviews (more about this later).
NAP consistency
Use the same name, phone number, and address across all your business listings. This way, you can prove to Google that your company is legitimate and operational. Plus, customers can contact you from any online platform of their choice.
To ensure NAP consistency:
Find and report false or duplicate listings.
Contact webmasters to change incorrect details.
Use platforms such as the Moz Local tool to verify how your company appears online.
Ensure the details listed on your website are accurate. Directory listing owners may collect information from your website when creating your company’s profile.
Local citations and directories
Citations are a collection of your company’s digital footprint.
It’s everywhere someone has mentioned your company online, either at your request or without your knowledge. This could be on social media platforms, review sites, data aggregators, and directories.
Listing your company in directories and prompting people to mention it online boosts your credibility and brand awareness. Both factors can instill confidence in customers who might otherwise be in two minds about picking your company.
Here’s a list of directories you can list in:
Angi (formerly Angie’s List)
Houzz
Yelp
CitySearch
Craigslist
Nextdoor
In addition to listing in directories, develop a relationship with local journalists to get mentions in the press.
You could give them quotes for their articles, invite them to special events, and grant them access to breaking news about your company. In exchange, they link to your website and mention you in their articles.
Customer reviews and reputation management
Reviews matter a whole lot to customers and search engine algorithms. Customers read them to decide if a company can fix their issue, while search engines rely on them to measure how prominent businesses are, which determines their rankings.
Getting customers to leave online reviews and testimonials can be daunting; they may be too busy, lack the technical knowledge to navigate the review platform, or feel the process is too tedious. However, you can overcome these objections by:
Soliciting reviews immediately after you’ve completed a job.
Encouraging painting technicians to teach customers how to leave reviews or postcards explaining the process.
Following up on review requests a day after or alongside the invoice.
Delivering five-star service that makes customers submit reviews willingly.
Implementing the tips above can prove difficult, especially for a business owner with few employees. Hiring extra employees to handle those tasks is cost-prohibitive and impractical for smaller businesses.
But what if you had a tool that automates all those tasks and more? Enter ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management software. Whether collecting, responding to, or tracking reviews, the platform automates them all.
You can program the platform to email review requests to clients immediately after a job is completed while the experience is still fresh in their minds. This generates authentic reviews that resonate deeply with potential clients.
“One of the biggest value propositions of Reputation Management is the ability to ask for reviews from your customers at the right time, right when things are fresh in their mind, and add a little more automation to it,” says ServiceTitan’s strategic project manager Heather Donaldson.
Furthermore, ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management platform matches each review to the originating job and technician. You can also program it to notify you or any team member whenever a customer leaves a review on more than 60 listing sites, so you can respond to them from one dashboard.
This makes it easier to manage reviews from the field or office and ensure your business listings are accurate.
Off-Page SEO for Painting Businesses
Off-page SEO is a collection of SEO strategies employed outside a website. These strategies ensure that search engine bots consider the website an authoritative source for painting-related content, which improves the website’s ranking.
Off-page SEO strategies include building backlinks, publishing helpful content, and building a strong social media presence.
Building high-quality backlinks
High-quality backlinks are simply links to your website from authoritative and highly trusted sources in the painting industry. They help increase your website’s authority and quality in the eyes of Google and attract visitors from other websites.
To build high-quality backlinks, follow these tips:
Search for places where your company was mentioned without a link to your website and ask that the publisher add one.
Publish helpful content on other websites and link to your website.
Organize special events and invite local journalists to write about them.
Social media and content marketing
Building a strong social media presence and sharing helpful content strengthens your digital authority, which strengthens your website. People will trust you more and intentionally search for your website whenever they have a particular issue.
When building a social media presence, avoid spreading your resources thin across various platforms. Simply pick the few frequented by your target audience, and direct all your resources there.
Lastly, it’s best to align your social media and content marketing efforts. The tone and voice you use on social media should be preserved in all your blog articles. Your social media posts can be based on a blog article, with a link (placed in the comments section) redirecting users to read the complete piece on your website.
Technical SEO for Painting Websites
Technical SEO is optimizing your website’s technical aspects—source code and architecture—so search engine bots can find, understand, and index it.
It also involves performing a technical SEO audit to find and fix potential technical issues that can negatively impact user experience, such as broken links, slow loading times, and poor navigation.
Here are some technical SEO best practices:
Mobile-friendliness
Google often prioritizes mobile-friendly websites, as most searchers use mobile devices to access the internet. Therefore, optimizing your website structure to load and display well on mobile devices is important.
A mobile-friendly website essentially means that:
Website visitors can click on buttons without having to zoom in.
Every text has a legible font size and type.
The display interface automatically changes to fit the viewport of mobile devices.
You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to check the performance of your painting website on mobile.
Page speed optimization
If your website takes too long to load, searchers will move to another website. Plus, Google will rank you low on search engine result pages since it considers page-loading speed a key ranking factor.
To improve your website loading speed, implement the following:
Ensure all images don’t exceed 700kb
Use a reputable hosting service
Use browser caching and a content delivery network
Increasing site security
Google considers site security a key ranking factor since its priority is protecting and encouraging users to return.
To ensure your website's security, use HTTPS—a secure application layer protocol with an SSL certificate that encrypts data transferred between your server and visitors’ devices.
Advanced SEO Strategies for Painters
All we’ve covered so far falls under the umbrella of basic SEO strategies. However, your chances of success will increase when you employ some advanced SEO strategies.
Local Services Ads
Local Services Ads (LSAs) are a unique PPC ad offering that allows customers to contact you directly from SERPs. They appear at the top of local result pages and contain basic company information such as name, phone number, reviews, and opening hours.
LSAs are triggered to appear whenever someone in your local service area searches with a painting-related keyword with high buying intent, like “painters near me,” “[location] painter,” etc. This gives LSAs a high conversion rate.
Despite their multiple benefits, this advertising channel has one major drawback: an employee must always be available to answer potential clients’ questions and schedule appointments. This is inefficient, as the employee will have to sacrifice time meant for other tasks.
Fortunately, ServiceTitan’s Local Services Ads integration permanently solves this by allowing customers to book appointments directly from SERPs without the help of any employee.
The process is simple:
Customers click on the calendar booking widget and are redirected to select a service type.
Next, the system will notify them of the associated costs and open a calendar where they can select a time and date. Since the calendar is integrated with your scheduling system, customers will see only available time slots.
On the next page, the customer will enter their details—name, address, and phone number—into a smart Google form. Once they click ‘submit,’ Google will email them a summary of the appointment booking.
Lastly, ServiceTitan will automatically create a job booking in your scheduling system and fill your painting CRM with the customer's data.
This seamless job booking process helps painting companies generate leads from their LSAs, even during holidays.
Content marketing for long-term success
Whenever customers have painting issues, Google is the first place they go to find solutions. This allows painting companies to earn customers’ trust by creating blog series and how-to guides that solve their specific needs.
Before you write a blog post, find the topics potential customers frequently search for online. Or the recurring questions and complaints your customer-facing teams receive daily.
Are they looking for painting DIY ideas? Do they find it hard to pick color palettes? Find that pain point and write a helpful article that solves it.
You can even feature quotes from internal subject-matter experts. This will differentiate the article from others on the internet covering the same topic and help you comply with Google’s EEAT guidelines.
AI and voice search optimization
Nowadays, everyone is talking about how AI and voice search could change SEO and how we consume content online. Recent trends and data studies show that the predictions are absolutely on the money.
In 2023 alone, 13 million Americans said they used AI to search.
Almost 50 percent of Americans report using voice-assisted search on their smartphones.
Investing in AI and voice search can secure a competitive edge when these technologies become mainstream.
Here’s how to optimize for AI and voice search:
Use natural language when speaking instead of focusing entirely on keywords.
Dedicate a significant portion of your SEO budget to ranking for long-tail keywords.
Use FAQ pages or sections to offer quick answers to people’s questions.
Heavily optimize for local search as most voice searches are local.
Optimize your website content with schema markup to provide additional context about what it is about to Google bots.
Leveraging ServiceTitan for SEO Success
Although ServiceTitan isn’t a dedicated SEO tool, it has multiple features that indirectly help your SEO strategy.
In addition to the Reputation Management tool we covered earlier, other ServiceTitan tools enhance SEO strategy.
Home Services Marketing Software
It’s expected that every home services company prioritizes marketing. However, knowing each campaign’s revenue performance is vital to avoid wasting resources.
ServiceTitan’s Home Services Marketing software allows you to create and assign unique phone numbers to each campaign. The system then uses these numbers to track the exact campaign from which a customer calls and plots the call-tracking results on an intuitive dashboard.
This dashboard lets you accurately decide which campaigns and areas to focus your ads, helping you maximize your resources.
Schedule Engine
After gaining online visibility with SEO, you still need a seamless booking process. Otherwise, customers will land on your website, start booking, and leave to find another painter because no one answered the phone. These dissatisfied customers may even discourage others from booking appointments.
With Schedule Engine, you can process job bookings 24/7 (even during holidays) without having to be present to hold the prospect’s hand.
Once you install the widget, every call and message you receive outside work hours gets rerouted to our team of industry-trained agents. They will answer all questions, schedule appointments, and record any special requests from customers.
When you resume, your CSRs will be able to see highlighted appointments previously booked by the support team, enabling them to follow up efficiently.
“The thing that really sets Schedule Engine Live Voice apart from your typical answering service is our integration, our industry training, and our escalation services,” says Savannah McDermott, head of customer success for Schedule Engine. “It's not just a standalone answering service. It's actually a fully integrated service that stacks right on top of your scheduler.”
Reputation Management with MarketingPro
Online reviews are vital to building a solid online presence. Google’s algorithm uses them to determine rankings, and prospects read them to decide which painting companies to hire.
However, collecting reviews isn’t enough. You must also respond to them to reap their benefits, as 88 percent of customers are likely to prefer using a business that responds to all reviews, negative or positive.
We agree that sifting through reviews and responding to each one can be time-consuming. That’s why we created Marketing Pro – Reputation, which sends review requests to customers immediately after technicians complete a job.
Once the customer responds, the platform will automatically ping you or a team member, who can reply via a centralized dashboard that consolidates reviews from multiple sources.
This will free up time for you and your employees to focus on other tasks while your online reputation remains secure.
What SEO Mistakes Should Painters Avoid?
Considering the multiple benefits of ranking high, there’s a temptation to cut corners using black-hat tactics—strategies that violate Google Search Engine’s terms of service.
Go down this route, and any short-term gains are likely to be canceled out due to the impact on your authority in the long term.
Some black-hat SEO tactics to avoid include:
Keyword stuffing: Overusing keywords or placing them in unnatural positions throughout your website can cause Google to penalize your website or remove it from SERPs entirely. It also drives visitors away.
Paid backlinks: Google’s PageRank algorithm has a set of criteria it uses to determine if a link is paid for. If it is, the algorithm automatically discounts it (that is, it won’t improve your ranking) or de-indexes the website from SERPs altogether.
Plagiarism: Copying and pasting content from other websites can hurt your ranking. That’s because, in most cases, Google prefers to promote websites with unique content to searchers.
Tools Painting Contractors Can Use to Boost Their SEO
To succeed at SEO, you need data to make the right decisions. This will help you target keywords, fulfill search intent, and rank faster.
Here are some free SEO tools you can use:
How to choose the right SEO tools for your painting business
Free SEO tools can only do so much. You may need to invest in premium SEO tools to access advanced keyword metrics such as search volume, intent, and keyword volume.
Here are the three key categories of premium SEO tools:
Local SEO tools: These are used exclusively to enhance your local SEO efforts. Some examples include BrightLocal and Whitespark.
Keyword research tools suggest extra keywords from a seed phrase and provide data on their respective search volume, historical performance, etc. They can also be used to analyze competitor websites to identify their SEO strategy and weak points you can exploit. Some examples include Detailed and SE Ranking.
Full-suite SEO tools: These combine the capabilities of local SEO and keyword research tools in one platform. Some examples include Moz, Semrush, and Ahrefs.
The tool you choose depends on your budget. Large companies can comfortably afford premium full-suite tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush, while those strapped for cash or just starting out can choose less expensive tools such as BrightLocal, Mangools, and Detailed.
Overall, you should ask yourself these questions before investing in any SEO tool:
What’s my budget like?
What are my most pressing SEO needs?
Does this tool have the features I need for my SEO campaign?
Over to You!
If you need leads, you must rank at the top of search engine results since most customers use Google to find painting companies.
It may cost a bit in the short term. However, the cost is significantly lower than you would spend on other online marketing channels, such as paid advertising and social media marketing.
If you find implementing the SEO strategies suggested above hard, consider contacting an SEO agency. And remember to use ServiceTitan to support your SEO efforts and generate results faster.
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive cloud software tool that helps painting companies automate and streamline their business processes. Over 100,000 contractors nationwide use this painters’ software to create, manage, and track their marketing efforts.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
