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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for House Painting Companies in 2023: Help Your Brand Stand Out In The Search Results (SERPs) Part 1

Does your painting business’ website show up where you want it in the Google search results for ALL potential clients?

If not, this article is for you.

We will review what SEO is, why it’s important and the steps that you can take to improve your ranking.

Unveiling the Significance of SEO: Boosting Your Painting Business Through Effective Strategies

The success of your business largely depends on how well you rank online. To achieve this goal, it’s essential to prioritize the right SEO techniques that will boost your marketing efforts and drive growth. With these strategies in place, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish!

Google processes over 5 billion searches everyday!  One out of five queries originate from mobile devices. In fact, more than half of mobile queries are “near me” searches.  For the desktop inquiries, which make up the other 80% of searches, roughly twenty percent have local intent. 

This trend highlights the importance for businesses to optimize their online presence and ensure they appear prominently when potential customers search nearby.

Its evident that local search behavior has immense potential for generating new house painting leads! By crafting a targeted campaign focused on consumers in specific areas and implementing effective marketing techniques you can enhance your visibility online. This will ultimately lead to increased chances of attracting fresh customers who may not have known about you otherwise.

Strategy 1 – Business Listings: Enhancing and Tracking Key Elements

By optimizing your Google Business Profile Listing correctly, you could potentially reach the top of organic SERPs within the local results section for your niche. 

However, don’t limit yourself to just focusing on your Google Business Profile alone when it comes to improving your local SEO campaign. Optimizing your business listings on social media sites, Yelp and other major listings is crucial for attracting customers.  

To achieve this, you will need to claim, optimize, verify, manage and sync all relevant information about your company across these platforms.  

(Need help with this? Our services will ensure that potential clients find accurate details about what you offer when they search online. Don’t miss out – let us handle the heavy lifting so you can focus on running a successful painting company! Email si@iftsdesign.com to find out more)

So, what do you need to sync across all of your listings?

Business NAP (Name / Address / Phone Number)

Make sure that your company’s name, address and phone number is written exactly the same across all listings and your website.

As an example, if your address is “123 North Smith Street,” don’t have your website say “123 N. Smith Street” and the Google Business Profile say “123 North Smith St.” Choose one version of the name/address/phone number and stick to it.

Your Painting Business’ Website

Having a link to your official website is crucial.  This gives Google and other search engines a link to follow, which gives them relevant information about your company.  It also allows customers looking at your citation to go directly to your site.

Business Hours / Description / Categories

All your listings should have the same hours, description and industry categories. If they don’t, the search engines will be confused about which is the correct and most relevant data about you. This could result in a lower result for your website in the results.

Images / Videos Of Your Painting Jobs and Team

Including high-quality images and videos can set your citation apart from others in your industry. It will maximize your visibility and sometimes, will make your citation larger than others, which catches the eye of the person browsing.

Online Reviews

While you can’t optimize your reviews, technically speaking, it is still essential to keep a close eye on them. Regularly checking up on new listings for fresh feedback is important. So is flagging any spam or inappropriate comments.

Bad review? No problem! Responding professionally when dealing with dissatisfied customers who may have had negative experiences shows that you care about the client experience and gives you a chance to fix the issue. 

This approach helps ensure that everyone has an opportunity to share their thoughts while also maintaining the integrity of online review platforms overall. By staying vigilant about these matters, painting businesses like yours are better equipped than ever before to address concerns head-on and ultimately improve customer satisfaction levels over time!

Strategy 2 – Local SEO: Attract More Clients Near You

Want to improve your local presence online? Start with your website!

Using multiple SEO strategies to optimize your website is crucial to getting more local house painting clients.

Here’s a great way to start this process:

Website URLs, Page Titles, and Meta Descriptions

When Google and other search engines crawl your site, it’s important to have these elements filled in and optimized. 

[Side Note – If your website is created in WordPress, you can use the Yoast plugin to take care of all of these]

The website URL is the website address of the page www.yoursite.com/page-name. You’ll want to be sure that the page-name element contains keywords and your local town name.

The page title is the name of the webpage that appears in the tab on your browser.  A good format for naming your webpages is “Keyword 1 – Keyword 2 | Company Name.”

The meta description is the short paragraph that appears below the website name in the search engine results.  Google does not look at this when determining page rank, but your client is going to read it. Put the most relevant information in there for them.

Contact Information and Business Hours

Just like with the citations, you want to be sure that your website clearly lists the hours and how to contact you. Make sure that this information is consistent with the citations as well.

Landing Pages

Want to attract clients from multiple areas?

Have a landing page that is optimized for each location.  However, one important thing to note – these pages cannot have the exact same text on each page. Be sure to customize it to that town or be penalized by Google.

Blog

Having a blog is a great way to improve your SEO!  

You can showcase your latest projects, highlight an employee, inform your clients and prospects about a frequently asked question, or talk about events that are happening in your town. Each one of these allows that specific blog entry to be optimized to a set of keywords that are relevant to your local area.  More about this in the next post…

To Be Continued…

Ready to get started? Implement the two SEO tactics above.  

In our next post, Strategy 4, Strategy 5 and Strategy 6 Will Be Revealed.

Helping Your Painting Business Rank in the Google 3-Pack

When you search for a local business on Google, the first three results that appear are known as the Google 3-Pack. The 3-Pack (also known as the local pack or snack pack) is displayed with a map that provides the location of each business as well as basic information about each business. The 3-Pack is above normal search results, which makes it a valuable piece of real estate for any local business that wants to reach people who are looking for something in their area.

Let’s talk about helping your painting business rank in the Google 3-pack.

In our experience, a lot of phone calls come from just showing up below the map in Google when someone is searching for a painter.

The best part about this? These calls are coming to you free of charge. So, how do you get more of these free calls?

To rank in the 3-pack, Google looks at 3 things:

1 – How close your business address is to the searcher, or proximity

2 – How prominent your business and brand are online, or prominence

3 – How related your company is what the person is looking for, or relevance

Now, you can’t do much about the first one, so you need to concentrate on the other 2.

Let’s start with prominence.

For this, Google is going to look at how many other websites link to you online.

This isn’t about the quantity of links, but the quality of the links. So, you want to be sure to have links from all of the organizations that you belong to and if possible, from all of the charities that you participate in. These are the types of high-quality backlinks that Google is looking for.

Google is also going to look at a bunch of different online directories/citations and make sure that your name, address and phone number all match what is in your Google Business Profile and on your website.

If you’ve moved locations a few times, you may want to look into a tool like Yext to help you get that all straightened out. We also offer this service at our company.

Now, let’s move onto relevancy.

It used to be that the closer your company name was as seen in your Google Business Profile to the search terms that someone put in, the more likely it was that you would show in the 3-pack. However, companies started to game this system by naming themselves things like “Pittsburgh House Painters” in their Google Profiles. Once Google became aware of this issue, they replaced looking at the business name with looking at your reviews!

So, Google now wants to see detailed reviews about your company, and they will look at the keywords used within the reviews to determine the relevancy to a person’s search term.

For example, if someone in Oklahoma City was looking for someone to paint their living room, Google would probably expect words like “interior painting”, “painters”, and “OKC” to be in the review text.

So, what does this tell you?

You need to get reviews on a regular basis to establish the relevancy that Google wants to see.

Unfortunately, these can’t just be any reviews.

They need to be high-quality reviews that mention words that Google wants to see…which will help you get more free phone calls.

So, how do you accomplish this seemingly impossible task of putting words into people’s heads? 

You’re not a magician.

Well, when you ask for a review via text or email, we have found that it’s good to provide a nice basis for them, which helps avoid writer’s block and allows you to put ideas in their heads…kinda like Inception, but without Leonardo DiCaprio.

As an example, you could send the following email:

“Mrs. Smith – 

We hope that you found our service to be extraordinary.  If that is the case, we would love for you to leave us a review.

To help you get started (and avoid writer’s block), we have found that the most impactful reviews answer these questions:

  • What work did we do for you and where are you located?
  • Was it done well?
  • Why did you pick our company?
  • What was the best thing about working with our company?
  • Would you recommend us to family and friends?

Please click here and it will take you directly to our Google Review Page: [Link]

Thank you for choosing us and we really appreciate you taking the time to leave a review.” 

By asking these questions, you help guide them to use the words and phrases that will make your reviews relevant to most searchers looking for companies like yours. In addition, they will leave reviews that look non-spammy and well thought out.

The other thing about reviews is that you need to get them regularly…and this is for a few reasons.

Reason 1 – Google wants to see recent reviews to help with relevance

Reason 2 – Prospects want to see recent reviews to help them make a decision

In fact, almost 50% of people won’t even consider a review relevant if it was written over one month ago.

So, you’ll need to create a system that helps you get reviews on a regular basis.  We have a whole video about this, which I’ll link to in the description.

As a bonus, you should respond to reviews to help increase your relevancy. In your response, it gives you a chance to mention the place you worked and what the job was. It also allows you to express your gratitude to the person that took the time to leave you a review.

So, in summation, ranking in the 3-pack requires 3 things:

  • Proximity
  • Prominence
  • Relevance

Because you can’t change the first one, be sure to concentrate on the second two to have the best profile possible and get more phone calls than your competition.

If you have any questions about the topic discussed in this article, or if you need help with ranking in the Google 3-pack, contact IFTS at 412-715-6266 or email Stacey Ivol at si@iftsdesign.com.

Important Stats About Google Business Profile For 2022

We wanted to end 2022 (and start 2023) with a ton of stats about Google Business Profile that you should keep in mind while planning your marketing for 2023.

We divided the stats into 3 Categories:

–       Fun with Numbers

–       Did You Know

–       Little Known Facts

So, without further ado… 

Fun with Numbers

  1. The number of searches containing the keywords “near me” have increased more than 200% over the last two years.
  2. 28% of searches that include the keywords “near me” result in a purchase.
  1. More than half of the interactions between customers and businesses in Google Business Profile result in a store visit.
  2. 76% of people who search for local businesses on Google Business Profile visit the business within one day to make a purchase.
  3. 88% of people who search for local businesses on Google Business Profile visit a business within one week to make a purchase.
  4. 60% of consumers contact businesses directly through Google Business Profile, using the “click to call” feature.
  1. In 2020, there was a 61% increase in calls from Google Business Profiles.
  2. 72% of local users visit a business within five miles after finding them on Google Business Profiles.
  3. There are almost 4,000 Google Business Profile categories to choose from.
  4. 84% of searches in Google Business Profile are ‘discovery searches,’ which means consumers were not looking for a specific business.
  5. Google, along with the many other platforms the tech giant owns, account for about 92% of the search engine market share in the United States.

Did You Know…

  1. 97% of consumers learn about local businesses online.
  2. 64% of consumers have used Google Business Profile to find contact information for a small business.
  3. On average, businesses listed in Google Business Profile receive 33 clicks per month.
  4. 16% of Google Business Profile listings receive more than 100 calls per month.
  5. Local businesses receive 94% of their Google Business Profile visits on weekdays.
  6. Over 5% of Google Business Profile views result in a conversion, and that number is increasing every day.

18.  Google Business Profile is completely free!

Little Known Facts

19.  Listings in Google Business Profile that include photos are twice as likely to appear as reputable to users.

  1. Using images in Google Business Profile has increased revenue for businesses by 17%.
  2. Local businesses have, on average, 11 pictures per Google Business Profile listing.
  3. Google Business Profile syncs with Google Maps to display the location of a business.
  4. Businesses can create a Google Business Profile listing even if they do not have a physical address.
  5. Complete Google Business Profile listings are seven times more likely to get clicks than those that are incomplete.
  1. With the increased usage of cell phones and smartphones, it is not surprising that Google Business Profile has more searches on mobile than desktop.
  2. 90% of searchers read reviews before making a purchase.
  3. 20% of consumers expect a response in a timely manner after leaving a review.
  4. The average Google Business Profile listing has 39 reviews.
  5. When higher-end products have reviews, the conversion rate increases by 380%. 
  6. When lower-end products have reviews, the conversion rate increases by 190%.

Need Help?

IFTS specializes in helping companies get found on Google.  For a free consultation on how we can optimize your profile, call us at 412.715.6266.