Time to read: 9 minutes
Here Are Six Tactics That’ll Upgrade Your Painter SEO Strategy
Whether leads or sales were down last year, or running ads on Google can be time-consuming, we know that finding the best investment for your painting company can be tough. You’re in one of the toughest niches, and without a proper SEO strategy, you may be fighting tooth and nail to stay in front of your ideal customer.
Search engine optimization is the perfect solution to your marketing challenges. Whether you are looking for SEO services for your painting company or you’ve been doing it for years yourself, it’s critical to capitalize on key fundamentals to help you improve your presence in search for the painting industry.
Before We Dive In, Start by Assessing Your Painting Company’s Current Website Performance
Tracking is everything. To ensure you can later evaluate the success of the tactics you implement, gather some baseline statistics about your website. Here are a few things to examine:
- Quality of Leads – Taking a step back to assess the quality of leads from people calling you is critical. If the volume and quality have declined or just aren’t where you want them to be, you may want to look closely at your website’s SEO health.
- Keyword Positions in Local Search – How are you currently ranking in local search? If you aren’t in the local pack, this could be an indication that you may need help. Ranking well in local search but not having a presence in the local pack can hurt your overall presence in your market for your painting services. If you aren’t already using a preferred keyword tracker, you’ll want to find one that does what you need, such as SE Ranking, Local Falcon, or even BrightLocal.
- Change in Traffic Coming From Search Engines – We would recommend identifying a specific time period (a case in point would be the last 60 days) and assessing your search engine traffic compared to the same time period last year. If it’s not up by a healthy margin, it could be a cause for concern. If you have spent a decent amount of time and/or money on a campaign, you would want to see anywhere between a 5-10% increase year over year (depending upon how active you’ve been and how wide your targeted geographic area is).
Now that you know what types of things you should be looking at, it’s time to dive into the specific tactics you should be using.
1. Claim and Complete Your Local SEO Profiles
It’s critical to make sure you’ve claimed your Google Business Profile and Bing Local Places profiles. These are the entities that Google and Bing will qualify you to enter into the local or map pack listings. Make sure to add as much information about your business as you can to complete the information that these profiles request. Completeness of your profile is something that they look at for ranking you. This includes:
- Selecting the right categories – Including categories for your business will help Google understand what your business does better, which will positively impact your rankings. It’s often seen as one of the main ranking factors when it comes to local search. As of February 2026, “Painter” remains the top category for you. However, you have the ability to add custom services to diversify your offering. Try adding residential or interior terms based on what your team provides.
- Adding photos and videos – As you or your team knock out projects, have someone on your team take photos as they’re done. These don’t need to be done by a professional, as your cell phone camera will do. And when you complete a project, with your client’s approval, add those pictures of the completed job to your project.
- Collect strong reviews – The more positive reviews you have on your profile, the more likely you are to rank. If you are starting from scratch, studies from Sterling Sky have shown that you will need at least 10 to rank well.
2. Target High-Intent Painting Keywords
Your website can only do its job if it’s showing up for people looking for your services. Which is why having a solid list of keywords you need to target in your headers, copy, and metadata is crucial. Here is a sample of terms and their respective search volumes that are frequently targeted in painting company SEO campaigns, via WordStream:
As you can see, many of these terms are localized with the “near me” identifier. This will often trigger a local pack to appear in the search. “Near me” terms are often found to be very successful but also can read awkwardly, so use them carefully. Instead, you can also replace “near me” with your city or suburb, or even test out “near you” to help it read more naturally.
Additional specific keywords, or what the industry refers to as “long-tail” keywords, can also help attract top-of-funnel searches (aka, those who are in the beginning stage of hiring a painting company or deciding if they should do it themselves). The specific types of searches usually make great topics for blog posts. Some ideas would include:
- How much does it cost to paint a house exterior?
- How long does it take to paint a house?
- What time of the year is best to paint a house?
- Why should I hire a painter to paint my house?
3. Visually Emphasize Your Phone Number on Your Site
Something unique for painting companies is that your customers tend to call rather than fill out online forms. We’ve seen this firsthand with some of the painting clients we’ve worked with. So it’s critical to make sure your phone number is prominently listed at the top of the page in both the desktop and mobile view of your website. The most critical space on a webpage is above the fold (what you view when the page first loads). Use that space wisely. Finally, make sure that the click-to-call code is in place on your website so it’s easy to contact you. Some other ways to enhance conversions include:
- Include CTA buttons and graphics – 70% of small business websites don’t have a call to action on their website. Adding CTAs that stand out and start a phone call or direct people to a form can help increase your leads.
- Create balanced webpages – Excessive copy or white space will leave your users confused or overwhelmed. Be sure to have a good ratio of images, video, graphics, maps, and text on your key pages.
Pro tip: We also recommend utilizing a call tracking program to help get more details about where people find your business. The program we recommend is CallRail. It costs $45 per month, but it’s worth every penny.
4. Be Diligent About Asking Your Customers For Reviews
Reviews are crucial for local businesses to rank in the city where they operate. Assess and change your business process to emphasize getting reviews on an ongoing basis from your customers. It will be critical to gain ranking and to keep your position in search, too. Try to automate this process as much as possible to send requests for reviews after a job is completed. You can also try to build in a follow-up email, too, as most people will need a pleasant “nudge” after you ask them for a review. Here are some additional ways you can steadily get reviews:
- After completing a job, give business cards with a QR code that leads to a review form
- Include an option for users to leave reviews via receipts or invoices
- Respond to reviews, both negative and positive, to show you are tending to all feedback
5. Keep Completed Project and Team Photos Fresh
If you rank well in search engines, people will find you for your painting services and not your company name. One of the things that you’ll want to address is the photography on your website. Unlike a lot of other contractors, whose work is sometimes unseen by the customer, you can make or break the appeal of their home.
But not only is your work important. We often see that for painting companies, photos of their actual staff are an afterthought. Make sure to add photos of your team and put a little description of each of the key members of the team, so people can see the staff. If you improve your ranking on search for terms related to your business, the people coming to your website won’t be aware of who you are. The images can be critical to show who you are and that you have a presence in the local community.
6. Add Unique FAQs to Your Service and Location Pages
Your pages are going to capture people in every phase of their purchase journey. To help cater to everyone, no matter where they fall in the sales funnel, you need to add informative content that better serves them. Questions like “How long does it take for our team to complete a project?” or “Do you paint exteriors in the winter?” are some unique questions to add, but also ensure your content can visually answer questions they will have when they’re on your site, such as “How can I request an estimate?” by having a form or phone number present.
Answering these types of questions directly in your content gives you a better chance of appearing in Google’s People Also Ask results, and it keeps visitors on your site longer by giving them the information they need without having to look elsewhere.
