SEO for Home Painters and Decorators

Search Engine Optimization for home painters and decorators, otherwise known as Local SEO, is an example of a way to enhance your Web site to ensure a search engine will find it and help you rank higher than local competitors. This is especially important now that the economy is improving and more people are turning to painting, decorating and otherwise remodeling their homes. According to the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI) first-quarter Remodeling Business Pulse, inquiries, requests for bids, and conversion of bids to jobs is up since last quarter, while the value of jobs sold is 0.2 percent greater than last quarter. Additionally, the survey found that 83 percent of respondents cited a need to improve their home after postponing the work. This data proves that it’s time to work on SEO for your painting and home decorating Web site, since customers are looking for you.

SEO Tips and Strategies

According to a MarketingSherpa study, 70 percent of the links search users click on are organic, meaning the company did not pay for the link placement. Time and again, research is showing that creating a SEO-friendly Web site will pay off in the long run. Be sure to be careful about unethical SEO tactics, however. Social media and blog comment spam and article marketing are sneaky SEO tactics that will get you penalized by the search engines. The short-term payoff is not worth the long-term detriment to your Web site.

SEO Tactics

So, what can a painter and home decorator do to get solid Web site placement in a search engine’s results?

1. Blog about your work: Blogging will help your Web site skyrocket, and it’s one of the best ways to conduct SEO. Your SEO will be impacted by each new page you create on your Web site, and blogging will do that for you. A HubSpot survey found that companies that blog have 434 percent more indexed pages than companies that don’t blog. At the same time, don’t rely on blogging purely to insert more keywords, indexed pages and other SEO-related reasons. Make sure your blog has something to add to the painting and home decorating conversation. Talk about do-it-yourself projects, and when to call in a professional. Position yourself as a resource and an authority in the home decorating world.
2. Paint a Picture: Take a break from painting the walls and take a picture of your work, particularly before-and-after shots. Next, upload it to your Web site. Did you know that search engines can actually read your photos? The photos definitely count towards SEO practices. Search engines can read the file names of the photos, so use that as an opportunity to be descriptive and enter keywords.
3. Engage with Social Media: You’re probably already on Facebook and Twitter, but make sure you’re using these social media sites to their full potential. Search engines can pick up on the activity of your social media page and use it to enhance your page rank in search engine results. Be sure you’re posting your new blog on your social media sites, as well as “talking” to your followers each day.
4. Hire the best SEO company. When choosing an SEO company, make sure that their marketing and writing experience is above average. Remember that you get what you pay for; some of the less expensive SEO companies outsource their content writing overseas, leaving you with a confusing, hard to read Web site. We created a video entitled: How to Choose the Best SEO Company in New York City that will help explain what SEO is and why you need it.