How To Do SEO For a Painting Business
For a painting business, SEO or search engine optimization is a crucial step. The process of SEO optimizes your business website for easier and more effective indexing by popular search engines. Effective SEO enables your business website to rank higher on search engines for your chosen keywords or search terms.
This ensures that people searching for those terms find your website. As a result, the elevated SERP can bring a lot of organic traffic to your website which translates to real business. People looking for painting services in your area can find your website and approach you with their projects.
Here is a step-by-step, comprehensive guide about successfully doing SEO for a painting business website.
Step 1: Perform Keyword Research for Your Painting Business
The first step is keyword research. In this crucial step, you will be pinpointing a list of main and auxiliary keywords that you want to target while optimizing your website. Keywords are, in essence, search terms that people might enter into search engines to find a painting company. To perform this research, you need to come up with likely search terms and optimize key pages of your website to rank for those terms.
There are a few tools that can help make the task easier. Paid services like Ahrefs and SEMRush have excellent keyword research tools that will take your main keyword and suggest a bunch of related keywords, along with detailed stats and information about each keyword. You can also get similar data using the free Google Keyword Planner tool.
The most important metrics to look at during keyword research are:
- Relevance: How relevant are the chosen keywords for your business? How likely potential customers to enter those as search are terms to look for a painting service?
- Difficulty: This is usually represented as a function of the CPC or Cost per Click of the keyword, the search volume, and the number of sites that already rank for a particular keyword. The higher the keyword difficulty, the more work you would have to do to optimize your website for that keyword to a meaningful degree.
- Search Volume: Search volume indicates an average number of monthly searches for that keyword. Optimizing for higher search volume keywords has the potential to bring more traffic to your website. On the flip side, high search volume keywords are also often the more difficult ones to rank for.
Along with the above tools, you can also use other tools like Google Trends and People Also Ask to find new, high-potential keywords with high relevance and low competition that you can optimize for in the long run.
Step 2: Perform On-Page SEO
Once you have identified your keywords, it is time to carry out on-page SEO or optimize the pages of your website for the best search performance. To do this, you need to arrive at a final list of keywords and create one or more web pages for each keyword.
Then, you have to populate these pages with expert content that establishes your credentials in the painting business, provides customers with rich information, and informs them in detail about your service offerings.
Ideal SEO practices instruct that your main keyword for each page should be placed in your page URL, the Title tag, and the Meta description tag of the page. In addition, you should also weave in the keyword naturally and organically in your main page heading, at least one of the sub-headings, and in the first paragraph of your content.
Your main keyword should also be included judiciously in the rest of the content so that the overall density of the main keyword in the total content is in the range of 1-2%. If you have images on the page, you can also include the main keyword in the ALT text attribute for the images, a good SEO move that is meant for better accessibility.
With that said, this is not all. Along with your main keyword, it’s also decent SEO practice to include a limited number of other keywords in the content for each page. This usually includes keywords that are closely related to your main keyword.
This also includes relevant long-tail keywords and LSI keywords, where LSI stands for Latent Semantic Index. This indicates keywords that are different from your main keyword but still semantically relevant in the context, niche, or business.
Step 3: Setup Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Next, you need to connect your business website to two essential Google services, Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Google Search Console is a direct connection between your website and Google’s search engine index, which allows you to submit sitemaps, track indexing for individual pages of your website, and diagnose problems with indexing.
On the other hand, Google Analytics provides you with powerful reporting on the performance of your website, including insight regarding site visits, breakups of visitors along different properties like geography, device, operating system, and more. Combined, these tools can give you the information you need to periodically gauge the SEO performance of your website and make necessary changes and additions to your strategy to reach your goals.
Getting your website connected to these tools is easy, with Google providing detailed instructions about the process. This is usually done at a domain level, by inserting a TXT entry in your domain records to verify site ownership. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, the process can be even simpler as you can use plugins to accomplish this.
Step 4: Include Monthly Blog Posts
Once you have the basics set up, the key is to keep publishing content. The Google search engine ranking algorithm favors authoritative sources, assigning higher ranks to websites that consistently display superior authority in their chosen domain. To facilitate this, it’s crucial to have a content plan in place for regularly writing and publishing content that cements your expertise and authority.
The best way to accomplish this is to set up a blog section on your business website. There, you can regularly publish content relevant to the field of painting, preferably using a monthly publishing schedule. Along with quality, it’s also fundamental to maintain consistency.
Formulate a plan for your content in advance, creating a list of potential blog posts and dates of publication. With each post, you can target additional keywords from your list to further optimize your website. Or, you can use new blog posts to target new, low-competition keywords that emerge from subsequent keyword research.
Step 5: Google My Business Profile for Painting Business
Next, it is time to set up a Google My Business profile. This is a listing on Google that ties your business website to a particular geographical location that can show up as an entry on Google Maps. This is crucial for attracting local customers and letting people in the area know and learn about your business and service offerings.
Setting up a Google My Business profile is easy, with all the instructions available with Google. Along with helping customers find your place of business on a map, this also allows you to rank better for local keywords. For example, if users search for terms like “best painting services” with a city name for the city you operate in, your local business profile will be shown in the Google Search results.
Instead of just a business website, your service can then appear to customers as a business listing, complete with contact information, a map entry, and a website link. This is generally known to further boost organic traffic.
Step 6: Create Backlinks for Your Painting Business Website
Along with on-page SEO, you also have to spend quality time on off-page SEO optimizations. These are SEO moves that you make not directly on your website but on other areas of the internet. One important metric Google uses for its rankings is the number of quality backlinks your website has.
Backlinks are instances where a link published elsewhere on the internet leads back to your website. The higher the authority and rank of the page that houses the backlink, the better the effect on your own rankings. A fast and easy way to get started with backlinks is to post comments on blogs and make forum postings that contain a link for your website in the content or the profile signature.
Similarly, creating profiles on certain websites that allow you to put a link in the signature can also work. You can also use link insertion and directory submission to get fast and easy backlinks.
Similarly, take a look at PDF submission directories where you can post information-rich content in the form of PDF files or presentations, replete with a link back to your website. Many websites also allow you to drop in presentations in the form of infographics, which can also be used to get more backlinks.
If you are after high-authority backlinks that can have the most impact on your SEO, consider guest posting. This involves choosing a high authority website that specializes in topics like painting or home improvement and sending them a pitch for a guest post where you can write about the subject matter as an expert.
When your guest post gets published, you also have an opportunity to talk in short about your business and include a link to your business website—a solid backlink.
Step 7: Don’t Forget Sharing Your Painting Business Website on Social Media
Social media has become an integral part of SEO and business promotion and marketing in general. To leverage this to the max, you need to create accounts for your business on the most popular social networks and create a posting schedule where you share rich content about the painting business in general and your services in particular.
This has multiple benefits. Apart from helping with SEO, this can help you reach out to customers and prospective customers directly, sharing valuable information about your business. You can advertise your service offerings, special deals, and discounts, and ask satisfied customers for feedback and testimonials.
An effective social media strategy can significantly increase the number of organic visitors to your business website, translating directly to more customers. This can also help you increase your brand awareness and create a positive perception of your business in the minds of potential customers.
With these steps, you have a complete framework for successfully doing SEO for your painting business website. As your business grows and evolves, you can tweak and fine-tune your strategies to efficiently implement those SEO practices that yield the best results according to analytics data. You can also expand your reach and authority by ranking for more relevant keywords and gathering reviews and ratings from local customers of your business.
This is a salient way to find consistent growth for your painting business using modern tools and techniques.
Along with the above tools, you can also use other tools like Google Trends and People Also Ask to find new, high-potential keywords with high relevance and low competition that you can optimize for in the long run. Another great practice is turning to an SEO Hong Kong agency where professionals will collect and find keywords for your business.