Websites for painters.

If you are a painting contractor looking to start a website there are two preliminary questions that is best to ask before spending a lot of money on your new idea.

1. Do you live in the large to medium size city with enough potential customers looking for a painter on line?
If the city you live in is a small one, there may be other better ways to get customers: local newspaper, flyers, direct mail. If the city is too small, there may not be enough people looking on Internet for a house painter. With very little search volume related to painting it would be very easy to create a website that comes up high in search results, as there would be very few competitors going after the same keywords. However, if you are going to rely exclusively on your website to get customers , you may find out that your website will not bring you enough customers to operate the business, and you are going to need additional off line ways to market you house painting business.
Not to discourage anyone living in a small city from creating a website though. It may be small now but in 5-10 years it may grow in size and population and with the new generation of kids, using Internet to find every little piece of information, it may become very popular. Just in the short run not to expect too many phone calls from Internet marketing for any smaller city.

2. Do you have minimum business requirements for the state that you live in covered?
Under this category will fall things such as: liability insurance, business name officially registered with the state, painting contractors license. If you live in the state (take the state of California for example) where it is mandatory to have a contractor's license and you do not have one, even if the customer can find your phone number on line, you will unlikely to get the contract for the job, after spending your money on marketing, and time on driving to the house to place a painting bid, as there are plenty of licensed contractors who price their jobs very low. What is the benefit for the customer of getting unlicensed or uninsured painter if they can get a licensed one, for the same or may be almost the same price? So it is important to take care of all the business related paperwork first, before spending any money on promoting your business (on line or otherwise).

Now, you have all licensing requirements covered, live in the large enough city and have money to spend. What is next?

The first step of Internet marketing is to find out what keywords to target, and there are so many. If you do general house painting, such as painting exterior and interior of homes, here is the list of keywords that would be related to what customers are possibly typing in the search engines: painting, house painting, painters, house painter(s), painting contractor(s), painting services, painting company, and also many combinations of the above, plus a bunch of many other low volume keywords. It is not going to be easy to rank high for every single keyword so it is very important to choose your targeted keywords wisely. If you are doing business with an experienced Internet marketer, he will know the best combination of the keywords and will be able to structure your marketing campaign.

Go after very competitive keywords, or of a moderate competition? (Low competition means that very few people using those keywords looking for the service or product).

It all depends on how experienced the person who promotes your website and how much money you can afford to spend. It is best to have a combination of both. The goal should be try to rank high for most competitive keywords, at the same time not forgetting the low volume keywords that are easy to rank high for, without spending a lot of money and effort.

What defines a website as a successful one?
It is all about bottom line. How many relevant visitors it gets on a monthly basis will determine it success. I underlined relevant because the website can get a lot of traffic from another city or even country. People will click on your link, check out your website without possibility of ever becoming customers. It has to be visitors from the same city looking for the type of services that you are offering.

What motivates people to call you for an estimate?
It can be a lot of things: original video embedded on your site, pictures of the projects that you have completed, original content. There is no rules on what will work very well, as long as it is something someone wants.
I can only tell with certainty what does not work. Something that is very generic, that sounds similar to what you get when you go to a dealership to buy a used car. Let me give an example of the content not to put on a website:
"Our painting service has been around for 15 years and our painters are trained on all of the latest techniques and technology. We strive to exceed your expectations with our superior customer service skills. Our company believes that communication is the key to a successful working relationship with each and every client. Cleanliness and details are our biggest priority, we want you to be 100% satisfied. We will meat or beat any written estimate by $100. Mention you found us at ... website and get $200 off our regular price."
The Internet has been around for years and there are a lot of savvy buyers out there, who know how to navigate there way around the Internet sites, and still, there are plenty of companies out there who put nothing but a sales pitch on there website, and expect phone calls from potential customers.
There will be customers that will call you no matter what you put on your website, just as long as you come up high in search results, and there will be customers that will not like your website, in spite of all the time you spent on design and content. The goal for successful website marketing campaign is to try and get as many customers, in between those two extremes, as possible.

Some ideas on website content that may, or may not work.

Show the visitor the type of tools you are using.
Take a separate picture of all the tools that you use, including your truck/van, sprayer, power washer etc, and describe each one. For example, under the picture of power washer you can put something like this: "our 3,500 psi power washer is used for all our residential projects and it also has enough pressure to handle some of the medium size commercial projects". Many customers do not care what type of power washer a painter uses, as long as he is capable of doing a good job. But there are small percent of the customers who probably would be curious to learn the exact specifications of your power washer, and by displaying this information on your website you may get an extra phone call.
Get into little details.
Mention all the sizes of spraying tips that you are using for each surface. Ask an average painter:"What size of spaying tip you are using for the doors?" Some may not even be able to answer that. If you are the type of a painting contractor that knows that kind of details, and able to display it on your website, in an interesting to read format, that is an extra bonus to you, that could possibly result in extra phone calls.
Describe the process of painting.
Yes, almost on every painter website you can see the process of how they paint a house, but describe it one more time, in your own words and in details. Do not assume that the customer knows the process of painting a house. Many of them do not. For one customer it is the first house they bought. For another it is the first time painting a house since they moved to another state, and they do not know what is customary way of doing things in the new for them area.

Final thoughts.
As I mentioned earlier that is no one standard or strategy, that is going to make a website a success. Just like in a painting business, there is usually more that one way to do the job correctly. It is all comes down to two things: the way you think your website should look (the design, the content) and the experience of the Internet marketer who will promote your message and make it easy for potential customers to find your website.