Painters in 2025 understand that the best way to generate consistent business leads is through search engine optimization. The SEO landscape, though, has changed from the early days, and newer SEO strategies are placing more emphasis on quality, rather than quantity. Painting contractors and companies that want to successfully grow their businesses through SEO today need to prioritize best practices and the latest insights to be successful, particularly when up against larger companies and businesses in their area.
Your online presence plays a pivotal role in dominating with local SEO, heading to the top of Google results and other search engines, and helping more local customers find you. Search engine optimization (aka technical SEO or local SEO) helps your website get in front of your target audience while they're doing local searches for painting services.
Many painters and painting businesses are prioritizing "old school" advertising like Facebook and Google ads, radio, TV, and newspapers to try and reach customers. This is an expensive way to hopefully reach people who hopefully need your services at the exact moment you reach them. Being successful with advertising requires a lot of money, every month, for a long time. And it can play an important part of a robust marketing and content creation plan...for those who have a budget of $10,000 per month or more to spend.
And what painting business has that?!
Focusing on your search engine rankings means that people who are searching for painting companies, who actually need help now, find your company first! It's the only way to focus your energy on reaching people at the precise moment they are looking for you! It is in my 20 years of marketing the most powerful way to reach potential customers. And the best part about SEO is that anyone can use it to their advantage.
In this post, I'll walk through the most important three tips for SEO for painters 2025:
1. Conducting keyword research helps master SEO for painters 2025
Knowing the right keywords is essential to landing at the top of search engine results. And finding the right keywords requires conducting keyword research. Spending time up front on keyword research and focusing on content quality with those keywords is essential to driving more organic traffic to your site and reaching more potential clients.
When we think about content strategy - planning what to write about and include on your website - keywords help to make sure that Google can find your website when people are searching for painting contractors, painting businesses, and specific painting services. Many companies make mistakes with keywords, thinking that all traffic to their website is good traffic. This is a waste of time, money, and resources. Instead, focusing on search intent, and high-intent keywords, helps to direct the right traffic to your website: people who need painting help for their home or business!
There are a range of keyword research tools (my favorite of the many SEO tools is Ahrefs, a very reasonably priced tool) available for anyone to use each month. While using Ahrefs or another tool to conduct your keyword research, you'll notice a range of both short- and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are one or two words, things like "painting projects" or "house painting." It can be tempting to try and rank for these; however, these types of keywords do not signal high intent. They are generic painting-focused keywords, rather than the type of keywords people search for when they need help. Something like "house painting Indianapolis," or "painting companies Indianapolis Indiana" are longer-tail keywords, keywords with three or more words that provide more detail and intent. Search algorithms will connect the dots between these long-tail keywords and your properly-optimized content to a search query made by someone in your area to ensure that the right people reach your website.
Once you have a list of keywords to include on your painting website, creating user-centric content for your site is going to play a pivotal role in your successful SEO for 2025 and beyond.
2. Create a fast-loading website for your painting company that is keyword optimized
A well-organized website with ideal page speed, real value, and the right keywords hits the sweet spot for Google and for user experience. Choosing a website provider that prioritizes clean, fast-loading websites is essential (I recommend Wix, in fact, this site is built with Wix). Then, building a website with important pages full of relevant content and the right keywords helps bring it all together. Once your website is built, published, and submitted to Google, it will be crawled by Google to determine how valuable and trustworthy it is. From there, Google determines how and where your site should rank for keywords (those you have optimized for specifically, as well as others).
Internal links connecting the pages and content that make sense to be connected also help Google crawl your site and determine its relevance (think connecting a specific service page to a blog post examining more on the topic, or even a note about contacting your business linked to your contact page). Of course, you should be using your keywords in your website content to help Google identify your site as relevant to these keywords and topics. But, be careful about keyword stuffing. It can be tempting to include as many keywords, as often as possible, to entice Google to rank you on the first page. The appropriate rate of keywords in your content should be about one keyword per 200 to 250 words. You might hear SEO experts refer to your keywords and other public-facing SEO efforts as "on-page SEO" because visitors to your website literally see the work. Keyword stuffing is one dangerous way of going too far with on-page SEO.
There are other small details of on-page SEO that shouldn't be missed either. Wix is excellent because it points out exactly what you need to do on each page to "check the boxes" of SEO. In many instances, it can even generate AI overviews for you with its range of AI tools. Things like alt tags on your pages, your page title, and more.
You'd be surprised to hear, though, how many painting company websites forget to add critical information to their website. I'm talking about information like your business name, address, phone number, hours, Google Maps, customer reviews, and email address! This information is essential to build trust, and to make it as easy as possible for people to contact you.
When it comes to your website, your homepage is essential for optimization and including the right information; however, don't forget that your website is more than one page! Adding relevant, helpful pages and information to your website will help Google see you as a trusted resource and expert in your area. Creating a web page for the most important topics will help your customers find you, and will help them trust you after they visit your site!
Lastly, let's dig into off-page SEO.
3. Ongoing SEO builds on the foundation of your website to get you to the top of Google results
Conducting keyword research and building a website with content optimization are important foundational pieces of your SEO world, but ongoing SEO is what will help your company name continue to rise through Google results and stay at the top. Backlinks are the most important component of ongoing SEO that any painting company needs to prioritize. By definition, backlinks are links to your website from other, trusted sites. I like to explain Google as a popularity contest. The websites that are the most popular are also the most valuable and trustworthy, so other, trusted sites link to them. When Google sees more backlinks to your site, they know you're a valuable site. And as a result, they reward you by moving you up in search engine rankings.
Adding high-quality content like blog posts can help you generate backlinks. Link building relies on consistent outreach and content creation to help people see the value in your website. Crafting blogs that help people with their painting projects, help them fix paint problems in their home or business, or otherwise showcase your expertise help to build trust and add value, which in turn helps them generate more backlinks. Posting tips and advice from your blogs on social media also helps bring more eyes to your content, which can result in more backlinks. Anything you can do to help more people see your content and link to it is going to help you get more backlinks, and help Google's algorithm shine a favorable light on your business and its website.
What do I do first?
Many painting businesses are struggling to set aside money for marketing, and local SEO agencies or freelancer are expensive. Worse yet, they often outsource their work to cheap overseas contractors with shoddy results. I actually owned a boutique SEO agency, doing most of the work myself. I wanted to help as many small businesses as possible; however, even charging a bare minimum of $500 was too much for many small businesses to afford (and it wasn't enough for me to pay my bills). I recently walked away from my agency to care for my disabled daughter, so I instead put over 1,000 hours into building Local SEO Accelerator, a course that shows painting contractors and painting companies how to build their own websites (without knowing anything about websites or marketing), get backlinks, and everything you need to know to rank at the top of Google.
The course includes over $5,000 in bonuses designed to ensure you genuinely have everything you need. You, a spouse, a relative, an administrative assistant -- anyone -- can follow the steps in this course and get your business to the top of Google. The course contains exactly the steps I used to get my clients onto the top of Google, explained in a way that anyone can follow. You can do it yourself - and I am proud to show you how! The best part is that any business can afford the course - it's only $199, and you can use any smartphone or computer to access it. You can learn more about the course and enroll here.
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