maya SEO

Summary:

1. Set up Yelp, Angie’s, and Google Business profiles with consistent name, address, phone number, and link to your content information. After these are set up, reach out to any past clients and try to encourage them to leave reviews on each, perhaps for a future discount. These steps will help you rank in location searches, such as ‘house painter near me.’
2. Choose a specific kind of client to target your content toward, such as ‘homeowners looking to repaint in Northern Virginia,’ and exhaustively explore every question or problem they could have with your content. Use Google trends to find keywords to help your content rank higher in local searches, as well as finding popular search queries to use as headlines.
3. Whenever possible, create video versions of your higher-traffic articles and publish them to Youtube, linking them on your website. This will accelerate traffic (Youtube is the second biggest search engine and help you get backlinks from other sites, significantly increasing your domain authority (the primary function improving your rank in high-competition search results).

Loudoun County, Virginia, is the wealthiest county in the United States. Because of this, it abounds with high square-footage houses and rentals, new and used, which creates an ever-growing demand for painters—for both full-house jobs and recurring touch-ups. For this reason, the competition is high for painters in Loudoun—however, as a tech center, Loudoun homeowners and landlords are more likely to seek a painter through Google search and Yelp.

This means you can overstep the majority of competition just by doing the work to meet your prospects where they’re looking to meet you. Here are 3 ways to do that:

First, for local searches, Google prioritizes its ‘Business Profile’ registry. To set one up for your business, simply search ‘Google business profile’ and click the Google link to set up a profile. It takes only a few minutes to provide basic information. Take the most time on a ‘business description’ which represents your value as concisely as possible. Include high-quality photos of your work, list your service areas within Loudoun County (Leesburg, Sterling, Ashburn, etc.), and reach out to past clients to ask for reviews—it is worth incentivizing them if necessary. Regularly post updates and offers to keep your profile fresh.

It is extremely valuable for painters to support their local presence in searches by creating profiles on platforms like Yelp and Angie’s, especially if have work examples to show off. Be sure that every detail of your business’s name, logo, address, phone number, and website links are consistent across any kind of profile you set up.

The second focus needs to be on a specific prospect to target. This is for one simple purpose: If you’re reading this, you probably aren’t being overrun with search engine traffic, so you probably aren’t yet able to rank for the more popular, competitive keywords. This means that you have to rank for extremely specific, low competition keywords, and target them with both height and width. What does this mean? You want to go deep into one detail of a specific topic, such as ‘How to choose an house painter in Loudoun County’, and you want to cover as many details as you can think regarding that topic, such as ‘How much should it cost to paint a townhouse in Loudoun County.’ This will give you the best chance at out-ranking anyone else competing for these keywords, as investing such effort in SEO has become extremely rare.

You can use Google’s “Trends” service to analyze, compare, and find new keywords to use, keeping an eye out especially for queries to use as headlines; ‘How to paint high ceilings?’

The second step is the most important and doesn’t have any end point until traffic fills up client capacity. However, just as the first step is essential for allowing your site the traffic it needs to get going, the third step is necessary to scale that traffic so it is harder to complete with:

Your best performing pieces of content—whatever pages have the most visits—can be turned into videos and uploaded on Youtube, then embedded into the pages they’re based on (this is extremely easy, just click the ‘video’ widget on nearly every page-design tool). Making these videos should be very easy—don’t worry about too much editing or animation. Present yourself well, cover the topic in the same way you’ve already succeeded at, and add some graphics if you have time. This will introduce visitors to your face and voice, and also benefit your SEO ranking—plus, Youtube is the second biggest search engine, with more activity among individual users.

Loudoun is always building more houses and apartment complexes, and it’s a sea of opportunities for painters. Word of mouth is always king, but individual homeowners and apartment managers will be looking for specific problems they need solved, and most of your competition won’t be willing to do the work to position themselves. I don’t blame them, it’s really boring.