In the good old days you could rely on a local advertisement in the Yellow Pages and some word of mouth to bring in new leads to your business. These days, your customers have the world at their fingertips and they can quickly do a Google search to check out your company and every competitor in the area. With so many options available it’s critical that you make a good first impression with potential customers online. For most painting contractors that first impression comes when a user searches “{insert your town here” painting contractor”.
If you think your business needs to make a better first impression on Google, follow these tips.
Pursue Reviews
People want to know that you do a good job, and one of the best ways is via social proof. What’s social proof? That’s just a fancy marketing term to show that other people have used your product or service and have given it a thumbs up. If you do a search for painting contractors in your town, you’ll usually get a 3-pack of Google listings as the first results. Consider this search result below for “painting contractor in Detroit, mi”. There isn’t much in the way of social proof here, but you’ll notice that the top listing does have a couple of reviews. As a user, this gives you more reason to explore this contractor to see what kind of feedback is available on them.
Also, having these reviews proves to Google that customers are using and liking your services which gives them more reason to rank you above your competitors who have no reviews.
Make Sure Your Google My Business Listing Has GREAT Pictures
If you haven’t set up your Google My Business account yet, you should do that ASAP. It’s what feeds Google the information it needs to display you in the map listings above. If you don’t have an account set up, go here and select “Start Now” to begin the process. Once you have an account take full advantage of adding as many high quality photos as you can. If you don’t currently have any photos of your work, start snapping some photos of your best work with a nice digital camera, or at least a cell phone with a high quality camera. When people cycle through local listings in Google they can see more than your reviews, they can see these photos. This is a chance to show off all of the different painting work you’ve done, and can help separate you from competitors who don’t have any work to show.
Offer Deals
A relatively new feature available for small businesses is Google My Business Posts. You may have seen this already when you search for a restaurant, as they’ve been some of the earliest adopters. If you do a search on your phone you’ll see these posts right beneath the call and directions buttons like the Spring Noodles deal in the picture below.
While this seems like a no brainer for restaurants, you can also use this tactic to draw more clicks to your website or get more phone calls. If you want to drum up more business create a post that offers 5% off your painting services if they mention the ad or create a link that points to a current deals page on your website. If you don’t have a current deals page, make one and update it regularly in conjunction with your posts.
How do you create a Google My Business post?
Even if you’re a complete novice with the internet it’s extremely easy. Login to your Google My Business account and on the left hand side of the page you’ll see the option for posts. Click on that and then you have a few different options for setting up your posts, but it’s really quite simple. Just follow these steps:
- Upload a photo.
- Write your post (100-300 words).
- Add a button. If you want people to go from your post to your website or your Facebook page you can add a button that reads: Learn more, Reserve, Sign up, Buy or Get offer. Select the button you want and provide the URL of the web page you want to send the user to when they click.
- Preview to make sure everything looks good and when it does…
- Publish
It’s a competitive marketplace for painting contractors these days so any opportunity to generate more business shouldn’t be overlooked. Google My Business provides you with a number of tools to help generate more leads if you just take a little time to learn how to use them and get set up properly. If you’re looking for more ways to get a leg up on your competitors, check out JobFLEX’s painting estimating software which streamlines the quoting and invoicing process for painters.
Junzi Kitchen image credit: http://searchengineland.com/google-posts-now-live-google-business-users-277710
