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For many contractors their home page is their only website landing page. When running any ads on Facebook or Google, they should use dedicated specific website landing pages for the service the ads are made for. This article will help you generate more leads. If for no other reason, it will save your prospects time surfing through your website to find what your ads mentions.

For a painting contractor, marketing your business can be a challenge is putting it mildly.  From the competition, to lead brokers like Home Advisor to knowing when to do, what kind of marketing.  A painting company has many hurdles to jump to get results from their marketing efforts.

In this article I am going to explain how to build and use city-page or services pages for your website.  What you can and should be to doing. Plus how to market them as landing pages and do it effectively.

Painting Contractor Website Landing Pages

We all know we should have a good website and do our best to get it to rank well in the search engines.  That is a given.  But, how do you go about using the above-mentioned digital marketing tool?

Creating Website Pages

Many times, when I am doing research for a client, I look at their websites and also their competitions websites.  What I see is the websites that don’t rank well are very shallow.  Meaning they only have a few pages.  Like a home page, about us page, a contact page and maybe a gallery page.

While the higher-ranking websites have more meat.  They have these same pages, yet they have more pages and posts (Blog/articles). 

Since, most painting contractors have a fairly small marketing area and a few services they offer, we need to look at each one of these as a separate page on your website. 

As an example:  This one painting contractor client has 5 main services in 10 locations. 

Painting Services

• Interior Painting
• Exterior Painting
• Deck Staining
• Cabinet Refinishing
• Epoxy Garage Floors.

Local Marketing Areas

• Millville, New Jersey
• Vineland, New Jersey
• Bridgeton, New Jersey
• Rosenhayn, New Jersey
• Malaga, New Jersey
• Newfield, New Jersey
• Fairton, New Jersey
• Laurel Lake, New Jersey
• Buena, New Jersey
• Elmer, New Jersey

In this example you should have not only a service page that explains your services, but a separate service page for [Interior Painting], then a service page for Interior Painting in Millville, Interior Painting in Vineland, etc.  Hopefully, you get the picture. You need more informational pages and location specific pages.

These are called city-pages, and they work wonders.

We have the Google Search Console data to prove it, that adding these pages increases search engine generated leads.

Your website now has in this example over 50 pages that are targeted and specific. 

When a website is built out like this, I see search volume traffic for a small contractor like many of us go from double and triple digits to four digits in a very short time. 

This one website in particular mentioned they offered a deck staining service on their service page, but they were not showing up in any search results for that search term.  After we created a website page for that service, they not only came up, but shot up in rankings for that search term.

Download on how Contractor Marketing Network builds a website structure.

Doing this takes a lot of time and research, but if you are wanting to get the best results you can from your website, this is what it takes. 

There are other benefits of making out these pages, ones that generate more leads for your company.  And who wouldn’t want more leads generated for their painting business?

Google My Business for Painting Contractors

Google My Business is in my opinion one of the most under used marketing tools a contractor has and it is free.  With your GMB, you can upload images of your work, make posts and offers you have.  You can make an event, even message with customers.  This is also the place you get your reviews. 

So how do you use your new website service pages with your Google My Business?  You post an update, with a few sentences from your service page, then link to you page with a LEARN MORE button.  This now links your GMB to your website. 

People do see it.  They do visit your website and it does increase the leads your website generates.  You are pushing traffic that has buyer intent.  You can even sweeten this by making it an offer instead of an update.  These offers can come with a coupon to boost your lead generation over the simpler update. 

 How often should you be making Google My Business posts and offers? 

Well, if you are making any posts on your GMB, Google will email you to remind you that your post is about to expire.  As they only stay up for about a week.  I have tested the frequency of posts and offers and came up with once a week.  Note: Offers stay up longer than updates, because you can put an offer time frame, as in offer ends on this date. 

Around here, Monday is the day we do all our clients Google My Business post, offers, images, plus work on Google maps and look at the data.  So, to answer how often, we suggest once a week. 

Social Media for Painting Contractors

Now a days the question isn’t should you be using social media, but how. 

When clients or prospective clients ask me about using social media, I ask them these three questions. 

1. What is the cheapest method you are using now to reach one person?
2. How fast can you produce it and have it in front of this person?
3. How targeted is this method?

With Facebook and Instagram marketing, you can have a targeted audience ad up and in the newsfeed, messenger, Instagram and marketplace in less than 30 minutes.  The bonus, is you can do it for less than two cents a website visitor.  For $10 you can be seen by 300-1000 people. 

You can’t do that with a postcard or Google Ad.

What other kind of marketing tool, other than email marketing (If you have that many on your list) can you reach that many for so little? 

None.

With the cost per click for a painting contractors keyword running between $6-15 per click, you can see how cheap social media ads can be.  Not only are they cheap, they are effective. 

When our website has its city-pages made and published, we now can drive traffic to it.  These service pages are now landing pages.  They are specific to your target market.    

In some cases, we are getting targeted traffic to the website for less than a buck a landing page view.  With a conversion rate of 3-10%, you can see where this is a lead generation method, not to overlook. 

With heatmaps we can also increase conversions of these city-pages, by reading the data.  Actually, see what people are doing and how they interact with our webpages.

Email/Newsletter Marketing for Painting Contractors

One last way we will use these city-service pages, is in our email/newsletter marketing. 

Email, even though we all say we hate getting it, is still one of the highest-return on investments a contractor can make.  With my clients we have a newsletter that goes out once a month to our segmented list as a rule. 

Yet, when we capture a new lead from one of our city-services pages we run a four-part email sequence to them.  One thanking them for viewing the article, the second email feeling out how interested they are in have a home painting service performed.  The third email, is a customer review and testimonial email to build trust and our last email is a coupon for an offer we create. 

This automated email goes out over a four-day span and yields some good results.  In both our email and newsletter driving traffic to these pages is a sure way to generate interest and get the phone to ring.

Wrapping things up.

Although there are several other ways to uses your website city-service pages, we find that these methods work the best.  Some other ways you can use the city-service page links are:

• As links from video’s
• As random posts on your social channels, not just in ads.
• As links in customer follow-up emails, after you give a prospect an estimate.
• As a quick way to comment on a social post. 

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