As a successful painting company, an opportunity might present itself to expand your business to other locations. When this happens you need to consider how this change impacts your marketing strategy.
Here we will review various marketing strategies you can implement today to help you dominate the local markets for your multi-location painting business.
How do painting franchises market their businesses?
It’s a logical place to start. Whether you’re expanding into other markets or opening up your business to franchising, your marketing strategy needs to change. Your website, Google Business Profile, social media pages, and your online listings all need to be updated to reflect that you are no longer a single-location painting business.
So where do you start? Let’s jump in!
Local SEO for Multiple-Location Painting Businesses
While having multiple locations does require a larger marketing investment, each painting business location should still leverage local SEO as it’s primary marketing strategy. Why? Because whether you have three or 300 locations, your customers still search Google based on their own location. When you change your strategy to address each location independently, you can greatly increase traffic to your website and increase the quantity of leads for each location. How do we do this? Using location pages!
How to Leverage Location Pages to Boost Local SEO
You can optimize your online presence as a multiple-location painting business by creating location pages. Instead of having a single generic homepage, each location should have its own separate homepage with unique, location-specific content. This is the most important SEO strategy for your multi-location painting business as it ensures one website will rank for the same terms various geographic areas.
For even better results we recommend creating dedicated service pages for each location. This will help boost visibility for each individual service in search engines. We have an example sitemap detailing the structure of a well-optimized multi-location painting business website below:
- Primary Service Area Homepage (General Homepage)
- Locations
- Link to General Homepage (Selected)
- Link to Homepage for 2nd Location
- Link to Homepage for 3rd Location
- Service #1
- Service #2
- Service #3
- Locations
- Homepage for 2nd Location
- Locations
- Link to General Homepage
- Link to Homepage for 2nd Location (Selected)
- Link to Homepage for 3rd Location
- Service #1 for Location #2
- Service #2 for Location #2
- Service #3 for Location #2
- Locations
- Homepage for 3rd Location
- Locations
- Link to General Homepage
- Link to Homepage for 2nd Location
- Link to Homepage for 3rd Location (Selected)
- Service #1 for Location #3
- Service #2 for Location #3
- Service #3 for Location #3
- Locations
Click here for an example of a multi-location painting business website with a well-optimized site structure.
Optimize your Location Pages
To optimize your location pages use strategically placed target keywords throughout your content:
- Include geo-targeted keywords on your location pages
- Update your address and phone number for each location page
- Use location-specific internal links
- Optimize content for each location looking for opportunities to not just insert geo-targeted keywords, but location-specific blog posts to help boost domain authority within each local market.
Make sure that regardless of the location, your pages consistently deliver your brand message and highlight your unique selling points. Your location pages should also have location-specific calls to action and a contact form on every page.
Create High-Converting Location Landing Pages
Location pages can be used to boost your paid search campaigns or social media posts, but they must be designed and optimized to convert. The best way to achieve this is by including an easy-to-use estimate request form on every page. We also recommend providing other forms of contact such as a prominently featured phone number and a link to send an email.
Make sure your call to action buttons reflects the desired action. For instance, on your estimate request form instead of using a button with the text “Submit” try “Request Your Free Estimate”. Your page layout should also reflect your brand and the painting services you provide with colorful high-quality images, intriguing headings, and informative videos if applicable. The goal is to establish yourself as the local authority and keep people focused on the task you want them to complete – contacting your business.
Optimize your Google Business Profile
We already wrote an indepth article about this topic, but there is a slight variation for multi-location painting businesses that needs to be accounted for. Since each location will need a separate Google Business Profile it’s important that you use DBAs or register each location under a different business name.
For instance, if your painting business name was Associated Painting and you served both Grants Pass, Oregon and Rock Island, Illinois you may consider registering your businesses as “Associated Painting of Grants Pass” and “Associated Painting of Rock Island, Illinois.” This way when you claim your Google Business Profiles it will be understood that these are two different locations for the same business.
(Image Credit: Google)
Research and monitor your progress
Even after you’re ranking on page #1 of Google your Local SEO efforts are never quite “finished.” Why? Because Google changes it’s algorithm multiple times a day. So what works well to rank your site today may not work tomorrow. Optimizing your locations for search engines is an ongoing strategy that requires keyword research and constant monitoring. We recommend investing in a tool such as Ahrefs to check for errors and monitor each location and their target keywords independently.
Use SERPs for keyword research
Search engine results pages or “SERPs” are the pages search engines provide following a search query. SERPs are important as they provide clues about your competition, as well as what a search engine perceives to be user intent based on the keywords they use. Google prioritizes websites that provide information about the search. While informational pages may not generate business directly, they boost traffic to your website as a whole which will indirectly generate painting leads for each location.
We recommend searching for your target terms in each location to identify who is ranking well for reach term. You can use a tool like I Search From to search Google from another location you’re not physically located in.
If the organic results on a page is dominated by “big box” shared lead sites like HomeAdvisor and Angi then you might want to consider focusing on another term to start with. Outranking authoritative domains such as these is difficult without first establishing yourself for terms that are easier to rank for.
Once you identify the terms you can rank for, build a list of the websites that rank above of you. Use this list to generate an outline for the page that you need to create. Remember, Google ranks pages, not websites. So to rank #1 for the term “house painter” you’ll want to average the word count on every page ranking on page #1 and count up how many times “house painter” is used on each of those pages. Then you just need to write a page that is slightly longer than the average and includes slightly more instances of your target term. In time Google will determine that your page is has more relevant content, thus ranking you higher on the SERPs.
Conclusion
Whether you have a painting business franchise or are just looking to expand to another market, it’s critical that you consider how each location is going to generate business online. If you’re looking for a hands-off approach to optimize your painting business website for search engines, reach out to the team at Base Coat Marketing.