Getting Online Reviews for Painting Contractors

We all know how important online reviews are for painting companies. Painting contractors without social proof and reviews in places like Google My Business, Facebook, and anywhere else your brand shows up when it’s searched are going to experience extremely low conversions. Not only will you experience low conversions, they are tied directly into the algorithm for who is shown in the three-pack, in which mediums or direct three pages are served up on the first page of Google. Conversions and being found, which you can’t convert unless you’re found, are tied so often to reviews.

1. Your Online Reputation

The first thing I would tell you is that online reputation management is important, and you need to select properties that matter most. The number one area you need to be sending people to review is Google My Business, probably followed by Facebook. There are other places, and you’ll know what they are by searching.

Do not get in a situation where you’re sending tons of reviews to HomeAdvisor, tons of reviews to places where you buy leads, because they own those reviews. It only helps their web property and it helps them get in between you and your client forever. Don’t let them build any more online digital real estate to separate you from your customers than you already have. Send those reviews to platforms that are associated only with your business.

2. Use Your Contact List

Number two, you need to leverage list automation, meaning some sort of software program that allows you to, in a slow methodical, not all at once way, because it will penalize you if they show up just out of the blue, that goes through and works your list for brand new reviews, your past customers. I don’t care how old they are. You want ones that quarantine the bad reviews so that you can deal with them and make the customer happy before they ever get to a platform where they can give you that one-star review and that terrible, awful commentary.

Make sure that you’ve got that in there and make sure that you put keywords into your reviews that you want to rank for, because as you look through reviews on Google My Business in particular, you will see certain keywords that are highlighted related to painting service providers and painting services and locales, what we call geo modifiers. Those need to be in there, and you can instruct your reviewers how to do that. It’s real quick and easy.

3. Get Your Customers’ Help

Then, finally, sometimes being found online and ranking really well with reviews doesn’t have anything to do with automation, it has to do with a good old fashioned shoe leather and salesmanship. At the end of every project, I’m going to encourage you to create a TinyURL for your Google My Business page and to text message that to someone at the end of a job, when you know that they’re happy, and ask them to leave an online review immediately, and just watch them do it. Ask them, “If you could, please put this term and this term in there because it really helps us.”

I’m Brandon Lewis with Painters Academy and Painters Weekly saying I hope you can get out there and get all the leads you want, because online reputation management is important for painting contractors, and you should be managing yours. Do download the free report and the video training series on this page where we go more in-depth into review management and more in-depth to the other aspects of online lead generation that really matter for painting contractors. 

Talk to you next time.