Follow one exterior repaint backwards.
June — the crew is on site. Roughly 55% of exterior painting projects start between May and August.
April — the contract is signed. The homeowner compared, in most cases, three estimates.
March — the decision is made. Around 48% of exterior painting decisions land between March and May.
February — the estimates get requested. And here is where the money leaks: median painting cost per lead runs about $185 in February and $193 in January, against $155 in April. One analysis of over 1,270 painting leads put January at the highest of the year.
Your leads cost the most in the months you have the least work.
January — the searching starts. Which means the page that wins this job needed to be ranking before Christmas.
What that timeline changes
Almost every painting company starts marketing when the season starts. By then the decision has been made and the estimates requested. You're arriving in April for a choice that closed in March.
The work is done in the dark months, which is exactly when it feels least justifiable.
Where you can rank, and where you can't
We ran the searches in August 2026 and they split cleanly.
"House painters near me" belongs to Yelp. Six of nine organic results were Yelp city pages. One was a Wikipedia article about a building called Painter House. Independent painting companies appeared twice.
City plus service is open. Searching cabinet painting and exterior painting in Nashville returned Nash Painting, Cumberland Painting, Harpeth Painting, Nashville Painting Professionals and The House Painters — real local operators.
Cost queries belong to publishers. Angi, HomeGuide, Housecall Pro. No local painter ranked for any cost query we ran.
So don't fight Yelp for the bare near-me term or Angi for "how much does it cost to paint a house." Build for city plus service, where the results are winnable and the buyer already knows what they want.
One thing to be straight about
SEO wins residential repaint work. It does not win new construction or commercial.
A homebuilder has never typed "painters near me." Builder and GC work is won on relationships and bids; commercial through bid lists and plan rooms. Commercial painting keywords have been measured at over three times the cost per click of residential ones, which is what a thin, contested market looks like.
If anyone sells you SEO for builder work, they haven't looked at the data.
$500 to start, then no monthly fee until we hit the agreed page-one target.
of pages we build rank on Google's first page
location pages built for a single client across 7 states
page-one placements for one client across 5 cities
growth in monthly search impressions for a Nashville client
Limitless Doors
Commercial automatic doors, five Alberta metros
- 63+ page-one placements across 5 cities
- 85%+ of 74 pages on page one
- 4,483 clicks in 12 months
PM2
MRO inventory and storeroom optimization, Orlando and Tampa
- 589 to 1,300 monthly organic visitors
- 85%+ of pages on page one within 90 days
- First inbound leads in the company's history
Haus of Sovereign
Somatic and spiritual wellness, Nashville
- 132 to 2,900 monthly impressions
- 1,903 organic clicks in 6 months
- 15.6% average click-through rate
We also built and ranked a 208-page location program for a security and surveillance company across 15 metros in 7 states, with 85%+ of pages reaching page one. That client has asked not to be named.
Common questions
Do we need separate pages for interior and exterior?
Yes, and they're on opposite calendars — exterior decisions cluster March to May with work starting in summer, interior planning peaks in February and again in June. One page covering both is optimized for neither, and it means half your content is out of season whenever someone reads it.
Is cabinet painting worth its own pages?
Nearly always. It's a $3,000–$10,000 job, specifically searched, and a different decision from a whole-house repaint. Burying it in a services list leaves your highest-ticket residential work without a page.
Why is our cost per lead rising?
Industry-wide rather than just you — median painting cost per lead has risen sharply over the past two years. It's the case for building a position rather than renting one, especially across a months-long decision window.
What do the cost guides actually say a paint job costs?
They disagree, and the gap is worth knowing. Angi's survey of 30,000+ customers puts interior painting around $2,022 average; a homeowner project survey puts interior median project spend nearer $12,000. The likely explanation is that one measures single-room jobs alongside whole-house work and the other measures committed projects. Which one your content targets should be a deliberate choice.
Where we work.
We build for local service businesses across the US and Canada, with dedicated pages in every market you cover.
Other trades we work in.
$500 to start. No monthly fees until we hit the page-one target we agree on.
The $500 one-time setup fee covers page research, page development and the website build. Monthly billing only starts once we hit the page-one target we agree on before any work begins. If we never hit it, you never pay a monthly fee.