Content Marketing for Painters & Decorators
People search by colour. Almost nobody in your trade writes for it
The search nobody in the trade is answering
A full interior decoration on a three-bed is £3,260. Exterior painting, £2,380. A kitchen refresh, £915. Wallpaper hanging, £445. A single room, £410.
Here is the gap. An enormous share of decorating-related searching is not “decorator near me”. It is colour and finish: what colour goes with grey flooring, is eggshell or satin better for woodwork, how many coats over dark paint, best colour for a north-facing room, can you paint over wallpaper, what finish for a bathroom ceiling.
Those searches are answered almost entirely by paint manufacturers and interiors magazines. Not by anybody who could come and do it.
That is unusual and it is worth exploiting, because the person searching is unambiguously about to have decorating done — they are already choosing colours. They are further along than almost any other trade’s researcher, and there is no local competition for their attention.
Why the seasonal split matters here more than anywhere
Interior work is autumn and winter, driven by Christmas, a new baby, a house move or simple impatience with a colour. Exterior work is spring and summer, practical, often overdue, frequently prompted by a survey or by a neighbour’s house being done.
Content published against the wrong season is wasted effort. A render and masonry guide going live in January reaches nobody; the same page in February, before the March rush, catches the whole run-up.
Getting that timing right is most of the difference between content that works for a decorator and content that sits there.
The ratio
A full interior is £3,260. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One interior job covers five and a half years.
And decorating spreads down streets. A page that brings one job into a road frequently brings two more from neighbours who saw the van — which makes each won enquiry worth noticeably more than its own invoice.
What we’d actually write
Colour and finish guides. Which finish for woodwork, bathrooms, kitchens, high-traffic hallways. How many coats over dark or bold colours. What primer a bare plaster wall actually needs. This is where the uncontested search volume is.
A room-by-room cost page. Single room, three-bed interior, hallway and stairs, kitchen refresh, exterior. Ranged honestly, with what moves the number — height, condition, how much filling, whether the woodwork has been neglected.
A preparation page for exterior work. This is how you justify being twice the price of the bloke with a roller. Filling, sanding, priming, what happens when it is skipped, what a proper job looks like two winters later.
A “what it’s like having decorators in” page. How long a room is out of use, dust, furniture, whether you can stay in the house. Small anxieties nobody addresses.
Wallpaper. It is £445, it photographs better than anything else you do, and the how-much-does-it-cost search is barely answered locally.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Six to ten colour and finish pages bringing steady, uncontested search traffic
- Cost pages by room type, doing the qualifying before the phone rings
- Interior content live from September, exterior preparation content from February
- Local street and area references so neighbours can find you
- Enquiries that mention the colour they have already chosen, which are the easiest jobs you will ever quote
The mistakes we see most
Writing “why choose us” instead of what people search. Nobody searches for why to choose you. They search whether eggshell or satin is better.
Ignoring the season. Interior guides in June and exterior in January is the commonest and most expensive timing error in this trade.
Not naming products. People search by paint name and finish. Naming what you used gets you found and reads as somebody who knows the difference.
Publishing nothing about preparation. It is the entire justification for your price and it is invisible in a finished photograph.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. Whichever seasonal set is next — interiors if we are heading into autumn, exterior preparation if into spring — plus the room-by-room cost page.
Weeks 5–8. The colour and finish guides, which is the uncontested volume and the fastest thing to rank for in your trade.
Weeks 9–12. The practical pages — what it is like having decorators in, wallpaper costs — and local area references added throughout.
At ninety days the measure is whether people are arriving having already chosen a colour. Those enquiries close faster and haggle less than any others you get.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Job records hold the colours, finishes and products actually used, which is where the content comes from and what keeps it specific rather than generic.
Quote templates for single rooms, full interiors and exterior work carry the real numbers, so the cost pages stay current and flag when your pricing moves.
And because decorating is genuinely cyclical — most homes want redoing every five to seven years — the customer who arrived through a colour guide can be prompted again later, from the same record.
The commercial repaint nobody writes for
Everything above is domestic, because that is where the volume is. There is a second market alongside it that behaves completely differently, and it is almost entirely unwritten for.
Letting agents and landlords repaint between tenancies. Pubs, shops, salons and offices repaint on a cycle or before a refit. Managing agents repaint communal areas and stairwells. None of those buyers care about colour trends. They care about one thing: how quickly the space can be back in use, and whether you can work around that.
Which is why the content aimed at them is a different document entirely. A void turnaround page — what a two-bed void takes, what happens if the previous tenant left it rough, how fast you can be in after the check-out. A communal areas page covering access, residents, dust and working in occupied buildings. A page on out-of-hours and weekend working for retail and hospitality, where closing for a day costs more than the decorating does.
The volumes are small in search terms and that does not matter. A single letting agent with sixty properties is a stream of repeat work that never appears in any domestic search, and it is won by looking like somebody who does this routinely rather than someone who normally paints living rooms.
Keep it separate from the colour and finish material. Different reader, different worry, different page — mixed together, each one weakens the other.
Questions decorators ask
Do colour searches really turn into work? They are the earliest reliable signal that somebody is about to decorate. They convert more slowly than a direct enquiry and there are far more of them.
How long should these pages be? The colour and finish ones, short and genuinely useful. The cost and preparation ones, properly thorough.
Should I publish prices? Ranges by room type, yes. It is the most-searched decorating question and the least-answered.
When do I write the exterior stuff? February, so it is live before the March rush rather than during it.
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