Local Visibility for Painters & Decorators
Reviews are how you beat “my mate can do it”.
Your competitor isn’t another decorator
Every trade has competition. Yours has something different: a friend of the customer who owns a roller and has offered to do it for a case of beer.
That’s the job the map pack does for you. Not out-ranking the decorator down the road — demonstrating that there’s a difference between a professional job and a favour. Thirty recent reviews from people in the same town saying the work was tidy, on time and better than they expected does that in a way no amount of website copy can.
Underneath that, decorating has steady, year-round local search. It doesn’t spike like roofing or collapse like landscaping. It rotates — interior in the colder months, exterior in the warmer ones — which means your profile can work all year if it’s set up to cover both.
Job values are modest, from £410 for a room to £3,260 for a full interior. That makes free channels disproportionately valuable to you, because paid channels have to work hard to justify themselves at those numbers.
What actually decides who ranks
Proximity and completeness, as ever.
Reviews, and specifically what they say. Reviews mentioning tidiness, timekeeping and prep do more for you than star ratings alone, because they answer the exact objections your customers have.
Categories. “Painter”, “Painting contractor”, “Wallpaper installer”, plus spraying if you do it. Several distinct searches.
Services listed separately. Interior, exterior, wallpapering, kitchen cupboard spraying, commercial. Each one is a search.
Photos, seasonally rotated. Exterior work forward in summer, interiors in winter — the same trick as the website, applied to the profile.
Activity. Regular photos and prompt replies signal a working business.
What we’d actually do
Full profile rebuild with the complete category set and every service listed, because most decorators are listed for a fraction of what they actually do.
Automatic review requests after every job — and we’d shape the prompt to encourage mention of the things that matter: tidiness, prep, sticking to the quote. Those specifics are what beat the cheap alternative.
A photo habit that rotates with the season, so the profile shows exterior work in June and interiors in December.
Spraying listed prominently if you do it, because demand is real and few decorators are listed for it.
Consistent details everywhere, and supporting content on the site.
Then a steady rhythm rather than a burst — decorating is a year-round trade and the profile should never look dormant.
What good looks like for a decorator
Reviews: three to five a month. You do more jobs than most trades on this list and they’re shorter, so your review rate should be higher than a builder’s or a roofer’s. A decorator doing two or three jobs a week has no excuse for a profile with eight reviews on it.
What the reviews say matters as much as how many. You want tidiness, timekeeping, prep and “stuck to the quote” appearing regularly. Those four words are what beat the mate with a roller, and the request prompt can steer people towards mentioning them.
Photos: rotate seasonally. Exteriors forward May to September, interiors October to March. Monthly additions are plenty.
Every service listed — interior, exterior, wallpapering, spraying, commercial. Spraying especially, because demand is real and almost nobody is listed for it.
Position: top three locally, steadily, all year. Your demand doesn’t spike, so there’s no rush window to hit — but equally there’s no quiet period where you can afford to let it slide.
Watch enquiry volume rather than job size. Your trade wins on a lot of modest jobs rather than a few big ones, so the profile is doing its job if the phone rings steadily across both seasons rather than feast-and-famine.
If January is still quiet after a year of this, the problem is seasonal messaging, not visibility.
The mistakes we see most
Not asking for reviews. In the one trade where reviews directly counter your main competitor, most decorators have a handful.
Listed only as “Painter”. Leaves wallpapering, spraying and commercial searches uncontested.
No exterior photos in summer, no interiors in winter. The profile shows the wrong season half the year.
Dark, phone-shot photos. Decorating needs light to photograph well and it’s worth doing properly once.
Nothing about prep. It’s your entire price justification and it’s absent from most profiles.
No commercial services listed if you do commercial work — it’s a completely separate search with less competition.
What’s it worth?
Average job £915 · extra jobs per month 7
£76,860 a year, from an asset that costs nothing.
Every job feeds it through Gaffer
Review requests go out automatically after each job, which is the only way it happens consistently in a trade this busy. Every job records the rooms and date, so the same system that builds your profile also tells you when that customer is due again in three to five years.
Questions decorators ask
Will reviews really beat someone doing it cheap?
They’re the only thing that reliably does. A customer weighing you against a favour needs evidence that the favour will look like a favour.
How do I get reviews to mention prep?
The request prompts for it. Most people write about whatever they’re asked about.
Should commercial be on the same profile?
Listed as a service, yes. It’s a distinct search with much less competition.
How often should I add photos?
Monthly is plenty. Consistency matters more than volume for your trade.
Is it worth listing spraying separately?
Definitely. Kitchen cupboard and UPVC spraying has real demand, it’s higher value than brushwork, and hardly any decorators are listed for it.
What if most of my work is for letting agents?
Then say so on the profile and collect reviews from them. Agent work is steady, repeatable and far less price-sensitive than domestic — and it’s worth building the profile around if that’s where you’re heading.
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