Reviews for Painters & Decorators
You finish something most weeks. Nobody else on this site can say that
Volume is the advantage and almost nobody uses it
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.
Look at the bottom of that list. A single room is £410 and takes a day or two. Over a year you will finish forty, fifty, sometimes more distinct pieces of work.
A builder gets twelve chances a year to ask for a review. You get one most weeks.
That is a structural advantage over every trade on this site, and the standard state of a decorator’s Google profile is eleven reviews, the newest from 2024. It is the widest gap between what is available and what is collected that we see anywhere.
What volume actually buys you
Two things, and they compound.
Recency, permanently. Because you finish work constantly, you can have a profile where the newest review is always a fortnight old. In a trade where customers compare three local names, being visibly active beats being highly rated but dormant more often than people expect.
Range. Fifty reviews a year means you can have reviews about hallways, about wallpapering, about exterior render, about working around a family with small children, about a rental turnaround done in three days. A customer searching for their specific situation finds someone who has done exactly it. Twelve reviews cannot cover that ground; fifty can.
The second one matters more than it sounds. Decorating enquiries are unusually specific — people want their hallway done, or their kitchen refreshed, not “decorating”. A profile that visibly covers their exact job converts noticeably better.
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.
But decorating runs on referral and proximity more than any trade here. A strong, current profile is what turns one job on a street into three, because the neighbour who saw the van looks you up before they ask.
What we’d actually do
Ask after every job, without exception. Including the £410 single room. Especially the £410 single room — it is your volume, and volume is your edge.
Ask two days later. Long enough for the room to be back together and for them to have lived with the colour, short enough that they still remember your name.
Vary the prompt by job type. For an interior, ask about tidiness and how the house was to live in. For an exterior, ask about preparation. For a rental turnaround, ask about the timescale. The reviews then cover the ground you want covered.
Reply with the colour. “Glad you’re pleased — that was Farrow & Ball Cornforth White in estate eggshell on the woodwork.” It reads as a professional and it puts searchable detail on your profile.
Ask about the neighbours. Not as a review, but at the same moment. Decorating spreads down a street, and the review request is the natural time to mention you are working nearby next week.
What good looks like at six months
- A request after every completed job, automatically
- Four to eight new reviews a month, which is realistic at your job volume
- Reviews covering interiors, exteriors, wallpaper and quick turnarounds separately
- A newest review that is never more than a fortnight old
- Local street and area names appearing in the reviews themselves
The mistakes we see most
Only asking after the big jobs. Your advantage is the small ones. Use it.
Asking for “a review”. Vary the prompt and you get a profile that covers every kind of work you do rather than fifty variations of “very tidy, highly recommended”.
Going quiet in January. Interior work is seasonal and the profile follows. Ask exterior customers in summer to post then, and keep something arriving all year.
Not replying. At your volume, replies are the cheapest content you will ever produce and they double the words on your profile.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–2. We turn on the automatic request after every job and split the prompt by job type, so a hallway and a render job do not produce the same sentence.
Weeks 3–6. We go back through the last year of work and ask the customers who were never asked. For a decorator this is usually forty or fifty people, and it is the fastest profile transformation available to any trade on this site.
Weeks 7–12. We get the replies running with colour and finish detail in them, and start pairing the reviews with the room-type galleries so a customer looking for their hallway finds both a photograph and a neighbour’s words.
At ninety days the target is simple: more reviews than any decorator within ten miles, and the newest one always within a fortnight.
Where this lands in Gaffer
At your job volume, remembering to ask is the thing that fails. The request fires off job completion, so it happens forty times a year without a single decision from you.
Reviews attach to the job, so a hallway that produced a good comment sits with the photographs of that hallway and can be used on the page for that work.
And because decorating is genuinely cyclical — most homes want redecorating every five to seven years — the same record can prompt a return visit later, to a customer who has already written publicly that they were pleased.
The back catalogue is the fastest win here
Before any of the above changes anything, there is a one-off gain available that is bigger than a year of new requests.
You have finished forty or fifty jobs in the last twelve months. Almost none of those customers were asked for a review, and almost all of them would have said yes at the time.
Asking them now, once, politely, with a line acknowledging that it is a while ago, typically converts at somewhere between one in five and one in three. For a decorator with eleven reviews that is a profile transformed inside a fortnight. The only thing we need from you is the customer list you already have; the asking, the wording and the chasing are ours.
It only works once, which is exactly why it is worth doing properly rather than in a hurry, and why everything after it has to be automatic.
Questions decorators ask
Is it worth asking after a single room? That is the whole strategy. Small jobs are your volume and volume is your advantage.
Two days or straight away? Two days. On the day they are moving furniture back and thinking about something else.
What if I have almost none now? Then the back-catalogue ask in weeks three to six will change your profile more than anything else we could do for you.
Do I reply to all of them? Yes. At forty a year that is one short reply a week, and it doubles the content on your profile.
Get your free website review · Bigger outfit? Talk to us