SEO for Painters & Decorators
Two seasons, two completely different sets of searches.
The searches flip halfway through the year
Roughly May to September, people search exterior. House painting, render painting, fascia and soffit painting, exterior paint costs, best time to paint outside.
Roughly October to March, they search interior. Room decoration, hallway and stairs, kitchen cupboard spraying, wallpaper hanging, cost to decorate a house.
Most decorators’ websites say the same thing all year, which means half the year they’re optimised for work nobody’s currently looking for. That’s a large, easily fixed problem.
Underneath that, your search world has a particular shape. Job values run from £410 for a single room to £3,260 for a full interior. That’s lower than most trades on this list, which means volume matters and you need a lot of searches rather than a few big ones. Fortunately there are a lot — decorating is one of the most searched domestic trades there is, because everyone eventually needs it and almost nobody knows what it should cost.
And there’s your specific competitor: “my mate can do it”. That’s not a search you lose to another decorator, it’s one you lose to a friend with a roller. Content that shows the difference is the only thing that beats it.
What that means for how you rank
Cost searches are your biggest opportunity. “Cost to paint a room”, “cost to decorate a 3 bed house”, “how much to paint the outside of a house”. Huge volume, and people genuinely have no idea. Publish ranges and you’ll win the click.
Room-type pages beat generic ones. People search “hallway and stairs decorating” and “kitchen cupboard painting”, not “decorating services”. A page each, for the rooms that actually get decorated.
Seasonal switching is a real ranking tactic. Exterior content pushed forward in spring, interior in autumn. Same site, different emphasis, timed to when people are actually looking.
Prep content sells the price difference. “What preparation should a decorator do”, “why is one quote half the price of another”. These searches come from people trying to understand a price gap, and answering them honestly wins the job.
Spraying is an underserved growth area. Kitchen cupboard spraying and UPVC spraying have real search demand and far fewer decorators competing.
What we’d actually do
Cost pages first — by room, by house size, interior and exterior. It’s the volume and it’s the search people actually make.
Then room-type pages for the jobs that get bought separately, each with photos of that room type done properly.
Then the prep and quality content, which does the job of beating the cheap quote and the mate with a roller.
Then a seasonal plan: exterior pushed from March, interior from September, with the homepage and internal linking shifting to match rather than staying static.
Then spraying, if you do it, as its own section — it’s genuinely underserved.
And the profile and reviews, which carry the local searches.
What to expect, and when
Month one to two. Profile and reviews going in, cost pages written. Cost searches tend to move relatively quickly because there’s a lot of vague content out there and a page with actual numbers stands out.
Month two to four. Room-type pages start ranking. These bring steadier, more predictable enquiries than anything else — someone searching “hallway and stairs decorating cost” is close to booking.
Month three onwards. The seasonal switch starts earning. Whichever half of the year you launched into, the other half’s content is being built and indexed ready for the flip, so the second season is always stronger than the first.
Month six to twelve. This is where a decorator’s search work compounds unusually well, because you’re accumulating pages across both seasons and both keep working year after year.
Your volume advantage is real: decorating searches are plentiful, so you should see enquiries earlier than a trade with fewer, bigger searches. The trade-off is that each one is worth less, so the programme is judged on total volume rather than on a couple of big wins.
The mistakes we see most on decorators’ SEO
One message all year. Half your content is out of season at any given moment.
No prices. In a trade where customers genuinely can’t estimate, refusing to indicate cost just means they don’t enquire.
Generic “decorating services” pages. They match nothing anyone actually types.
Nothing about prep. It’s the entire justification for your price and it’s usually invisible.
Ignoring spraying. Real demand, little competition, higher value than brushwork.
Dark photos. Decorating photographs badly without light, and bad photos rank and convert poorly. Worth doing properly once.
What’s it worth?
Average job £915 · extra jobs per month 7
£76,860 a year. Booked costs £1,188.
Every enquiry lands in Gaffer
Every job records the rooms and the date, so in four years that customer is a reminder rather than a memory — which for a trade on a three-to-five-year cycle is the cheapest work available. Follow-ups run automatically, which matters because decorating customers get three quotes and take a fortnight.
Questions decorators ask
Is search worth it at my job values?
Yes, because the volume is there. You need a lot of small wins rather than a few big ones, and decorating searches are plentiful.
Should I really publish prices?
Ranges by room. It’s one of the few trades where customers can genuinely compare, and silence loses more than a number does.
Commercial as well?
Different searches entirely — schedules, insurance, out-of-hours. Worth a separate section if you do it.
How do I beat someone charging half?
Show the prep. It’s the only argument that works and it’s the one nobody makes.
Do room-type pages not overlap with each other?
Not if they’re written properly. A hallway with stairs is a genuinely different job to a bedroom — different access, different prep, different price — so the pages end up saying different things.
How far ahead should I be thinking?
About six months. If you want interior work in January, the content wants writing in September. Most decorators think about marketing when the diary goes quiet, which is already too late to fix that quarter.
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