Painters Give Me Five Excuses for One Unread Line

What would you charge a customer to type one sentence?

Nobody has ever paid me for one, and yet I’ve spent an entire hour on the phone with a painter arguing about a single line of text, and I’ve watched his whole trade get ranked on whether that line exists.

The line is the title tag, and every page on your website is supposed to have its own.

Take it away and nothing you can see changes. The photographs load, the phone number sits where it always sat, and the page sells about as well as it did yesterday.

The damage turns up somewhere you never look. Google refuses to print a blank space, so it assembles a name out of whatever text it can grab off the page, and the words above your listing end up being nobody’s decision at all.

I’ve seen a painting company listed under the word Untitled. I’ve seen another one listed under the name of the theme its website was built on.

Neither owner had any idea. Both had paid for their website, both were reasonably happy with it, and both were being introduced to strangers under a word they had never once seen.

Most painters aren’t in that position. 98.2% of painting websites carry the line in the audit I ran, so what follows is mostly not about an empty box.

It’s about a sentence that got typed once and hasn’t been read by a human being since.

1) “My web guy handles that”

Verdict: holds up.

Every website builder I’ve worked inside fills that field on its own, whether or not anyone asks it to, which is why nearly every trade is bunched at the very top. 99.1% of everything I put through that check comes back with one, and a group packed that tight leaves almost no daylight between one trade and the next.

I used to think the trades at the top of a check like that were the ones spending most on their websites, until assisted living homes took first place on this line without paying anybody extra.

It stops holding up on the day someone adds a page by hand, or copies an existing page to make a new one, which is how the same eight words end up sitting on six different pages.

Your web guy handled it. He handled it in one afternoon, four years ago, for a business that has changed since.

Do you still do the work you did back then, in the same towns, for the same kind of customer? I’ve asked that on plenty of calls and the answer is almost never a clean yes.

2) “It’s got my company name on it”

Verdict: half right.

On the homepage, fine. Someone typing your company name into a phone wants to see your company name looking back at her.

On the page about cabinet work, she typed something else entirely, and your company name is the one phrase she definitely did not type.

I get why this excuse persists. Your name is the thing you’re proudest of, and it took a decade of finishing jobs properly to make it worth anything at all.

She just doesn’t know that yet.

Which of your pages does a stranger land on first? Ask that, then ask whether the name on it would mean a single thing to a homeowner who has never heard of you.

3) “Nobody reads that line”

Verdict: no.

She reads it. She doesn’t know she read it, because to her it isn’t a setting in a box somewhere, it’s the blue words she tapped on with her thumb.

Watch someone choose a tradesperson on a phone sometime, over their shoulder, without saying anything. It goes quickly, and that line is most of what they take in before deciding.

The lines she skipped over got the same second of attention as the one she chose. She just answered a question about them faster.

I’ve sat beside people while they did this, and I have never seen one of them read past that first line before ruling a company out. It bothered me the first few times.

4) “All my work is word of mouth”

Verdict: holds up better than I’d like it to.

A neighbor who has been given your name types your name, and she’d find you if every page on your website were called Untitled, which is why a trade sitting 45 of 47 on that line can still keep two vans busy all year.

I have yet to meet a painter whose business fell over because of that ranking, and I’ve spent a fair while looking for one.

Word of mouth has an edge, though. Past that edge sits everybody who wasn’t told about you, and those people typed the job rather than the name.

How many of last year’s customers came from someone who already knew you? That number is your answer on this one, and only you have it.

5) “I’ll do it when I redo the site”

Verdict: no, and of the five this one does the most damage.

The rebuild is next spring, or the spring after that, or whenever the quiet month you keep promising yourself finally arrives.

The line is a text box in software you already own, and whoever holds your login can change every one of them while the kettle boils.

I’ve watched owners carry this particular job around for three years, then finish the whole website in ninety minutes on a Sunday once someone finally put the list of pages in front of them.

The rebuild you’re waiting for will inherit whatever wording is on the site today, by the way. Nobody rewrites those lines during a redesign unless a person is specifically paid to sit down and write them.

Redesigns take things off a website too. I deleted a therapist’s markup during one and took months to work out what I’d done.

Every painting website I take on gets those lines written before a single design decision is made, and it remains the cheapest hour in the entire build. They sit on the same list I work through before anything goes live, beside the padlock and the redirects.

The thing none of the five will say

Nobody owns that line.

The builder typed it and moved on to the next customer. You’ve never read it, and I don’t blame you, because it lives in a place you have no reason to visit.

The agency that emails you about it every quarter has never opened your website either, and the email is written to make one small field sound like a diagnosis.

Meanwhile a trade carrying the second best star rating of any trade I grade is being introduced to strangers by eight words another stranger typed in a hurry.

I spent an afternoon closing that gap with a painter called Dan, and six sentences did the whole website.

Odd way to run the front door of a business that people otherwise speak about so warmly.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes, send me the address and I’ll send back a list of what every page on it is called.

Otherwise I’ll leave you with the one question I can’t answer from out here.

Who at your company owns that sentence? Not who typed it four years ago. Who owns it tonight?