Five Stars and a Painter’s Page With No Name

The rebuild I’d priced in my head on the drive over lasted about as long as my coffee.

Dan paints houses. Two vans, one apprentice, a phone that rings on Sundays.

He called me because a friend told him his website looked old, and I’d agreed with the friend somewhere on the highway, before I had opened a single page of the thing I was driving out to criticize.

So I sat in his lot and read his Google profile first, the way I do before I meet a new client. Five stars, year after year, homeowners naming the guy who did the work and mentioning that he covered the furniture without being asked.

Nothing unusual about that in his trade. Painters average 4.9 stars across the ones I could find a rating for, and the only trade rated higher is wedding photographers, with cleaning companies a whisker below.

Then I opened the website itself. The name sitting at the top of the browser said Home.

The name a page hands over

Google keeps a name for every page it files away, and the title tag is the line it takes that name from. Search for a company and the blue words you tap came off that line, near enough word for word.

Dan’s homepage said Home. His quote page said Home. The gallery, with eleven years of work in it, said Home.

Someone filled that box in once, on an afternoon four years ago, then shut the laptop and went to lunch.

Nobody has read it since. Not Dan, not the friend who told him the site looked old, and not one of the strangers who had been landing on it all summer.

A pass on my audit means the box wasn’t empty. Dan’s wasn’t empty. It said Home.

She had three of you open

The homeowner comparing painters doesn’t do it one at a time. She opens three of you in three tabs and leaves them sitting there while she makes dinner and gets a child into the bath.

An hour later she comes back to that row of tabs, and two of them are wearing the same word.

Which one does she close first?

I’ve watched this happen over a shoulder more than once, and there is no thinking involved in it at all. It’s the flick you give a pile of junk mail while you’re still standing in the doorway.

Here’s the part that stings for your trade in particular. She didn’t arrive at those three tabs by typing anybody’s company name.

A recommendation comes with a company name attached, so the person acting on one already knows exactly what to type into her phone. A stranger comparing painting companies on a Tuesday evening has no name in her head whatsoever.

She typed the job instead, read the star ratings, and tapped through to whatever those ratings happened to be attached to.

Two scores, one trade

Painters are adored, so how does a trade like that finish near the bottom of anything?

Reputation and discovery are two separate jobs, and painting companies have quietly become excellent at the first one while nobody was paying any attention to the second.

So why pay for a website at all? I get that question on nearly every sales call in this trade, and what a painter’s stars can’t close is the whole of my answer.

Your own reviews probably read a lot like Dan’s, and I’d guess you have never once lost sleep over them.

Painting websites carry that line 98.2% of the time, and a pass rate like that ought to be the end of the argument.

It isn’t, because every trade I audit is crammed into the same narrow band. 99.1% of the sites I run the same check on hand the line over, so the ranking gets settled inside a very small space, and only solar companies and accountants leave it out more often than painters do.

Accountants have the opposite trouble with the thing you’re good at. Their stars are fine and their review counts are embarrassing, and I’d take your problem over theirs any week of the year.

Numbers that flat send me back over my own work. I ran the check twice, then pulled it a third time out of the report itself, where the explorer at the bottom rolls an entire trade into a single card the moment you pick painters in the industry menu and leave the city list alone.

The count of sites behind each rate prints underneath it, and the answer came back identical all three times.

None of which tells you whether the line on your own gallery page is any good. My crawler counts the line and stops there, with no taste, no ear, and no idea whether those words would mean anything to a woman looking for a painter.

So what does yours say? I’d bet the person who typed it couldn’t tell you either, and I’d bet nobody has had cause to ask him.

When I do ask, the same five excuses come back, ranked in my head before the owner has finished the first one.

What I sold him

Nothing.

No rebuild, no move to a different platform, same theme, same photographs, and no invoice from me for a website that didn’t need replacing.

“So the site’s fine?”

Not fine. Not broken either.

“Then what am I paying you for?”

Six sentences and an hour of your time.

The hour wasn’t the typing. The hour was getting Dan to describe, without the telephone voice he keeps for strangers, what a customer actually stands in her kitchen and asks him for.

We wrote them at his kitchen table, one page at a time, with the work named first and the towns his vans reach named second.

The gallery stopped being called Home. It started instead with the words interior and exterior painting, followed by the two towns he covers, which is close to how his own customers describe him when they ring.

You already own everything your own version of this needs. The words are in your head, and the login sits either in your pocket or with someone who owes you a phone call.

Every painting website I take on now starts with that list, before anybody opens a design tool, because the design conversation is the enjoyable one and it will eat the entire meeting if you let it.

Curious what the good ones look like? The painting sites I keep bookmarked all name the job and the place in that line, and not one of them is being clever about it.

What happened after

He texted me in June.

A woman had called about a hallway and a stairwell, and she mentioned to him that she’d found the page about interior work.

One call. I’d be lying if I sold that to you as proof of anything, and his phone still rings on the strength of the streets his crew painted last summer.

But she landed on a page that told her what it was, and the old one had never once done that for anybody.

The stars were never the problem here. A reputation is the expensive thing to build, and Dan had already built his over eleven years of covering people’s furniture and turning up on the morning he promised.

His reviews were simply handing her over to a page with no name on it.

Do this before bed

Open your website on a laptop rather than your phone, and click through four pages with your eyes on the tab at the top of the screen instead of on the page underneath.

If the words up there never change, you’ve found the same thing Dan found, and what you’ve found is a text box, not a rebuild.

Then read them out loud, in the voice you use answering the phone. Would you say those words to a woman standing in her hallway asking what a ceiling costs?

If you’d rather I looked, the audit form takes a minute, and I’ll read your page names back to you one at a time.

Four pages, tonight. I’d bet my coffee on what you find.