Painting Company Lead Generation From Your Own Website, Ads & SEO

No, a lead is a person who contacts your business wanting to buy something you sell, who is not already your customer, who did not come to you through a referral, who is inside the area you serve, who can actually be reached, and whose enquiry is backed by a call recording or a stored form submission that you and we can both open.

Read how we define and count a lead

Bring in your own. A bought lead is often sold to several painting companies at once.

Lead marketplaces often send the same request to several companies, so you race them to the same homeowner. You usually pay for the lead whether you win the job or not. A request from your own website and ad account comes to you alone. You also keep the website, the ad account and your Google reviews if you ever stop working with us.

For most painting companies, Google. People search when they're ready to get a quote.

Google Ads put you at the top of those searches within days of launch. SEO (showing up higher in Google’s regular results) and your Google Business Profile (your listing on Google Maps) take months to climb. Once they rank, they bring in requests without you paying for each click. That’s why we usually run both: ads for requests now, SEO for lower costs later.

No. We build and run your own website and marketing, and every request goes straight to you.

The website, the ad account and the requests are all yours. We never sell or pass on a request to another company. Each request is tagged with where it came from, so your referrals are never counted as ours.

The same thing you want for your own customers: to do what’s best for them.

We want to give you something that actually works, so we can be proud of it and be confident in our service offering. We wouldn’t be able to grow for so many years if we only aimed for a quick sale that leaves you hanging. Our job is to grow your business.

From real search numbers. We work it out in a keyword analysis and share it with you in a free Zoom meeting.

Google tells us how many people search for your services in your area each month. We know about how many of them click the top results. And we measure how many of your website’s visitors become leads.

For example, say 1,000 people a month search for your service in your city. About 30 in every 100 click the top result, so that’s about 300 visitors. If 10 of every 100 visitors request a quote, that’s about 30 leads a month.

We set the lead goal in your proposal from these numbers. If there aren’t enough searches in your area to reach your sales goal, you’ll know before you spend anything. Then we’ll look at other cities or services to make up the difference.

How keyword analysis works

No. We charge for the work that brings in your leads, not for the leads themselves.

We don’t take a fee for each lead or a share of your sales. Each service has its own fee, set in your proposal. What depends on results is when you pay: you pay once the work starts hitting the targets we agreed.

There’s no minimum. You can stop with 30 days’ written notice.

SEO, AIO and ads run month to month. Web design is a one-time project, so it ends when the work is done.

Web design starts with a deposit of half the price. SEO starts with a $2,000 deposit. The deposit is refunded only if we miss the target we agreed. If you cancel before we reach it, the deposit isn’t refunded.

Move your ads and website toward interior repaints, cabinet painting and commercial work before the weather turns.

Exterior painting slows down in the cold and rainy months, but interior repaints, cabinet painting and commercial jobs keep going. Before the season changes, we move your ad budget to those searches and give each kind of job its own page on your website, so the requests keep coming in when exterior work slows down.

It depends on your city and the jobs you want. We work it out in a keyword analysis and share it with you in a free Zoom meeting.

A lead’s cost comes from two things: what each click on your ad costs, and how many of the people who click become leads. Clicks cost more in a big city, where more painting companies bid on the same searches, than in a small town.

The keyword analysis shows how many people search for painters in your area each month, and what a click on those searches costs. From that, we work out what a lead should cost you, and agree a cap in writing before launch. If a lead costs more than the cap, the difference comes out of our pocket, not yours.

How keyword analysis works

We pay for your ads first and bill you every $1,000 they spend, plus a management fee, usually $100 to $300.

We pay Google or Meta for your ads, and they usually bring in their first leads within the first week. Each time they spend $1,000, we bill you for it, plus our fee for managing them. The fee depends on how much work your ads need. If your competitors keep changing their ads, we have to keep updating yours, so the fee is higher. If your leads cost more than the cap we agreed, we cover the difference.

Why pay a management fee? Good management makes every lead cheaper. After we rebuilt Duran Tree Service’s website and Google Ads, their cost per lead fell 71%. Even with our fee added, each lead cost them about 65% less than before we managed their ads.

Read Duran Tree Service’s case study

Before launch, we agree on the most a lead can cost you. If your leads cost more, the difference comes out of our pocket, not yours.

We work out the cap from two numbers. The first is what a click costs for your services, from Google’s own Keyword Planner. The second is how many of your website’s visitors become leads.

Say a click costs $10, and 10 of every 100 visitors request a quote. Then it takes 10 clicks to get 1 lead. So a lead costs 10 × $10 = $100.

Here’s a real example. An insurance broker we work with has a $103 cap. Their ads spent $4,000 and brought in 36 leads.

At the cap, 36 leads should cost 36 × $103 = $3,708. But their ads spent $4,000, which is $292 more. So we only invoiced them $3,708, plus our management fee. The other $292 came out of our own pocket.

Work out your own cost per lead

Enough to reach your lead goal. We work it out in a keyword analysis and share it with you in a free Zoom meeting.

Your ad budget is your lead goal times what a lead should cost you. Say your goal is 30 leads a month and a lead should cost $100. Then your ad budget is about 30 × $100 = $3,000 a month.

Your lead goal depends on two things. The first is demand: only so many people search for your services in your area each month, and spending more can’t bring in leads that aren’t there. The second is how many leads your team can handle. If your team can only handle 20 new leads a month, there’s no point spending money on more than that.

No. If about 15 or more of every 100 visitors already request service, your website is doing its job, and we start marketing right away.

We measure your website’s lead generation rate during the 2 to 4 weeks we track your leads for your baseline. That’s how many of every 100 visitors request service.

We only suggest optimizing it when that rate is low, because it changes what every lead costs you. If 16 of every 100 visitors request service instead of 8, each lead costs half as much for the same ad spend.

How we improve a website’s lead generation rate

We count the service requests from new visitors only, and divide by the number of new visitors.

We swap the phone number on your website for a tracking number, so every call is recorded. We listen to them and count only the quote requests from new customers, not spam or your returning clients.

We also add two questions to your website’s form: are you a new or returning client, and how did you hear about us? That way, referrals and returning clients are left out.

For 30 days after your new website launches, we track your leads. We add up the calls and form requests from new visitors and divide by the number of new visitors. If 300 new visitors bring in 45 requests, your lead generation rate is 15%.

We don’t use the conversion rate. It counts every action by every visitor, including referrals and returning clients, who contact you even when a website is poor. So it makes your website look better than it is. New visitors are the honest test: they decide from your website alone, and if they don’t like what they see, they leave.

How we define and count a lead

It starts from $1,000. The price depends on how many of your visitors we promise to turn into leads, and on what your competitors’ websites already show.

People compare a few websites before they ask for a quote, with the same questions in mind. Are you insured? Have you done jobs like mine? What happens if something goes wrong? Every question your website leaves unanswered is a reason to hire someone else. To turn more of your visitors into leads, your website has to give more proof that you’re better to hire than any competitor in your area. Every market has different competitors, so every website needs different work.

How you show the proof matters too. Nobody reads a wall of text. The more proof your website needs, the more carefully every screen has to be laid out. The goal is to make them see all the proof before they decide to leave the website.

That’s why the same result can cost very different amounts. We’ve built websites that turn 15 of every 100 visitors into leads for $1,000, for $4,000 and for $12,000. Once we finish the competitor analysis for your proposal, we will know the complexity of the project and will have a price.

You pay half the price as a deposit to start, and the other half once your optimized website hits the lead generation rate we agreed.

The lead generation rate is how many of your new visitors become leads, like 5 out of every 100. We agree in writing on the rate your optimized website has to reach. The higher that rate, the higher the price. You get the exact price in a written proposal before we start.

You can pay the second half all at once or in interest-free monthly instalments, which start only once that rate is reached.

Building it takes us about 4 weeks, plus the time you need to send your content and review the design. After launch, we track its lead generation rate for 30 days. If it falls short, we keep making changes at no charge. You don’t pay anything beyond the deposit until it gets there. If it still hasn’t reached the agreed rate 3 months after launch, you choose: let us keep going, or take your deposit back and we put your old website back.

A $2,000 deposit. Monthly billing, usually $400 to $1,000, starts once the campaign brings in half your lead goal.

SEO and AIO get your business found on Google and in AI search answers. They take months to build up. Your proposal sets a monthly lead goal. Until the campaign brings in half of it, you pay nothing beyond the deposit.

The monthly fee depends on how much work it takes to outrank the 3 businesses that show up highest for the searches you want. We lock it in once we finish the market research and the competitor analysis.

We aim to get you into Google’s top 3 within 6 months. If the campaign hasn’t reached half your goal by then, you choose: let us keep going, or take your $2,000 back.