Run separate campaigns for interior painting and exterior painting. The searches, the seasonality and the average job value are completely different. Exterior work spikes in spring and summer, so you want to be able to turn the budget up and down on that one without touching your interior campaign.

If you do specialist work like wallpaper hanging, cornice painting or painting after plastering, give each its own ad group. These searches are far less competitive than ‘painter Dublin’ and the person searching already knows what they want, so they convert much faster.

Keep commercial painting separate from domestic if you target both. A business searching for ‘office painting contractors Limerick’ wants a different ad, a different landing page and is often a higher-value job than a homeowner doing up a bedroom.

Start with phrase match and exact match keywords, not broad match. Broad match on something like ‘painting’ will burn your budget on ‘car painting’, ‘nail painting’ and ‘painting by numbers kits’ before lunchtime. Use phrases like “painter and decorator Dublin” or [exterior painter Cork] to stay tight.

Include location terms in your keywords, not just your town but nearby areas and county names. People searching ‘painter Kildare’, ‘painting and decorating Naas’ or ‘house painter Newbridge’ are all real jobs. List every town in your working radius and build ad groups around them.

Bid on job-specific searches like ‘painting after plastering’, ‘fence painting’ and ‘garden wall painting’. These longer searches signal the person has a real job ready, not someone idly wondering about giving the living room a refresh themselves.

Include keywords around SEAI grant-funded external insulation work if you paint render or external wall insulation finish. Searches like ‘painting EWI render’ or ‘render painting after insulation Dublin’ are low competition and the jobs are often large.

Block DIY and tutorial searches immediately. Add negatives for ‘how to’, ‘DIY’, ‘YouTube’, ‘tutorial’, ‘tips’, ‘ideas’ and ‘myself’. The person watching a video on how to cut in skirting boards is not going to hire you.

Block product and supply searches. Add negatives for ‘paint’, ‘Dulux’, ‘Farrow and Ball’, ‘Woodie’s’, ‘B&Q’, ‘primer’, ‘roller’, ‘brush’ and ‘masking tape’ on their own. Someone typing ‘buy Dulux Brilliant White 10L’ wants a tin, not a tradesperson.

Block art and hobby terms. Add ‘artist’, ‘watercolour’, ‘acrylic paint’, ‘canvas’, ‘portrait’, ‘landscape painting’, ‘classes’, ‘course’ and ‘lessons’ as negatives. These will absolutely show up in a broad or phrase match campaign if you are not careful.

Block job seeker searches. Add negatives for ‘jobs’, ‘vacancy’, ‘salary’, ‘apprenticeship’, ‘cv’, ‘painter jobs’, ‘hire a painter career’ and similar. People looking for work in the trade are not customers.

Put your location in the headline, not just the description. ‘Painter and Decorator, Galway’ in the first headline immediately tells someone searching on their phone that you actually cover their area. Generic headlines like ‘Professional Painting Services’ get scrolled past.

Mention the specific job type in the headline that matches the ad group. If someone searched ‘exterior painter Waterford’, they should see ‘Exterior Painter, Waterford’ not a generic ad about interior and exterior work. Relevance lifts your click-through rate and lowers your cost per click.

Include a real proof point, years in the trade, a guarantee or a number of rooms completed. Something like ’15 Years Decorating Homes Across Wicklow’ or ‘Fully Insured, Neat, On Time’ is more convincing than ‘Quality Work at Competitive Prices’, which every painter writes and nobody believes.

Add a clear call to action that matches how a homeowner actually wants to get in touch. ‘Call for a Free Quote’ works better than ‘Contact Us’ because it tells them exactly what happens next. Most people ringing a painter want a price, so say that.

Use Maximise Conversions bidding once you have at least a full month of call conversion data. Before that, use Manual CPC so you can see what clicks are actually costing you and catch anything burning budget before the algorithm has enough data to make smart decisions.

Increase bids in spring, particularly March to May, when homeowners start thinking about exterior painting. This is your busiest season for large outdoor jobs. If your budget runs out by midday in April you are losing jobs to competitors who kept their ads live all day.

Run ads around the clock rather than just office hours if you can answer calls early morning and early evening. Plenty of homeowners look for a painter after they get home from work, between 6pm and 9pm. If your ads go dark at 5pm you miss that window completely.

Set up call conversion tracking so Google can see when someone clicks your ad and then calls you. Without this, Google has no idea which clicks turned into actual enquiries and its automated bidding will optimise for the wrong thing, usually clicks from people who never pick up the phone.

Set a meaningful minimum call duration as your conversion, at least 45 seconds. A two-second call is usually a wrong number or someone who hung up immediately. A 45-second call almost certainly means they spoke to you or left a voicemail about a job.

Review your search terms report every single week and add irrelevant ones as negatives. This is where you will catch things like ‘painting company jobs Ireland’, ‘spray painting car panels’ or ‘painting a bathroom ceiling myself’ that slipped through. It only takes ten minutes and it saves you real money.

Look for new keyword ideas in the search terms report, not just waste. If you keep seeing people searching ‘painting after kitchen renovation Meath’ and you are not bidding on that, add it. The report tells you exactly how people describe the job they need done, in their own words.