The record of a painting job: surface, prep, paint line and color

What a painting job's record adds to a project write-up

Documenting reference projects sets out the write-up every trade needs: the job, the place, the date, the scope, what was hard and the client's words, with photos and permission. A painting job needs more than that, because a fresh coat hides much of what made the job good. Two walls can look alike in a photograph the week they are finished whether the old paint was scraped back or painted over.

What tells them apart is written down: the surface and the state it was in, the prep the crew did, the products that went on, by maker and line, and the color by the maker's name. A homeowner comparing painters can hold those facts against their own house, and an answer can repeat them only where a page states them; for your own jobs, that page is yours to write. Written up this way, a job is a case study in miniature.

Google's guide to generative AI search lists a unique point of view among the attributes of helpful content, with a first-hand review based on personal experience as its example. A job your crew did, written up by the people who did it, is first-hand in that sense. A page of general painting advice is not.

The record, field by field

Each field below is a sentence or two in the write-up, not a form to fill in. The examples are placeholders for your own facts.

Open the write-up with the job, the surface, the town and the month in one sentence: "[Company] repainted a [stucco] exterior in [neighborhood], [town], in [month year], in [maker] [color name]." Lifted out alone, that sentence still names the company, the work, the place and the date, which is the test of citability.

Captions for the before, the prep and the after

Three kinds of photograph carry a painting job, and each needs a caption in visible text. The before shot shows the condition, so its caption names the surface and what was wrong with it. The prep shot shows work nobody sees afterward: scraped trim, patched plaster, masked windows. The after shot shows the finish, so its caption names the product and the color, by the maker's names.

Date every caption, and keep the before and after of the same wall together, taken from the same spot where you can. "[South wall], [month year], before: [peeling and bare wood at the sills]" gives a reader the surface, the date and the problem in one line, and a text fetch of the page gets the same line. Alt text, file names and what a fetcher receives from a gallery are covered in the article on portfolios a crawler can read, and its advice holds for a painter's photos as it stands.

One more photograph is worth planning for: the return visit. If you go back to a job after [n] years, add a dated photo and a line saying what you found, good or bad: "[Month year]: [slight fading on the south side; trim unchanged]." Say what you saw, not how long the finish will last. That is a promise for your warranty terms to set, in your own words, and not for a write-up.

The client's words, quoted with permission and kept out of the markup

Ask in writing before a client's words go on the page, and quote them as they wrote them. If you shorten a quote, show the cut, and send the client the version you mean to publish. Attribute it the way the client agreed: a first name, the town, the date, and where the words were given, a review platform named as such or a note the client sent you. Words the client never wrote, put inside quotation marks, are evidence of nothing.

Put each quote on the record of the job it describes rather than on a page of praise. A review that says the crew covered the floors and cleaned up each evening belongs beside the interior job it came from, where a reader sees the job and the words together.

Keep the quotes as text and out of review markup for the company. Google's review snippet page says a business that controls the reviews about itself is ineligible for review stars, in markup or through an embedded widget, and that ratings must come directly from users, never aggregated from other websites and never from fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews. So the company's node carries no aggregateRating and no review schema built from a platform's reviews; the platform's average stays on the platform.

Filed by kind of work and surface, never by town

The placement advice in the reference-projects article holds for a painter as it is. A painter adds one layer: file the records by kind of work and then by surface, so the stucco exteriors sit together under the exterior page and the lacquered cabinets under the cabinet page. A homeowner with a stucco house can then read three stucco jobs one after another, and so can anything that fetches the page.

The town goes in each record's text, not on a page of its own. Pages aimed at particular cities that funnel visitors to one page are one of the doorway abuse examples in Google's spam policies; the record of a job done in that town is a page that would exist even if nobody ever searched for the town. The town-by-town check in last year's jobs beside the answers shows how to read which towns your records and listings place you in.

What a painting record never says

• How long the finish will last. Report what a return visit found, with its date; any warranty is your contract's to state, in your own terms.
• That one maker's paint is better than another's. Name the products you used and leave the comparison out.
• What a product does for health or the environment. The maker's own product documents speak for the product; the record says what you used.
• How old paint was handled on a job that involved lead, mold or asbestos. If you hold a certification for that work, state it as issued, with its number and dates, and leave the method and the rules off the page.
• Where the client lives. The town or the neighborhood, never a house number, and no faces or belongings in the photos unless the client agreed.

Each of those is something a record cannot back. Everything else in it happened, which is what lets a reader check it. What the rest of a painter's site should state is on the painting contractors page, and specialty work such as lacquer or historic finishes gets a page of its own that these records can support.