If you’re doing digital marketing, Google is the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

It’s biggest rival for digital ad supremacy – Meta, e.g. Facebook and Instagram – is great for e-commerce and impulse buys.

But if you’re advertising local services, there’s only one game in town: Google.

That’s because Google is where customers turn when they have a specific problem that needs to be solved.

Google is so dominant in the arena that last month the U.S. government accused them of having an illegal monopoly on search. If you’ve seen your cost per click go up these past few years, you may be feeling the effects.

Nevertheless, painting contractors have to advertise on Google in order to grow their business. If you don’t play by Google’s ever-shifting rules, you might as well be invisible.

Which is why we reached out to some of the most prominent experts on Google in the painting industry to get their views and advice on how we should go forward.

First, Chris Kiefer of Boolean Automation does a deep dive on Google Reviews. It turns out there’s more to reviews than the star rating. His column shows you how to automate the review process to get customers to include the keywords that will win on Google.

Next we have an in-depth interview with Austin Houser of Basecoat Marketing, the acknowledged expert on Google’s Local Service ads. He provides inside tips on how to optimize what could be your best ad channel for ROI.

Finally, we look into the very near future with industry technologist Morgan Knox. She astutely identifies the switch to voice search that will come with A.I. assistants, and boils it down to what it will mean for your marketing.

It may be Google’s world, but you can thrive in it.