Painter searches in Australia

Painter keywords, by job

People in marketing call these searches keywords. Keywords are just the words people type into Google, so from here we say searches. About 181,000 searches a month name the job, 37% of the whole count, and the jobs sort out the way a painter's quote book does: commercial, strata and industrial work is the biggest group, then roofs, then the inside of the house, then the outside, and a long way behind them fences and decks, kitchens and cabinets, floors and line marking, doors and trim. Every group below is the total of all the searches that name that job, with the biggest single search beside it.

Where the searches are

64% of all the searches name a place. The capital cities come first, then the regional cities, then the suburbs, 877 of them with a measurable search. Every place name was matched against the Bureau of Statistics list of Australian suburbs and localities, so "painters penrith" counts for Penrith and nowhere else. Every figure in this section counts every search that names the place, whichever group it sits in; the share bar at the top puts a search that also names a job in the job group first, which is why its place figures read lower.

By state, counting every search that names a place: New South Wales 73,900 · Victoria 66,190 · Queensland 60,460 · Western Australia 43,730 · South Australia 19,480 · Australian Capital Territory 5,320 · Tasmania 3,340 · Northern Territory 1,640. A further 43,660 sit on suburb names shared by more than one state, 490 only say Australia and 700 sit on place names with no state. Suburb searches together come to 125,820 a month, across 1,626 different searches.

"Near me" and emergency searches

"painters near me" is level with the bare word "painter" as the biggest search in the count, and the searches that say "near me" or "local" come to 52,960 a month together, about 11% of the total; Semrush lists "painters close to me" (4,400) as a search of its own beside it. The emergency, after hours and 24 hour searches come to 120 a month across 3 searches, too small to chart, so there is no emergency chart on this page: a repaint is planned and quoted, not rung through at midnight. Both are far smaller than the place searches: most people type where they are, not "near me".

The biggest "near me" searches

Semrush lists the same words in a different order as separate searches: "melbourne painters" (1,300) beside "painters melbourne", "brisbane painters" (1,000) beside "painters brisbane", "sydney painters" (880) beside "painters sydney". They are the same words. The chart shows them as Semrush lists them; across the whole count, 35,210 a month sits on a search whose words also appear, in another order, in a bigger one, which is why the key band gives both figures, 495,760 as listed and 460,550 counted once.

The dearest clicks on the page sit on the place searches: an average Semrush click estimate of $8.59 for a suburb search and $8.33 for a capital-city search, against $5.72 across the job group. Getting your Google listing into the three at the top for the "near me" and suburb searches, and getting your website found for the job searches, is SEO for painters (SEO means getting your business found on Google), and that page covers both halves.

What a click costs

If you run Google ads, you pay each time someone clicks your ad, and the price is set by an auction, so it is a range, not a number. Google's own planning tool records what advertisers have bid for the top ad spot. We published those ranges for four painter searches on 21 July 2026 and they are repeated here word for word.

painter near meA$5.64 to A$22.46

painter sydneyA$4.10 to A$14.48

painter melbourneA$1.97 to A$20.40

painter brisbaneA$3.62 to A$27.70

The search counts on this page come from Semrush and the click ranges come from Google, and the two are never mixed in one figure. Google's planning tool also counts searches, and it groups close spellings, so it puts "painter near me" at 4,400 a month where Semrush lists 2,400 (the Google Keyword Planner figure is on our Google Ads cost per click page, retrieved 21 July 2026); this page uses Semrush for every count so that every figure comes from one export, and Google only for what a click costs. Semrush's own click estimates for the job groups are in the jobs table above. Where you land inside a range is set by your bid and your ad quality; how that works is on Google Ads for tradies, and the full table of 44 searches across 15 trades is on Google Ads cost per click by trade.

How we counted

Every search count on this page comes from Semrush, a paid tool that estimates how many times a search is typed into Google in Australia each month, averaged over the past twelve months. On 8 September 2026 we exported every search Semrush lists that contains "painter", "painters", "painting" or "paintings": 123,607 different searches, 7,772,900 a month between them. "Painting" is in the pull on purpose: someone typing "roof painting sydney" or "commercial painting contractors" is looking for the same painter as someone typing "painters sydney". The exports are kept and dated.

Then we took out everything that is not a person looking to hire a painter: 6,928,470 a month across 101,119 searches, listed by reason below, and for a painter the pile is 14 times the count. Semrush lists every search that contains the word or a form of it, so most of what came back was paint: the tins, the brands, paint by numbers and paint-and-sip nights (4,132,680 a month of searches that only contain "paint", out before anything else). Then art. A "painting" is a thing on a wall far more often than a job on one, and a "painter" is Van Gogh, Caravaggio, an actor named Owen Painter and, in a search thousands of Australians make a month, Hitler. Paintings, artists, painting classes, car, nail and face painting, miniatures and painting software come to 1,969,630 a month; the famous painters and their paintings 315,540; brushes, rollers, tape and easels 193,190; questions and do-it-yourself research, "painting your cabinets" and "who is the painter of the Mona Lisa" alike, 167,630; careers, courses and licences 67,060; and things sold to the trade 64,730, a pile that also holds Van Gogh, because the rule's vehicle word "van" caught him before the art rule could.

Three more sets are shown but never counted. Searches about cost, price or a quote, 15,520 a month across 484 searches, because that was the rule we set before we started. Painting businesses searched by name, 26,840 a month, because someone typing a business name has already picked their painter: that is every search Semrush tags as a brand lookup, plus the name-shaped ones it does not tag as a hire ("{word} painting", "{word} painters", "{business} reviews"); a few of the last artists and people in the pull wash up here too, and they are not counted either way. And the searches Semrush lists but has never measured (no difficulty score, no click cost, no intent), 306,310 a month across 16,397 rows, most of them a suburb or a business name at 10 or 20 a month, because a number nobody has measured is a guess.

Everything left is the count: 495,760 a month from 5,077 searches. Each one sits in exactly one group, by this order: emergency first, then the job, then the place, then "near me", then company or services, then best or cheap, then the bare word. So "commercial painters perth" is a job search, "painters penrith" a suburb search, and "painters near me" a near-me search. The key band and the "near me" total above count every search that says those words, whichever group it sits in. Two shape rules did most of the work: a "painting" search with no painter word and no house-side word at all (no house, roof, interior, exterior, fence, render, ceiling, commercial, service or near-me word) is art or a class, not a trade; and a search shaped "painting the {surface}" with no painter, service or quote word is someone about to do it themselves.

Two limits, stated plainly. Semrush caps an export at 10,000 rows, and the word "painting" runs to more than 600,000 rows at 10 and 20 searches a month, nearly all of them never measured, so for those two bands we exported only the rows that carry a click cost (the rows the count can use, about 33,000 of 622,000), in eight slices, every one of them under the cap; the rows we could not export were never going to be counted. And a search like "richmond painting" could be someone in Richmond or a business named after it; we count it as the suburb, because that is what the words say.

KINGTRADIE is a tradie marketing company. We build websites, get businesses found on Google and run Google ads for Australian trade businesses, painters among them, and numbers like these are where we start when we plan a client's pages. The plan for a painter is laid out on SEO for painters. If a figure looks off, tell us and we will check it.