Landscaping SEO The Key to Attracting High Quality Leads for Landscapers
A majority of internet users start browsing online through a search engine. This is the case whether they intend to look for information or entertain themselves. So, it would be no surprise if a significant part of your potential customers uses a search engine to find a landscape or lawn care service for their property.
This is why search engine optimization, or SEO, is an invaluable marketing tactic in business. It gives your business the visibility to attract new leads that are prepared to hire you for your landscaping and lawn care. Moreover, landscaping SEO is one of the most cost-effective methods of marketing your business since it complements other marketing strategies and you are not paying for each lead generated.
What is Landscaping SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of maximizing factors evaluated by search engines to rank the landscaping business’s website at the top of the target audience’s search engine results page. Activities involved in landscaper SEO include the following:
- Identifying keywords that have the potential for attracting search engine traffic
- Creating and optimizing high-quality content for your target market and search engine algorithms
- Using relevant and high-quality links for the content
- Optimizing the website’s user experience and navigation
- Designing an organized and efficient website architecture
For most websites, these factors will do. But, there are more considerations involved for a landscaping business concerned with marketing its services in its area. This is where local SEO can help.
What Makes Local SEO Different from General SEO
Local SEO is still concerned with having a website achieve the top of its audience’s search engine results page. But, unlike general SEO, it aims to increase a specific segment of search engine traffic – the keywords searched in a specific location. These are the service areas where you can provide your landscaping services to customers. For example, your potential customers are searching “landscaping contractors near me” and “landscapers in ABC city.”
Aside from the search terms targeted, search engines also analyze more information in ranking a website and suggesting a business to its users. Here is the following information search engines use to evaluate a business or a website:
Location of the search engine user
NAP citations (Name, address, and phone number of your business)
NAP citations (Name, address, and phone number of your business)
Keywords in your Google My Business profile
User sentiment on your online reviews
Number of check-ins at that location
Social media shares
Business rating on Google and other search engine maps
Why Your Business Needs Landscaper SEO Marketing
It’s difficult to appreciate SEO marketing if you don’t know what you are missing without it. Here are some signs that your business needs to add SEO to its digital marketing strategy:
Why You Should Pay Special Attention to Local SEO
SEO will help your website rank at the top of your target market’s search results. However, even if you use keywords specifying your location or service area, you are probably not making full use of the potential that search engines provide to local businesses.
Search engines place local businesses relevant to the users’ search above the highest-ranking page in their organic search results. Getting your business listed on this part of the search result will ensure that you can attract leads and inquiries from your local area.
Unfortunately, it takes more than an optimized website and valuable content to have your business listed on the local business search results. You will have to set up a business profile with the search engine and optimize it to get your business ranked over your competitors. This is where local SEO becomes invaluable for your landscaping and lawn care business.
What are the Benefits of Landscaper SEO for Your Business
1. High rate of lead generation
People use search engines to look for information they need. Those who search for the terms your website targets will more likely than not need the landscaping services you offer through your website. Because of this, you are attracting people who are already looking for a landscaper or are considering a landscaping job for their property.
Of course, this requires your page to, at least, rank on the first page of the search engine results. This can seem improbable for a small business competing against every landscaper’s website. But, if you go closer to reality and only consider your actual competition in your service area, ranking on top of your target market’s search results is possible.
2. Attracts people who are more receptive to your brand message
There is a term in SEO known as search intent. It is an individual’s purpose for searching information in the search engine. There are four types of search intent – informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial. As a landscaping business, your ideal customers are searching for transactional or commercial information about their landscaping problems or the solution you offer. Examples of these keywords are “best landscapers near me”, “hire landscaping in ABC city”, and “landscaping estimate for ABC city property”.
Optimizing your website for these commercial and transactional search keywords will bring those who do not need convincing they need landscaping services for their property. Some might need some convincing that you are the right choice but well-written and compelling website copy can easily convince them to take your offer.
3. A long-term solution for your lead generation
Generating leads with pay-per-click advertising, promotional offers, or online events is effective. But, you should only use these in the short-term since they can easily get expensive if done too frequently or for too long. This is why your business must have a long-term method for generating leads even if your advertising and promotions are working great.
This is what SEO can provide to your landscaping business. You do not have to pay for every click done on an ad or spend on a promotional offer. Sure, you will have to create valuable content targeting specific key phrases for your content or landing page. But, once you have these done, you do not have to run an advertising campaign or promote these to your audience to bring visitors to read your content or copy.
4. Improve the user experience of your website
Aside from researching and using relevant keywords for your content, SEO also involves improving the technical aspects of your website that affect user experience. These aspects include page loading speed, website security, and navigation features. Since these are important for the average website user, search engines factor these into their algorithms when ranking the various websites they index.
However, improving how people experience your website is not just for the sake of SEO. It affects how well potential customers can browse your website. If they can easily browse your pages and go through your content, they are more likely to go through the pages that interest them. By consuming your content, they get to know more about what you offer and the benefits of hiring you as their landscaper. As a result, they are more likely to act upon what you offer in your call to action.
5. Inspires trust from your customers
Searching a business on Google and other search engines is one of the ways today’s customers see if it’s trustworthy. Your potential customers will want to see your business’ website or, at least, your business information on Google and other search engines’ business listings.
Unfortunately, just because you have a website does not mean it will show up on their search results. Search engines need to crawl and index your website to rank and include it in their users’ search results. This is where SEO for landscape business websites becomes crucial since it enables search engines to crawl and index your site. =
Aside from seeing your website on their search results, users also look for specific characteristics from your website to determine whether your business is trustworthy or not. People will want to see valuable and actionable content so they can determine the value you can provide to them. They also expect a secure site to ensure their information and activity are not compromised. All of these are taken care of with a search-engine-optimized website.
6. A cost-effective marketing strategy
SEO is one of the most cost-effective strategies to market your business. With it, you are not only increasing the chances of your website landing on the top of the search engine results page. You are also making sure your website visitors have an easy time loading, navigating, and reading your pages. And, optimizing your website makes your content marketing efforts more effective in educating your audience and converting them into leads or customers.
Moreover, SEO is an inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing strategies have one of the lowest cost-per-lead. This is compared to traditional marketing methods such as cold calling and networking, and digital marketing methods like pay-per-click advertising.
7. Helps you establish your brand’s authority
You can easily establish your authority in the landscaping business in your area when your target market frequently finds your website on top of their search results. Combine this with original and valuable content and your audience will more likely see your brand as a thought leader in your area of business. They will look to you for information and value what you tell them about landscaping.
8. High rate of conversion
When your website is on top of the search results, those looking to hire a landscaper immediately are more likely to choose you. As for those who have only been looking for information, they are more likely to choose you for your services if they have been frequenting your website to learn more about landscaping.
Even if they don’t go through with hiring your business for landscaping, a brand they frequently saw on their search results has an advantage against those that are new to them when they consider landscaping their property in the future.
9. Helps with your other digital marketing strategies
Content marketing and social media marketing benefit from SEO.
Your content marketing efforts will fall short if you do not have your website search engine optimized. Your web articles will have limited audience reach since a significant portion of web traffic comes from the search engine results page. Also, without the technical aspect of SEO, your visitors are more likely to back out of your page since it’s either slow to load or difficult to navigate.
As for social media marketing, even if you are not depending on search engines with your shared posts on social media, the traffic you bring to your website still cares about your website’s user experience. At the very least, they want fast-loading pages, readable and relevant content, and user-friendly site navigation.
How Landscaping SEO Works
The best way to understand landscaping SEO is to know the basic idea of how search engines work. Search engines perform three steps to provide search results to their users. These are crawling, indexing, and ranking.
1. Crawling is the process wherein search engine crawlers or bots find and record the information found on web pages. They will discover new web pages and periodically check those that they visited before. Search engine bots start crawling through websites on the homepage and follow any links present on them. The bots will repeat this process until they exhaust the number of links they can follow on a website.
2. Indexing is the next process search engines will perform after their crawlers have gone through a page. This process determines whether a page’s information is worthwhile to be stored in the search engine’s database or not. When a page is indexed, search engines can retrieve the information and provide it to their users when a page is relevant to their search. A page is not indexed if its content is considered duplicate, low value, or uncrawlable.
3. Ranking is the last step and it can only occur when bots have crawled and indexed a page. To rank a page, search engines use algorithms to evaluate a page’s content according to more than 200 ranking signals. Some of these include keywords in the title tag, the loading speed of the page, and website reputation.
Search engine optimization (SEO) at its core is the process of ensuring search engines can crawl and index a website and rank at the first page (if not the top) of the search results for its targeted keywords. This can be broken down further into three main components – technical optimization, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization.
Technical SEO
This process ensures search engine bots can crawl and index your website. Most of the activities in technical SEO are concerned with improving page loading speed, eliminating or reducing page errors, designing a flat web architecture, and optimizing user experience.
On-page SEO
This is the process of ensuring that the website contains content relevant to the keywords that potential landscaping or lawn care customers are entering in their search. This process involves title and meta tag optimization, internal linking, image optimization, and h tag optimization.
Off-page SEO
This is the process of publishing and updating content on another website or platform. The off-page content links back to the website and this is seen as a positive sign of the website’s authority in its niche. Off-page SEO involves activities like link building, content marketing, and social media marketing.
How Local SEO Works and How to Get the Top Business Listing
Although you want to make your site inclusive of all search engines, you want to pay special attention to the changes made by Google to its algorithm and search guidelines. It is the search engine with the most number of users so you can expect it to bring the most visitors to your website. This is also the case for local SEO.
For local SEO, Google has a dedicated portion for local business results. This appears whenever keywords like “landscaping near me” and “landscapers in ABC city” are relevant to the businesses near the user’s location. This portion is referred to as the local pack and contains a map with the nearby businesses related to the search term and NAP citations of these businesses. Only the top three businesses show up on the search engine results page. If the user wants to view more, they will have to click on “view all” to see the other businesses related to their search nearby.
Google has different considerations for local SEO when ranking businesses for the local pack in its search results. Here is a local SEO checklist for landscapers that you can follow to get the top business listing for your area:
- Set up and complete your Google My Business profile
- Link your website to your Google My Business profile
- Target local keywords for your general SEO marketing strategy
- Keep the same NAP citations for your profiles on different websites
- Encourage your customers to leave a review on your search engine business profiles
- Consistently provide great service to your customers for positive reviews
- Make the most use of “normal” SEO for your website
Why You Need a Landscaping SEO Agency
There will always be a debate between hiring or doing the strategy by yourself vs hiring a landscaping SEO firm. Here are some reasons why outsourcing your landscaping SEO service is the better option for your business:
Delegating means you can focus on your landscaping and lawn care business
Providing your service to your customers and operating your business are already taking up a significant part of your time. Adding SEO to the mix will only end up in two ways –it will take you away from what you do best or it will add too much work than you can handle in a day. Both possibilities are not desirable outcomes especially if they can result in losing business or slowing down your operations.
You can benefit from their expertise
Landscaping SEO experts can provide better search engine optimization for your business than you do it by yourself. This is not surprising as they have done it before for their previous clients and know the latest best practices in the industry. Plus, with their experience, there are a few optimization issues that can give them pause.
The experts can get it done faster
Having an agency do your landscaper SEO for you will shorten this time as they already have a tried and tested process for it. There’s little to no guesswork or experimentation with implementing it. If the agency has experience in providing SEO for lawn care companies and other local businesses, they are also more likely to know the best way to address any challenges they might encounter.
Some agencies bundle their landscaper SEO services with other services
Aside from providing SEO for landscapers, some agencies will bundle their other digital marketing services with it. This lets you save time since you will only have to work with one agency. Plus, they will more easily integrate your different marketing channels so each one complements the other. Moreover, with a single company providing landscaper digital marketing services, you will only have to talk to a single digital marketing team and there is no need for you to coordinate between different companies.
What to Look for in a Landscaping SEO Company
If you are looking for someone or a team to implement SEO for a lawn care company, you will be spoiled for choices. Here is a checklist to make sure you are getting the right SEO company for your business:
01
A portfolio of their previous work
To filter out any new and unreliable agencies, ask for a portfolio from the landscaping SEO companies you are considering hiring. If you are also rebuilding your website or building one from scratch, the portfolio can also give you an idea if an agency can give you the style you want for your business.
02
Experience in landscaping SEO marketing
It’s a given that you should only hire an SEO agency that has extensive experience and delivers good results with the services they offer. But, not every business will have the same requirements for their website. You are more likely to get what you are looking for when working with an agency experienced in providing SEO for landscaper businesses. They are familiar with the industry and you can benefit from their experience working with their previous clients in the landscaping industry.
03
Experience in local SEO
As a local business, it is no longer enough for your website to appear on your target market’s search results. Today’s search results include local businesses related to the user’s search keywords. If you want to attract as many clients as you can, local SEO is a necessity for your landscaper SEO campaign.
04
Realistic about what SEO can do
Your business can experience positive results from SEO in terms of brand awareness, lead generation, and lead-to-customer conversion. However, whether they are a full-suite digital marketing agency or a small landscaping SEO marketing team, nobody can guarantee a specific increase on web metrics or the first page of the search results. This is expected and natural for experienced SEO professionals so beware of those that promise a certain outcome.
Moreover, local SEO has a significant effect on people’s awareness of your business and the traffic it can bring to your website. Since local search results are affected by the competition in your area, you can expect results from local SEO to vary depending on a business’s location, niche, and industry.
05
Practices ethical SEO techniques
There are SEO techniques that can give your website quick results. Unfortunately, these techniques violate the search engine’s terms of service. Using them might result in a quick improvement of your website’s search ranking. But, search engines will eventually find out and lead to your website being penalized. So, if a landscaping SEO marketing company promises fast results, you have to be careful as they might be practicing these techniques, which are referred to as black hat SEO.
06
Positive testimonials and reviews
Testimonials and reviews are a great way to get to know what the agency can offer and how well they deal with their clients. You want to look for an agency that has previous clients saying good things about them. You also want these reviews to be recent and specific to the service you need. Lastly, if the reviews contain their information, you can visit their websites or search their businesses to check the quality of the agency’s work and the authenticity of their reviews.
07
Up-to-date knowledge of SEO
Search engines regularly update their search ranking algorithms to ensure they are providing the best experience to their users. SEO agencies should keep up with these updates since a new update can cause a website to lose its ranking or, worse, receive a penalty for its SEO techniques.
You can check their and their client’s websites to see if they keep track of SEO updates and adapt their techniques to these changes. At the very least, an SEO agency should have a decent ranking for its targeted keywords.
08
Provides case studies about their SEO results
Case studies show an agency’s process for helping a client meet their goals. It can also give you an idea of how effective they are in creating the results their clients want. It’s even better if they have some case studies in providing SEO for landscapers services, general contractors, and other similar businesses to yours.
09
Asks for access to your site tools and analytics
Although there’s no guarantee to how much lawn care SEO can improve your website, this does not mean it cannot improve your site’s analytics. This is why you must first ask if the agency needs access to your site’s management platform, analytics, webmaster tools, and business profile. If they say that they do, you know that they have an idea of what they are doing and they know they must measure the results of their work.
10
Affordable SEO for landscaping companies and contractor service providers
If you’re hiring an agency for any digital marketing service, it is best to shop around for the options available to you. Finding landscaping SEO services that tick off all the mentioned requirements is important. But, it is just as important to find one charging a fee that is within your budget.