I’ve been performing SEO services for landscaping companies for a few years and I’ve learned a few things that I want to share with you so you can continue growing your landscaping business, hopefully beating your expectations.
I’m going to breakdown the simple approach I use so you can do the same. Hopefully, it’s enough for you to get started, but you know you can always contact me if you need more help. Let’s dig in!
Why SEO is Perfect for Landscaping
As the manager of a landscaping company, it’s your job to keep everything going. Your employees rely on you to keep the work flowing so they can earn a living and enjoy a stable work environment. When work slows down, the pressure to find more customers can be unbearable. With a solid SEO strategy, this will likely never happen.
Landscaping and SEO go together like peanut butter and jelly. Showing up at the top of Google search means your website will get more visitors than others and when people need landscaping services, they call you. That’s the main idea behind SEO. It’s beautifully simple.
Google Search is like a game of hiding and seek. You start off hiding but you want to be found. As long as it’s easier for people to find you than it is to find your competition, you will get all the new customers! But, how does it work?
How SEO Works in the Landscaping World
Search Engine Optimization for landscaping is very straight forward. Since you’re likely serving people in your immediate location, that’s where the focus lies. If you already have a website, you start with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These free tools allow you to see a lot of great information such as:
- Who is visiting your website.
- How visitors are finding your website, ie. What keywords they are typing into Google
- How long people spend on each page.
- What pages they visit.
These are just four out of hundreds of metrics you can see that will give you insights about how to better market your company. Looking at analytics is a regular occurrence during a SEO campaign.
Once you have some ideas on where your strengths and weaknesses are in the online world, it’s time to look at your competitors. The idea is to figure out who is doing what and where their weaknesses are. By targeting their weaknesses first, we can build momentum and get some easy wins. But, what does that mean? It means getting your website to show up on the top of Google Search for the keywords that will bring you more phone calls and more customers.
Adapt to Your Market: A Game Plan for You to Get Started
I’m going to lay out a simple strategy you can use to get started performing SEO for your business. If you want to harness the power of Google and use it to grow your business, here’s what you got to do.
Step One: Decide Who Your Favorite Customers Are
Usually, this one gets skipped, but it’s actually the most important step. People don’t like saying no to money. They want to serve anyone and everyone because they are afraid there aren’t enough customers to go around. That’s just not the case.
Here’s the deal. You can narrow the scope of your marketing and still serve everyone. Just think of marketing like a shovel. Using a flat shovel to dig can be difficult because the end is blunt and it doesn’t go into the ground very easily. But if you “narrow the focus” by grabbing a round shovel with a point on the end, it’s 100x times easier to dig.
If SEO is like digging, then we want a pointy shovel. That means we want to narrow our focus and go after those exact customers we decided are our favorite. That could mean going after turf care, tree trimming, retaining walls, or whatever product or service earns you the most profit.
So, step one is deciding who your ideal customers are so you can target them with your marketing strategies.
Step Two: Spy on the Competition
The next step is to analyze the competition. Now that you know what kind of jobs or customers you want to target, it’s time to look at your competitors and figure out what they’re up to. You could call this spying, but I use a super-powerful SEO tool called Ahrefs that allows me to see how many visitors other website get and for which keywords.
When I look at competitors I’m looking to see what keywords they are strong on and which ones they are weak on. I’ll target the weak ones first and once I’m winning on those, I’ll move onto the more difficult ones. The goal is always total domination. You don’t want to be #2, you want to be #1!
Step Three: Make a Plan to Win
Ideal Customer + Competitors Weaknesses = Silver Bullet Strategy
Now that you have the information you need, it’s time to make a plan. A plan will get you 50% of the way, but the rest lies in the execution. This ain’t no Ronco Rotisserie Cooker. You can’t just “set it and forget it”. This is a race and the internet changes quickly, but it’s not the internet that changes, it’s your competition and market.
It’s fine to start the SEO race like a rocket and blast ahead, but you have to follow through in order to get lasting results. It’s critical to check in on the analytics monthly at least in order to see what is going on and make the necessary adjustments to stay on course.
Timeline
You’ll also want to decide on a timeline. Obviously you want everything to happen right away, but SEO takes time. Google even has safeguards in place that hold back new websites until a certain amount of time has passed. This ensures that the internet stays a fair place and nobody is able to come in and take over an entire market overnight. That would be bad… That’s why it’s best to start with a solid plan and implement it slowly over time.
When choosing a timeline you must balance your expectations with your budget. SEO takes a lot of work, a lot of man-hours, so getting faster results always means a larger investment. When I sit down with clients to choose a timeline, we consider the goals, the budget, and the expectations. By triangulating these three areas we are able to find the perfect plan for them. You should do the same!
Executing the Plan
Without getting too technical, it’s time to optimize your on-page and off-page SEO. The most important part of the execution is using Analytics to guide your actions. After a month or two has passed you should see results from the actions you’ve taken. Maybe they are better than you expected or maybe worse. Either way, this will help you decide what to do next.
The game of SEO is ongoing and never ends. It’s just a part of business these days. Some try to ignore it but the ones that embrace reality and run with it are the ones that make all the money.
My hope for you is that you will start to take SEO seriously and figure out how to make it work for your business. Being on the top of Google Search has changed the lives of many people. Will you be the next? Make it so!
