Owning a landscape business can come with a number of challenges. But one thing that should not pose challenges is your website and overall online presence. You want to make sure that your website is doing marketing work for you.
This means you need a good SEO presence online. And in order to do that, you will need to find the best local SEO services around.
Local SEO tips
Local SEO is an online strategy that helps you promote and expand your business locally.
Let’s say that you want to start a landscape business. You have everything you need, from a properly written lawn care and landscape maintenance contract to all of the necessary landscaping tools. In short, you’re ready for some professional total landscape care. However, your website looks totally unappealing — the landing page is awful, the links don’t work and nobody can understand what you’ve written. Naturally, they will simply click away.
When using a search engine, more than 95 percent of people don’t browse for a topic beyond the first page of results. They cite various reasons for that, such as:
The pages don’t look appealing
There’s too much text and they don’t bother reading it
The page doesn’t rank high enough for them to pay attention
The page doesn’t contain reviews, descriptions, etc.
Remember, you’re working on a webpage for your landscape business. Any local SEO company worth its salt will tell you that a professional-looking website alone will bring 90 percent of your new customers. It only makes sense that you should invest in a decent SEO strategy.
Tip 1: Pick your keywords
Everything revolves around keywords in local SEO. After all, the best way to make sure customers are looking at your page is to have them search for specific terms related to your business.
So, your first step is to make a list of all possible keywords related to your business. Terms like ‘pro care landscape’, ‘starting landscape business ventures’, ‘landscaping near you’, etc. will often appear in search engines, so it makes sense that you include them.
Of course, you need to know what a specific keyword relates to. When handling local SEO, you should focus on two particular keyword categories:
Buying intent
Research intent
People who want to buy a product or use a service will usually search for keywords that fall under the buying intent category. Those types of keywords tend to have sales and promotions in mind. Some examples of these keywords related to landscaping include ‘landscape services near you’, ‘professional landscaping in Knoxville TN’, etc.
On the other hand, you also have people who simply want to research landscaping and who don’t want to use a service right away. That’s where the research intent category comes in, and you have keywords such as ‘landscaping ideas’ and ‘should I hire a landscaper’.
Generally, you should focus on buying intent keywords, but not exclusively. By using keywords from both categories, you have a higher chance of getting clicks.
Tip 2: Optimize your webpage
Once you have your list of keywords, it’s time to optimize your webpage. There are various tools you can use, such as Google My Business.
Generally speaking, when you work on your website, you will need the following:
An optimized homepage
An optimized service page
A standard homepage should contain a title, a meta description, visible headlines and a page copy between 500 and 1000 words. Titles should be between 50 and 65 characters long, while a typical meta description should not go over 150 words. In addition, a headline ought to have the H1 format, something that makes it stand out for the reader.
Service pages will be what your clients are looking at the most. Therefore, you need to use the most prominent keywords related to landscaping there.
You might also want to use specific strategies for SEO optimization, such as on-page and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is a practice that refers to optimizing individual pages by editing both the content and the HTML source code. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to optimizing external sources like links.
Tip 3: Backlinks and citations
Your business needs to generate organic traffic, and one way of doing that is to connect to credible and reputable businesses. The best way of doing that is trading backlinks with these businesses. By developing a good relationship with other local businesses, you can grow your brand and get more clients.
In addition to good backlinks, you will need to create a good citation, i.e. an online directory listing for your business. Typical citations include your business’ address, name and phone number. There are various different types of directories for businesses:
General national directories (eg. yellowpages.com and Facebook)
General local directories
Directories specific to your industry (in this case, a landscaping business)
Tip 4: Reviews
Always make sure to ask for user reviews and display them prominently on your website. User reviews help potential clients decide on whether they want to use your services or not.
Keep in mind that you don’t want to have 100 percent positive reviews because the client will think that you’re being dishonest.
Tip 5: Track your results
One of the best ways of making sure that your landscaping website is ranking high in browser searches is to track your results. There are several ways you can go about it:
Track the rankings (you can use tools such as Google Search Console or RankRanger)
Track the traffic (Google Analytics is a good tool for this job)
Check the conversions’ rate (once again, use Google Analytics)
With these five tips, you can improve your local SEO rankings and your landscape business will start to bloom.
In order to make the best of your online presence, hire a local SEO company and start optimizing your website today.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written by Ian Dovan founded Seeds of Change in 2015, and has a passion for connecting and empowering people, and transforming landscapes in East Tennessee and beyond. He is a husband and father and has many hidden talents including piano, magic tricks, and a knack for knowing people everywhere he goes.
Landscapers use a variety of attachments for doing everything from snow removal to jobsite cleanup, and regardless of how often they are used, every landscaper has a favorite attachment.
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