If you have a landscaping business, you should seriously consider investing in search engine optimization. This marketing approach is not only great for driving more organic traffic to your site but also for increasing brand awareness.
Although landscaping SEO usually starts slow, this promotional method can provide much better long-term results than social media marketing or paid ads. Furthermore, ranking at the top of search engine results pages makes it easier to close deals, as people will perceive you as the industry leader.
In this article, we’ll explain how search engine marketing helps your brand and what to expect after paying for this kind of service.
What are the benefits of landscaping SEO?
Doing SEO for a landscaping company is very similar to optimizing other small business sites. In other words, your main focus is on the local market and local populace. As landscaping companies mainly derive profits from their home city, they don’t get as much value from traditional optimization.
So, after doing technical optimization, a digital marketing agency needs to focus on local searches and local SEO. This is arguably the best traffic source for handymen and small crafts shops, helping you tap into a massive audience looking to solve their issues immediately.
Anyway, here are a few good reasons why landscaping companies should optimize for search engines:
- SEO is the best marketing approach for building a healthy, long-lasting brand.
- Local SEO, in particular, can help you connect with the highest-quality leads.
- By improving the technical aspects of your site, it’s easier for website visitors to browse the pages and learn more about the business.
- Running a successful SEO campaign can also help you with other marketing efforts while increasing the likelihood of a partnership.
- Given that the optimization puts emphasis on brand building, it will be easier to scale your company in the future. This is especially important for landscaping brands that want to open new offices in nearby cities.
While the list of potential SEO benefits is enormous, we also have to consider a few drawbacks:
- If you’re looking to sell your landscaping immediately, SEO isn’t the best approach.
- Even if you reach the top of a lucrative search engine results page, there’s no guarantee that you’ll convert at a high rate.
- Unlike Google AdWords and other forms of paid advertising, SEO efforts can be thwarted by outside interference and negative campaigns.
So, while SEO services sound like the right choice for your landscaping brand, that doesn’t mean they’re risk-free. This is why MiroMind always suggests potential clients to give us a call and learn more about this form of internet marketing.
How does SEO compare to other marketing approaches?
In an ideal world, your company would have enough money to spend on SEO for landscapers and other digital marketing services. However, as most brands have tight marketing budgets, they usually have to choose just one option.
Here’s how using a comprehensive SEO strategy compares to other promotional methods:
SEO vs. SMM
Many companies nowadays use social media as a primary or ancillary promotional tool. The best thing about these platforms is that you can easily advertise your landscaping services without heavily investing heavily in SMM. In other words, each time you create a blog post, you can share it with followers, gaining another source of web traffic.
However, if you were to choose between the two, SEO should definitely be your priority. Building a landscaping brand on Facebook or Instagram can be every bit as tedious as running SEO campaigns but with significantly lower returns. In the end, it’s really hard to beat the website traffic you get from the local search results.
SEO vs. PPC
Paid campaigns scale much better against search engine optimization. Lawn care companies can benefit from instant injection of traffic to their site, making PPC a great choice for brands that require immediate sales.
In this particular case, you should decide whether to focus on a slower, long-term approach or make lots of short-term wins. While pay-per-click is much more predictive and provides faster results, it doesn’t do much for building brand authority. On the other hand, SEO is a slow, meticulous approach that, when done correctly, can place you among the market leaders.
SEO vs. influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is an interesting one. When advertising through famous people, companies pay a fixed price or percentage fee for their services. It has numerous similarities to PPC as it provides an immediate impact on your sales.
Unfortunately, given that landscaping is such a niche service that doesn’t appeal to many people, you won’t get the required results from this approach. Although you might try advertising via local landscaping magazines and sites, they probably won’t give enough return to justify the investment.
SEO vs. other marketing approaches
For the most part, we shouldn’t even mention other marketing strategies. Things such as email outreach don’t work as well for this kind of service, and you’ll also gain little from banners and similar tricks. However, you might gain some traction if you decide to go with traditional media outlets in your home city.
How to perform SEO for a landscaping business?
The most effective SEO strategy for landscaping brands involves local promotions. Aside from traditional methodology, you need to create a good basis for local optimization. If possible, you might also consider doing TV and radio ads in your home city and the wider region.
1. Technical SEO
Before doing anything else, an SEO agency should check the state of your landscaping site. This is especially important if you had a Google penalty or if some other companies did work on your blog. By using tools like Screaming Frog and Google Search Console, providers can learn more about your traffic, website architecture, and potential errors.
Among others, an SEO provider needs to make sure you have a fast and mobile-friendly website. The marketing team should make the platform more accessible to everyone by creating intuitive menus and simplifying browsing. During these initial phases, the SEO experts also check the state of your content, focusing on duplicate and cannibalized pages.
2. User intent
One of the most overlooked aspects of SEO is user intent analysis. In fact, there are even some optimization veterans who skip this step, simply jumping into keyword research and content creation.
Understanding the target audience is crucial for everything we do on the site. It affects the keywords we pursue, the writing style, and how we approach link building. Furthermore, using tools like Google Analytics can tell you more about their behavior on the site, things they like, and things they avoid.
Learning more about demographics is especially important for web stores. Even though clients don’t assess SEO agencies based on conversion, a business owner will pull the plug on the project if you can’t generate enough sales. So, it’s not enough to rank higher in Google if that doesn’t lead to any tangible improvements.
3. Competitive analysis and keyword research
Competitive analysis and keyword research often go hand in hand. In fact, some agencies even take the market into consideration when providing quotes to their clients. For example, getting a link to an online casino is much more expensive than getting a link to a landscaping site. So, this might affect their fees.
Whatever the case, an SEO company will use a keyword research tool, such as Google keyword planner, to find opportunities for your site. Most agencies focus on long-tail keywords that have high organic traffic potential. They especially focus on commercial “money keywords” that can generate sales.
Keep in mind that if an agency works long enough for your company, it will eventually exhaust all these landscaping ideas. So, while choosing the right phrases is vital for any SEO strategy, you should try to cover as much ground as possible.
4. Content creation
Once a provider finds keywords related to your business, they can start pumping out content. When creating articles, they should cater to potential local customers and adjust to their level of education and vocabulary. Using colloquialisms can go a long way for any brand working within the landscaping industry.
To create quality content, most brands use content software such as Surfer SEO or MarketMuse. These programs help create outlines for articles while targeting specific phrases. It’s also important for an SEO agency to add a compelling meta description and title tag to each piece on top of quality images and (if possible) videos.
A part of the content creation process is also revising the old pieces. As previously mentioned, an SEO agency needs to ensure your on-page SEO is on the spot by eliminating duplicate and shallow content. When possible, they should improve old articles by adding local keywords, improving meta descriptions, title tags, and overall readability.
5. Link building
Quality links are necessary, not only for landscaping companies but any business in the world. Google uses them as a critical ranking factor for local and especially global searches. In fact, many research tools prescribe how many links you need for an article to reach top spots in search engines.
Ideally, you should try to get links from direct competitors working in your industry. They need to be as relevant as possible to your own content. However, as this rarely happens in the real world, many experts simply try to build links from other quality sites.
One of the most popular SEO strategies is building links through guest posting. Organic outreach via email and social media is also an option, although it takes much more time. Savvy marketers also use methods like broken link building, HARO, and direct connections.
Importance of local SEO for landscaping companies
If you’re looking to sell a landscaping service, you should always focus on potential customers from your hometown. While it makes sense to hire elite contractors from other cities for larger projects, most clients go with local brands. Because of that, you should always focus on local SEO as the best source of web traffic.
Being placed in Google Maps (so-called 3 Pack ranking) provides numerous benefits to your brand:
- Increases the reputation and authority of your landscaping brand
- Makes it easier for clients to find you within the city
- Provides a fast breakdown of your company and availability
- Shows what previous customers think of your service
If you’re a handyman, mom-and-pop business, restaurant, or any other company relying on the local market, you need to reach top spots for local searches. When people look for landscaping businesses, they usually focus on the first few results that pop in the search engine and make their decision based on these rankings.
Luckily, setting up local SEO doesn’t take that much time and is pretty straightforward. In fact, unlike traditional SEO, which requires continuous maintenance, it’s much faster to execute. So, when you first start working with a marketing company, you should definitely tell them to focus on this type of promotion.
Here are the steps you need to do to jumpstart your local SEO:
- Create Google My Business Profile and add as much data as possible (email, address, phone, working hours, description)
- Add your landscaping company to all major online directories such as Yellow Pages and Yelp
- Make sure your data is correct across the board
- Start building positive reviews
Although local SEO is somewhat reliant on traditional SEO practices (having a well-functioning site and lots of links), local rankings are mainly based on reviews. Landscaping companies should try to get a steady influx of positive reviews. Not only should you get good scores, but you also need as much feedback as possible.
So, while an SEO provider can set up your Google business profile, it’s up to your employees to charm clients. Local SEO is so important that many landscaping brands even hire reputation managers to monitor online chatter and improve the impression of the company.
MiroMind is a top-tier SEO service provider that can help your landscaping business rank on top of Google pages. Don’t be a stranger, and give us a call today!