How Landscaping SEO Works
Much like landscaping, SEO involves planning, designing, and initiating improvements around a property—in this case, your website. SEO involves enhancing the overall functionality of your website while performing regular maintenance.
Sound familiar?
By organizing your website’s resources as you would for your customer’s outdoor property, you can optimize your website to attract them more easily. For example, people have many different ways of searching for hydroseeding services:
And this is just for terms that include the phrase, “near me.” People might also search for the phrase, “hydroseeding Grand Rapids,” or for other cities.
However, getting in front of these people takes more effort than simply adding the title, “Hydroseeding in Grand Rapids,” to your homepage. That’s where SEO comes in handy.
Why SEO for Landscapers?
Because it works. Landscapers can generate more calls, sales, and regular customers by using organic search. Your services solve some kind of problem people have with their garden, lawn, or outdoor landscape, and people in your area use search engines every day to find a solution.
Landscaping and lawn care SEO have become more valuable as search engines have become better at helping people solve their problems. After all, the majority of all website traffic on the internet comes from organic search.
SEO Strategies for Landscapers
Using an effective SEO strategy for your landscaping company means choosing a path that suits your goals. Let’s walk through each step of the landscaping SEO process, complete with some of our expertise.
Using Search Empathy to Understand Your Customers
What if you could solve your customer’s problems and show them your expertise before you’ve even talked to them? A great website can help you do that. Taking this approach creates an opportunity for a new customer—and a potential brand advocate.
At Avalanche, we tell our clients to focus on their customers first. To successfully execute an SEO strategy, you need to know more and care more about your customers than your competitors. One of the most essential parts of landscaping SEO is investing in content that helps your customer before they’re ready to buy.
However, website content doesn’t simply mean adding a blog to your website. It includes adding images, videos, slideshows, and more to establish your brand as an expert while making your services more desirable.
The tactics and channels you use need to hinge on your customer and their needs and concerns—as do your time and investments. It can be beneficial to research information about your customer, including:
- What does their daily life look like?
- What are their pain points with their landscape or garden?
- Which phrases do they use relating to your industry and services?
- What will they experience before realizing they need your services?
By gaining empathy for your customer and listening to them, you’ll get a clearer picture of how they might search for your services on search engines like Google, along with the content that might attract them to your site.
To see the success you’re looking for with this, you need a sound strategy built upon an evidence-based plan. Conduct research ahead of time, and plan the work before you work the plan. After all, you can’t campaign yourself out of a bad strategy, no matter how good your marketing collateral is.
Implementing On-Page, Off-Page, & Technical SEO for Landscapers
SEO generally falls into three separate categories:
- On-page SEO: This refers mainly to the contents of your website pages. Its common signals include the keywords, titles, headings, and meta descriptions you use on your web pages. It’s essential for ensuring search engines know your content is relevant to what your customers are searching for.
- Off-page SEO: On the other hand, this type of SEO refers to everything from other web pages that help your site’s pages rank higher. There are multiple factors to this, but backlinks—links from other sites to your site—are among the biggest. Having a good volume of relevant backlinks validates your authority to search engines, and subsequently to searchers.
- Technical SEO: For the most part, this occurs “under the hood” of your website. Most technical SEO tactics ensure search engines can easily crawl and scan your site. It includes making sure your site loads quickly, has adequate security, and is easy to index.
Creating Meta Titles and Descriptions
Also known as page titles, meta titles are the names of individual pages or posts on your website. While these aren’t necessarily visible on your page, they can be visible in search engine results. That’s why it’s imperative to optimize these titles so the reader wants to click on them.
Meta descriptions are another attribute that appears below the title on search engine results pages (SERPs). They provide a summary of the page and can be optimized, but the search engine could change them later for certain terms.
Optimizing Page Load & Mobile Compatibility
Loading speeds are essential for both your customer’s experience and SEO. Google and other search engines promote sites with faster load speeds, especially if it enhances the user’s experience. This strategy is valuable when people search for your website on mobile devices—which often rely on slower download speeds depending on location.
A few ways to optimize load speed include:
- Minimizing the size of your images
- Reducing the amount of unnecessary scripts your page needs to run
- Making your website more mobile-friendly in general
- Working with a developer to implement lazy loading
Designing a Usable Website
Web design is at the crux of good user experience. If your website visitor can’t find what they’re looking for, you might miss the opportunity to turn them into a lead. You may want to link your pages to each other internally and use thoughtful site architecture, complete with grouped topics and a cohesive sitemap.
Conducting Landscaping Keyword Research
Keyword research is essential to search engine optimization. Multiple reliable keyword research tools on the market can help you identify the most relevant keywords (download a list of landscaping keywords for free) for your business based on user intent and your content strategy.
At Avalanche, we use SEMrush as our keyword research tool of choice because it helps us understand if a certain keyword is worth spending time and labor to target. Here’s an example of its Keyword Magic Tool at work.
- Here is where you enter your first keyword. We like to start with a short, broad keyword to get more specific ideas.
- You can toggle keywords to find those phrased as a question so you can hone your content for user intent.
- On the side, you’ll see other common words and phrases people use with your target keyword.
- There is also data on how competitive the term is, the common search intent, and other factors.
Writing Content
In general, creating content involves asking your ideal audience the right questions and surveying them to learn more about who they are and how they think.
Your goal is to identify high-quality content ideas that your ideal customer will find attractive. From there, you can write content that includes these keywords as organically as possible in the title, headings, and the written piece itself. This will help you provide quality content that solves problems for the searcher.
Building Links
Link building is the process of acquiring trustworthy links from other sites to your website, which fosters expertise, authority, and trust. Generating backlinks is especially important if you’re in a competitive market because it can help you rank faster and not lose your search engine rankings as quickly as you might without it.
Utilizing Social Media
Your social media platforms offer another way to promote your landscaping SEO efforts. Promoting your lawn care and other services through your social media gives it the boost it needs to drive more traffic to your website. Not to mention, many social media platforms offer a reliable resource for establishing a baseline for your backlinking strategy.
Targeting Local SEO
More than most other industries, local SEO is extremely valuable for landscapers. Local SEO strategies help you optimize your site for local audiences that are close to your service area.
Reliable tactics for local SEO include creating a Google Business Profile account for your business, mentioning your service area on your website with specific pages for those areas, and making sure you’re listed in local directories such as your Chamber of Commerce and lawn or garden industry websites.
