Since our last post showing concrete (and actionable) examples for marketing a catering business online was so well received, I figured we’d do another. This time, I figured we’d offer up some advice to lawn care business owners/landscapers.
Why lawn care marketing? Simple. We don’t have a client in the industry and it was easy to come up with five ideas that were uncomplicated to implement. Add these ideas to the ones found in our small business SEO guide and you’ll be well on your way to organic search engine rankings in your local geographic area.
Cross promote with complimentary businesses
When you’re a local service provider with a good reputation, you’ll often be asked by clientele if you have recommendations for other service providers offering complimentary services. For a lawn business/landscaper some complimentary business might include:
- Sprinkler system services
- Garden pond companies
- Deck builders
- Pool maintenance and supply companies
- Aluminum siding companies that install screen porches and lanais
- Pressure washing services
- Tree cutting and removal services
- Nurseries
- Pest control companies
Just like you might go to your local nursery and leave your business cards on their counters in exchange for recommending them to your clients, you can do the same thing and cross promote your websites. But isn’t this reciprocal linking? Yes. The type that works and is not seen as “gaming” the engines.
Create a page for preferred vendors and contact your preferred vendors (you’ll essentially be endorsing them the same way you would be if you recommended them verbally to a client, so pick the ones you believe in) for all of the above services and propose some cross promotion on each others websites. Search engines love seeing relevant links to your site that are actually sending qualified traffic.
Use photos to create lawnbait
If you’ve seen Lisa Barone’s article on using Flickr to create content and links, you might get where this is going. You could do a search on Flickr for outstanding lawns or hoping to find some fun and interesting lawn ornaments to create a page of content on the topic to promote within your industry (see the article for details).
Or search through lawn service sites in other geographic locales (search Google for “lawn service [city names]” and put together a collection of “big difference” before and after photos from lawn services outside your service area, including one of your own outstanding examples. Be sure to contact the companies whose photos you wish to use and get their permission (shouldn’t be too hard to convince them to let you include them in a “best results” list that also features a link to their website). Be sure to let them know once the list is complete (and if you create an attractive graphic that says “Lawn Makeovers 2009 Winner”, they might even display it… with a link to the results).
Show pride in the communities you serve
Be sure to list the cities and/or subdivisions you serve on your about page or your homepage. The key here is not to keyword spam and list seventy-five cities in your footer. In addition to being against search engine guidelines, it’s also unattractive to visitors. Instead, pick your top ten most important locales and let customers know that “Located in [your main city] we also proudly service the following communities: [insert your most important ones here]“.
Network with bloggers
Network with popular lawn care bloggers and find out if they’d be interested in you contributing some content. Put together a post about how to properly seed a lawn or a video that shows the proper way to space out Evergreen shrubs. You can establish yourself as an expert within the professional community which in turn will help you promote yourself and your skills to your local community.
You can also reach a bit wider and contact popular homemaking blogs and see if they’d be interested on some content that explains the best landscaping ideas for folks who hate bees. Popular parenting blogs might be interested in an article on the ones that require the lowest amount of maintenance for busy moms or a listing of plants that could be poisonous to children. Pet blogs might be interested in the same type of list, but focused on the family pet.
Make your local affiliations work for you online
If you’re affiliated with your local Chamber of Commerce or local Gardening club or [insert a nationality here]-American club, Elks Lodge or whatever the case may be, ensure that you’re taking advantage of any opportunities they may have for promoting your business on their website. In addition to helping you out in your search engine marketing efforts, you will get targeted advertising with folks who would likely prefer to give business to another club member over someone they don’t know.
Most of the geographic lawn care and landscaping SERPS (search engine result pages) we’ve come across are only mildly competitive and by utilizing the tips above, you’ll have a pretty good shot at taking top ranks for your local terms.
About the Author
Rae Hoffman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Outspoken Media as well as the author of the often controversial Sugarrae Blog.
Get social with Rae at Sphinn | Twitter | WebmasterWorld
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I found this post to be quite interesting on a number of levels.
First, I used to work in the Lawn & Garden industry (on the distribution side) so I know the value of cross promotion with related businesses, community pride, and leveraging local affiliations. Those are integral parts of any geographically confined business.
Second, I have several friends that run lawn & landscape companies and none of them have websites. This is an industry on the tail end of the transition to online business as a result of the type of business they do. Don’t get me wrong, I think every business should have a website, but customers are much less likely to use the internet to find this type of business; they see trucks in their neighborhood or flyers on their door knob or the beautiful lawn next door and they use that information to make their decision.
The general lack of computer/internet skills on the part of the business owners in combination with the customer’s propensity for choosing a lawn company without resorting to the internet (yet), would make for an interesting case study for a new site in this market. A search for “lawn care Annapolis” showed a Google map where 9 out of the 10 listings were either chain lawn care companies or yellow pages listings for companies that don’t have a site.
So I just typed myself into an idea, thanks Rae!
Tim, I have found every lawn service company I’ve used in the last five years online. I don’t even own a phone book anymore. ;-)
According to Google’s keyword research tool there is no shortage of folks looking for “lawn service” online in geographical locations. Lawn service austin, lawn service dallas, lawn service atlanta – these all show over 500 queries a month. That’s a lot of potential business for services in big cities. Small towns obviously won’t have that search volume, but it will still bring in some qualified leads. And I’d be willing to bet the number of folks using the net to find ALL services will increase over the next few years.
Additionally, if you’re a local company just outside Atlanta or a city with much larger online inquiry volume, you could expand your business to that larger city with the help of a website and some very minor promotion.
Of course, the point of this post was to show some more specifics – the mild competition and lower online marketing budget of lawn service companies made them a good example.
It’s good advice. I was taking it off topic and would continue to do so if I responded in full, so I won’t.
As far as you using search to find a lawn service, that’s probably not all that relevant since all of us (online marketers) would use Google to find a lost dog if we could. For everyone else, it’s a chicken & egg thing. People will start using the SE’s to find services like this when more services get web sites, and the services will get websites when more people start using SE’s to find their services.
Again, I agree, these companies should have sites to take advantage of the void that exists in their industry now and to prepare themselves for the future when everyone uses search to find everything. And your tips are spot on with regard to developing an online presence with this type of business.
Forget the content, I’m just impressed with the photo Rae was able to find for this post. That’s simply amazing. [stands up, applauds]
I’ve known at least half a dozen guys my age that currently own lawn services. Two of them have web sites because I insisted. But even those don’t blog or have any content to contribute elsewhere.
These are hardworking guys who started from scratch with a lawn mower and a weed eater and took on new business until they had to hire another person and so on.
They have no college education, poor grammar, MySpace-level Web skills at best, and even with an annual sales of $3-400k, they don’t spend money on anything except door hangers, flyers, and mailouts.
One of the hardest marketing sales is to a person who doesn’t think others use the Web very much because they themselves don’t. Example: I trade services with a landscaping company. Trading is all their willing to do. And since I charge way more per hour than they do, they only get a couple hours a month of work in trade.
Great post. I do SEO for a friend’s local lawn care business. He just started the business this spring and we found that the web site just added to his marketing reach.
He still did the traditional marketing with fliers, and putting his business info on T-Shirts, Hats, and his work truck. But in the early stages, the web site brought those first few key clients while we were still waiting to get fliers printed.
He actually gets about half his business right now from his web site. People do look online for lawn care, odd jobs, and other related services. I know I do.
We implemented all of the strategies listed above for his business, and have seen an increase in web traffic and new clients as a result. Great post! I can tell you first hand that these techniques do work!
I think the coolest part about helping many of these local businesses online is that there are often very little competition because nobody else is doing anything of significance online either. I was helping a friend in the cleaning business and it didn’t take me a week to get him to #1 for his primary keywords. Absolutely ridiculously competition (or lack thereof).
Great post and comments. This is just another example of how local search works so well with small geo business. In most markets local guys are buried by franchises. Local search affords the opportunity for the local guys to rank and get some of the most targeted customers available. There are multiple example of lawn companies that are just cleaning out the local market.
This form of marketing in combination with more traditional fliers etc. only solidifies the business in the local market.
Then there are multiple listings…the competition is on page two. I love video.
Paul Harvey(RIP) once said: “Selling is simple if preceded by trust.”
I just found this case study on how a church has used local search to generate new members. I hope this further proves your point.
http://blog.ourchurch.com/2009/05/07/church-marketing-case-study/