As a lawn care and landscaping specialist, your work makes homes more beautiful and easier to use. And there’s a big opportunity to attract leads. For instance, there are more than 126 million households in the United States.

Despite that, you’re not getting as many customers as you want for your business.

If you’re reading this post, you probably want to increase the number of lawn care jobs you take.  Everyday, people use search engines to find lawn care and landscaping specialists for their homes. If you’ve been unable to get customers through this channel, you’ve been leaving a lot of money on the table.

Stop doing your lawn care business a disservice. I’ll show you how the step by step process for taking your website to the top of Google. If you have questions, Get a Free Consultation with Scott Keever

Structure your lawn care website

Since your lawn care website is your billboard online, you need to structure it well. One of the best things you can do is to dedicate each page of your website to a specific topic.

For example, here’s a lawn care business that has a dedicated page for all services such as lawn care maintenance, etc.

This is essential if you offer both lawn care service as well as lawn insect control. So whether it’s a services page or landing page — dedicate it to one topic ONLY.

For example, on your lawn care services page, don’t include snow removal information.

In the same way, if you’re writing about outdoor patio design trends, don’t make the mistake of writing about broad landscaping trends.

Google is looking for authoritative websites that know their subject very well. Because that’s a quick way to guarantee the quality of their content. With millions of websites in the lawn care industry already, it can be hard for Google to make the right judgments as to the best content.

But if your page is specific to a topic and you go the extra mile to make it the best content for that topic, Google will reward you.

Funny enough, you don’t have to worry about search visibility because Google will ‘eventually’ find your useful content and push the page to the top of their page.

A good site structure means a good user experience. It’ll help search engine bots to easily crawl and index your new content.

Aside from the fonts, the colors, the graphics, the images, and the white space, good site design boils down to great structure.

Search users’ minds craves cognitive equilibrium. The mind wants to affix the missing puzzle logically, exactly where they’re expected. Users will thank you for a good structure if you pay close attention to it.

Once your website’s structure has been sorted, it’s time to ‘further’ improve your lawn care SEO to gain more customers through search engines.

It’ll be considered in two wide categories which are:

  • On-page SEO

  • Off-page SEO

Let’s begin.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is basically the steps and strategies you implement on your own website to optimize it for search engines.

Some steps to take are:

1. Perform keywords research

Considering the fact that every search is performed through the input of keywords into search engines, then you must pay attention to keywords.

The first question to ask is: what are the keywords your potential clients are using on search engines?

When you’re able to answer this question accurately, you can target those keywords to attract clients from those searches.

However, these keywords are difficult to find without tools. A guesswork will only produce a list of search terms your potential customers aren’t searching for.

Finding the right keywords is so important because it could determine your content strategy.

Having said that, there are tools you can use to find keywords that your potential clients are using in search engines. A few that you can use are KeywordTool.io, Ubersuggest, SEMrush, etc.

KeywordTool.io helps you to find possible keywords that searchers are using. It draws these keywords from Google autocomplete. How do you use KeywordTool.io?

Enter your main keyword (e.g., lawn care service Chicago) into the search bar and click the “Search” button. This could just be a general term like lawn care and the location of your business like New York, for example.

This will bring out a list of similar terms that users have searched in the past. These terms can give you more insight into keywords to target.

 

Another tool you can use for keyword research is Ubersuggest. With this tool, you can enter your keyword into the box and select the country. Click on “search.”

You’ll see details about the keywords like search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and Cost Per Click (CPC).

Other details you can see are similar keywords when you click on “Keyword Ideas.”

You can also see the search engine results page (SERP) for the term to see the websites you’re up against.

Keywords you should consider targeting should be keywords that are also relevant to your locality. Such keywords include:

  • [city] lawn care services
  • Best mowing service in [city]
  • Landscaping services in [city]
  • Lawn care services near me

2. Develop a content strategy

Many times, lawn care specialists create their websites, add important pages, and just leave it. How sad?

Getting substantial organic traffic from search engines requires content that’s good enough to solve potential clients’ queries or provide the right information to those looking to hire you for your lawn care services.

One way to achieve this is to have a regularly updated blog. For example, HubSpot found that companies that published over 16 blog posts per month got 4.5 times more leads than those who published between 0 and 4.

Having a blog is cool, but what topics will you be addressing on your blog? This is where keyword research can help your content. It’s vital to target keywords with high search volume and less competition in the search results.

Each of your posts should target a single keyword.

How do you optimize your page for a keyword? Once you’ve chosen a keyword to target, you should add the keyword to the following parts of your page:

  • The post title and Title tag

  • Meta description that appears in search results

  • Your post permalink (or URL)

  • Your post subheadings

  • Image Alt Texts

This infographic by Brian Dean illustrates it better.

While trying to optimize a page for a keyword, it’s important not to overuse the keyword as keyword stuffing could land your website a penalty rather than a high ranking reward. The key is to implement your keywords while making your content natural.

3. Add internal links

To make your website an authority in the lawn care industry, you need to create useful posts consistently. It can be twice weekly or several times in a month. This articles MUST be related to lawn care.

Apart from that, you need to employ internal linking on your website. This helps Google bots and other search engines bots to crawl your posts effectively.

What are the steps to take to improve internal linking? Read through a post and find phrases that have been addressed by your previous posts. In some cases, this can give you an idea of posts to write.

The rule of thumb is to add about 2 to 3 internal links in your post. One example of this is Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia uses many internal links in its entries and this helps the website to rank for many keywords.

4. Improve website load speed

For everybody who visits your website, they want a fast website. They want to access the information on your website as soon as possible.

A slow website speed could kill your search performance. Pay a close attention to improving your website speed.

According to research, about 25% of your visitors would have abandoned your website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load.

A high bounce rate on your page is a negative signal to Google and it could lead to lower search rankings.

The first step to improve your website speed is to know your current website speed. You can use the Pingdom tool to get this piece of information.

Go to the “Tool” section of the website and enter your website address. Select the location Pingdom should test from. This should be close to where you think your ideal customers are located.

 

After that, click on “Start Test.” This will show you the results of your website including performance grade, load time, etc.

You can also get more details about aspects of your page you can improve to increase its speed.

Off-Page SEO

These are steps you take off your website that helps to improve your search rankings. 95% of off-page SEO boils down to link building.

1. Gain Backlinks

This is one of the most important elements to raise your search engine rankings. Along with content, backlinks are powerful factors in the Google algorithm.

When your lawn care website has links from other websites pointing to it, it shows that other websites trust your business and brand. [source]

When you gain backlinks from authoritative websites, it increases your credibility in your Lawn Care Industry. Apart from that, backlinks from local directories help to improve your local SEO.

What are ways to increase the number of backlinks to your website?

a). Hosting or Attending Local Events

Local events in your community help you to meet many professionals in your locality and also potential customers. For most of the people you meet at an event, they have homes and may need your service with their lawns.

While meeting people, you can also meet website owners, bloggers, and journalists who’ll write about these events.

As a participant, these people can link to your website. These are local links that would boost your local SEO in your area.

A DUI attorney gave a scholarship offer to Colorado students who admit to drunk driving. This step got a mention in The Denver Post and The Wall Street Journal.

b). Posting on Forums

This is an opportunity to build relationships with potential clients or other fellow professionals.

You may find that forum members have questions about lawn care. As a professional, you can show your expertise by answering these questions and providing solutions to people’s problems.

However, in some cases, a short forum post might be unable to answer a question in a satisfactory manner.

It might also be possible you have a post on your website blog that addresses the question. You can provide a short answer and link to your post.

With forums like Quora, you can search for questions related to your blog posts. Then you can write answers to those questions and provide a link to your post after the answer.

It’s important not to overdo this to avoid spamming forums. This is an example of a question on Quora related to lawn care

:

James Robert answered the question and also linked to his website.

6. Add your business to local listings

As a lawn care specialist, you want customers who live in your locality. Often times, you don’t want a customer in San Francisco when your business is in Chicago.

Therefore, local SEO is vital as local customers are the ideal customers you’re looking for.

One part of improving your local SEO is adding your business information to various local listings. One of the considerations Google make when choosing local businesses to appear in a local search is the number of local citations they have.

In fact, BrightLocal found in a study that businesses that appear in the top 3 of local searches have an average of 85 local citations. Local citations prove your existence as a business in a locality.

Some local listings you can appear as a lawn care business are:

  • Yelp

  • Yahoo! Local

  • Bing Places for Business

  • Angie’s List

  • Yellow Pages

While adding your business information to local directories, it’s important to use a consistent Business name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) on all local listings you appear.

Having inconsistent NAP can be detrimental to your local search ranking. Because it confuses search engines and your business will not gain the expected rankings in Google first page.

7. Create a Google My Business page

There are many local listings your business can appear on. But one of the most important is Google My Business. Without this page, don’t expect your business to show up in the Google map pack.

For local searches, Google present 3 results of businesses in a locality. Showing up for this helps people in your locality to find you.

With your Google My Business page, you can have details like your NAP name, address, phone number), website address, opening hours, images of your business location, posts, reviews, etc.

A visitor to this page will have all the details they need to get in touch with you. How do you create a Google My Business page for your lawn care service?

Go to the Google My Business homepage and click on “Start Now.”

After this, you can fill the important details about your business. When you’re through, you can verify your business using the options that Google will provide.

After verifying your page, you can set other details like opening hours. You can also add posts. This could be about a new development in your business or a promotional offer for customers. It’s important to keep your page updated with posts.

8. Encourage user ratings and reviews

It’s always a better strategy when your former customers talk about your service. For potential customers, they can know a lot about your service by reading reviews and viewing your ratings. Another reason you need to pay attention to reviews is that consumers trust them.

For instance, a study found that 85% of consumers trust user reviews as much as personal recommendations. However, customers don’t always leave reviews.

When satisfied customers leave no review, there’s no way for potential customers to have a knowledge of their experience. To increase the number of reviews on your local listing pages, you have to tell your satisfied customers to leave reviews.

This is an example of reviews on the Google My Business page for a lawn care business.

9. Submit sitemap and check indexed pages

To appear on searches related to your lawn care business, search engine bots need to have access to your pages and be able to index them. A sitemap is a document that tells search engines about the pages on your website.

It tells bots what to index and may restrict the actions of bots. To submit your website sitemap, go to your Google Console dashboard and click on “Sitemaps.”

After doing that, enter your sitemap address.

It’s important to avoid having private information on your sitemap as it’s public to everybody. After adding your sitemap, you need to check back after a few days to see if your pages have been indexed.

Without indexing, there’s no way your page can appear for a search term. To check if your pages have been indexed, click on “Coverage.”

Here, you’ll see the crawl errors, indexed pages with issues, indexed pages without issues, and excluded pages.

With these numbers, you’ll have an idea of your website pages that have been indexed and those left out.

Can I implement any of this SEO stuff myself?

Of course, you can. Since lawn care SEO begins with your website, if you’re a website designer and you were a part of the team that designed the website, why not?

If you understand how local SEO works, then go ahead and implement this SEO stuff yourself. It’ll save you money but your time will be spent.

On the other hand, if you’re not a website developer and you don’t like messing around with HTML and CSS codes, then you should see the help of a professional lawn care SEO company.

We’re here to support you along the way. We have the team, the tools, the network, and the strategy that works. We’ll make sure your site is properly optimized for search engines.

Working with an SEO agency that specializes in lawn care digital marketing can help you to save money on the long-run.

More importantly, whatever money you spent will be worth it as soon and you start generating quality traffic and leads as a result of your improved rankings in Google.

Final thoughts

To get more targeted traffic from search engines to your lawn care business, you need to take action. It may look like a daunting task. But when you use these tips one at a time, you get measurable results from search engines.

Do you want us to analyze your lawn care website? We can fix the errors and issues stopping it from ranking at number #1 in Google. Book a Free Consultation today.