If you’re a local landscaper and you’re looking for ways to expand your business to the next level through digital marketing, you’ve come to the right place.
With the rapid change and evolution of modern technologies, digital marketing is a great way to connect faster with potential customers; it’s also used to send valuable traffic to your website. It is a fact that 4 out of every 5 consumers contact local searches on their smartphones, tablets, and computers when searching for service providers.
A lawn care business has much to offer and can morph into something much bigger if chosen the right strategy of marketing. When your business has a good marketing strategy, it can build strong brand awareness, grow the customer base, and increase your sales.
The Basics
To understand the process of achieving a successful lead generating landscaping website it’s important to take note of these basic parameters of digital marketing:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most crucial component of any marketing plan and is the first thing to consider when trying improving your online presence. It is one of the organic ways to boost your website to a higher position in search engine results pages.
Let’s have a look at the framework that you will have to work on for building a quality SEO:
- Title Tags
Title tags can do wonders for your SEO when optimized with the right keywords. It lets people know what they can expect to find on your page when they click the link. So while deciding a title, put in your targeted keywords towards the beginning of the title, but don’t overdo it. The length of the title tag is limited; Google typically displays the first 50–60 characters of a title tag.
- Keywords
When a customer put ‘landscaping services’ in search engine, then that particular phrase is driving traffic to a specific resultant URL, this particular phase is known as ‘keyword’.
There are two types of keywords, short and long-tail keyword. Short tail keywords are 1-3 words whereas long-tail keywords are more specific keywords that are usually 3 words or longer. Usually, long-tail keywords are more profitable, as you will drive more targeted traffic and your chances of ranking on the first page are higher.
Example: Short-tailed keywords include Landscape, Lawnmower, Garden etc. In case of Long-tail keywords are more specific like, Landscaping business near me, what is Landscaping in Construction.
- Meta Descriptions
A Meta description is an aspect of HTML that provides a brief explanation about the content of the website. It plays an essential role in not only Google indexing, but also plays a vital role in creating a quality experience for the user.
This short description offers a great opportunity for the webmaster to advertise the brand and quality of the site to the user. A quality Meta description should focus on the title. It should give a summary of what the title means, increasing the relevancy and chances to attract traffic.
- Content Strategy
SEO and content marketing are very much interconnected and complement each other, so you need to focus on creating great content if you want your rankings to improve. Quality content is the organic way to make sure that you can strategically use your keywords. Without high-quality content, you can’t fully take advantage of the benefits SEO has to offer.
Relevant and useful content on your website not only motivates your website visitors to stay for longer, but also come back more often and this can positively impact your search rankings. Also quality Content Helps You Generate Backlinks, in fact for Google high-quality backlinks indicates credibility and trust.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC (pay-per-click), unlike SEO, is a paid digital marketing medium to advertise your landscaping business. You pay for advertisements to be displayed on the search engines. This greatly benefits your landscaping business, as you can specifically target the audience based on landscaping needs in a targeted location. So, every time your ad is clicked, you are sure that the landscaping business is attracting relevant audience.
Search engine advertising is one of the most popular modes of PPC. It will allow you to bid for ad placement on search engine result page (SERP) when someone searches for the targeted keyword.
So if you want to start using PPC for your landscaping business, it’s important to learn how to do it right. To launch your Google PPC campaign there are five steps to take note of:
- Keywords
As mentioned above keywords are the game-changing aspect in SEO as well as PPC campaigns and yet many tend to overlook or exert insufficient focus keyword research. Researching your targeted keywords is the most basic but most important element to consider in PPC marketing. It involves trying to identify the actual search terms your targeted customers are using and are searching for, and create appropriate ad groups based on these keyword lists.
Now let’s find out how to create ad groups.
- Ad Groups
An ad group contains one or more ads that share similar targets. Here you set a bid, or price, to be used when keywords trigger an ad to appear. This process of online bidding decides the position of your ad on SERP. Lastly, when you are all set, use ad groups to organize your ads by a common theme, such as the types of products or services you want to advertise.
Example: Landscaping campaign could contain various ad groups for services like lawn maintenance, backyard designing, gardening services, etc. running multiple ads per ad group.
- Ad Copies
This is the actual ad your potential customers will see. An ad copy includes a headline and a description. When you create your ad copy, be sure to check the character limits for your Google PPC ads. In most cases, headlines can have a maximum of 30 characters while descriptions can have a maximum of 90 characters. The new format allows up to 270 characters, three headlines of 30 characters and two description lines of 90 characters.
- Budget
Strategic budget utilization is the principle element of any business and holds utmost importance. Determine the ROI you want to generate and how much you are willing to spend for it. Fortunately, digital marketing gives you another advantage of promoting your business with a very small amount.
Here you set an amount you are willing to spend on a campaign daily. For Google, you will be charged in 30 days or when your billing threshold is reached.
Social Media
Social media has been escalating rapidly. It is the most powerful medium on the internet that allows you to connect with a wider number of audiences very effectively. Today, social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are used by every modern organization to promote their brands.
The social media posts serve two primary purposes; they allow you to promote your business to a prospective audience on a social media channel, and they build a searchable social backlink to your business.
When you use social media marketing to help grow your business, instead of thinking of Instagram or Facebook as a direct sales channel, use social media in a way to engage your audience, building credibility and brand image over a long period of time.
You might want to consider these ‘Must Do’s’ while working on building your landscaping portfolio on social media:
- Add a video or two regarding your company and the services you offer.
- Add as many pictures as you can to your gallery.
- Include a call to action when you add your services.
- Request your customers to leave you a review; this will help you make an impression.
- Be active on social media; Post a minimum of 2 times per week.
Content Marketing
The first rule of great content is that it must aid and appeal to your ideal customer. Content marketing is a process of creating valuable, relevant content to attract, acquire, and engage potential audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action. Driving more traffic to your website is where the concept of linking: Internal and external comes in, which opens new doors for content marketers.
Internal linking lets you create a link from one page of your website to another. While internal linking make sure to use descriptive keywords in anchor text that give a sense of the topic or keywords the source page is trying to target.
An external link is more valuable when it links to popular and relevant pages that are highly ranked and related to the content on your web page. Adding trustworthy and informative website links of high quality to your pages will help improve the credibility of your website which will help to improve the authority of your website resulting in better ranks on Google.
Conclusion
Usually, when someone types “landscaper” into Google, chances are they will choose a company found on the first page of results. If you’re buried on page five, you’re losing out on potential leads which could bring big money.
Quality SEO will force Google to take a look at your site. With some simple content tweaks and link building efforts, your website will rise up the Google ranks. Imagine being able to sit back and let the leads generate themselves. That is what a strong SEO campaign can do for you!