What is a Good Lawn Care Business SEO strategy?

Lawn Care Pros are always on the hunt for tips to help them run a successful lawn care business.  If you’re not researching ‘how to run a successful lawn care business‘ then likely your client book is already full, or you have no desire to grow your business beyond it’s current capacity.  If that’s the case then congrats, you can stop reading!

So you’ve got your new lawn business website up and running and now it’s time to let the world know who the best lawn company in town is.  What next? Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). If they can’t find it, your time was wasted building a kickass website.  

Lawn Care SEO can be a tricky thing for those who don’t fully understand what SEO is, and how it works.  Keywords, Meta tags, image alt tags, proper use of structure and headings, it can be a daunting task.  Fortunately the internet is chock full of good content for the DIY lawn care business pro to sharpen their skills and build a lawn business website that gets good rankings. 

At LPM our strategy is somewhat unique. We focus on the use of organic content and rely less on expensive pay per click campaigns to drive traffic to our clients lawn care sites.

Let’s take a look at some of the basic elements of good lawn care SEO to get you going on the right foot.  While the following information is by no means a comprehensive list to get your lawn business website on the top of google rankings, you’ll find it’s a great start.

In this post we’re going to take a quick look at the following key metrics for quality SEO:

• Meta Information
• Page Quality
• Page Structure
• Links
• Server
• External

META INFORMATION

Website Title: This is the title of your lawn business website.  The length of your website meta title should be no more than 60 characters.  Refrain from using duplicate words in the title. 

Meta Description: This is the summary of what your site is about.  Most SEO amateurs try to fill this up with keywords.  Don’t do it! – This is not the place for that.  Focus on writing a well thought out description about your badass lawn care website.  Save the lawn care business keywords for your content on the website.  Be mindful not to exceed 160 characters in length.

PAGE QUALITY

Content: This is the meat of your lawn care website.  This is where you want to start feathering in your keywords.  All pages should have roughly 800 words or more.  Keywords used in the page title should also be used in the page content.  Words from the H1 heading should also be used in the page content. 

Here at LPM we’ve learned the best way to write good content is to study your competition to see what keywords they’re ranking with. Use tools like Answer The Public to understand what people search for.  Then start writing!  Don’t bog yourself down on crafting a masterpiece of literature.  Just get the words on the page. Fine tuning can happen later.

Image SEO: aka ‘alt tags’ for images.  Spend 5 minutes and understand what they are and why you should use them.  There are countless lawn care websites out there that look great but sadly they’re not using alt tags on their images and this is costing them traffic. Note: don’t use the same alt tags over and over again.  Mix them up. 

Pro Tip: Use alt tags like ‘landscaping service near me, lawn care Houston, leaf cleanup Austin, Affordable lawn care, etc… 

Social Networks: It’s very important to add your social sharing icons to your content pages to drive users to your social sites so they can see up to date social posts.

PAGE STRUCTURE

Headings: It’s important to understand what H1-H5 headings are and how to use them correctly.  Proper website structure is very important for search engines when indexing your site.  We’ll post another article at a later date with more depth on proper use of header structure. 

Here’s an example of a proper heading structure:

H1 – ABC Company Services

H2 –  Mowing

H2 – Fertilizing

H2 – Winter Cleanups

H2 – Irrigation

LINKS

Internal Links:  Use them! When you have a paragraph that is explaining something related to fertilizing, link “Fertilizing” to your internal page that has information about your fertilizing service.  If you reference a specific brand of equipment elsewhere on your site and have an equipment page, then link that content to other pages in your site.  It keeps the user on your site and increases your visit time.  You want that!

External Links: Use these too.  Don’t be afraid to send traffic away from your site.  If you use a specific brand of fertilizer and you want to share the specifics of that brand, use an external link and send them to Milorganite.com or Scotts.com or whoever.  There’s a little thing called backlinks if you’re not aware of them.  Milorganite will see I’m sending traffic to them and they may feel inclined to share a backlink to my site in the future.  Website owners pay big money for backlinks and this is your opportunity to gain the possibility of snagging one for free.  We will discuss backlink strategies in a future blog post.

SERVER

Performance: No one likes a slow loading lawn care website.  Often lawn and landscape companies have very nice images of their work but they forget those images taken with their iphones are upwards of 5mb each.  This is not good! Optimizing images for fast loading is critical to a good end user experience.  Most website building tools like WordPress have optimization tools available to compress images.  Use them!

Page load speeds are greatly affected by the number of CSS and JavaScript files on your site.  There are tools in WordPress to combine CSS files and reduce JavaScript file sizes.  These should be used. 

Pro Tip: Backup your site before you start optimizing server settings.  Often when you begin manipulating server settings you may damage the site structure and you’ll be glad you had a backup to revert to.

Check out our SEO Packages or reach out to our team so that we can help you get started if you’re struggling with SEO for your lawn or landscape business website.

As always, please feel free to reach out to the Lawn Pro Marketing team if you need any additional support or guidance to help you promote your lawn & landscape business on Social Media