Landscaping SEO

Understanding Landscaping SEO

Similar to other contracting businesses, landscaping companies have to endure severe competition impacted by the current economy. If you want your firm to not only survive but also develop and grow, you need a solid customer acquisition strategy.

Search engine optimization SEO can help your business connect with your target audience and convert potential customers.

An effective SEO strategy pursues and attains several goals:

1. target commercial high-volume and high-intent keywords
2. increase your positions on search engine results pages (SERPs)
3. steadily grow your website traffic
4. attract potential customers and convert them

Why your landscaping business needs SEO:

1. The ROI of SEO efforts is high.
2. Search engine optimization boosts other digital marketing efforts.
3. You attract people who are looking for landscaping services.
4. The SEO campaign has a long-standing effect and will bring results for a long time.

Digital Marketing for Contracting Businesses

This guide on SEO for landscaping companies is written by the digital marketing experts of dNOVO Group. It’s part of our series of marketing materials for contracting businesses. Check out our other guides:

• Roofing Marketing
• Roofing SEO
• Contractor Marketing
• Contractor SEO
• Construction Marketing
• Construction SEO
• Landscaping Marketing

Key Elements of SEO Strategy

An efficient SEO Strategy requires an organized work of multiple knowledge workers with a varied set of skills.

It’s a long-term endeavour that will bring results to your landscaping business several months after you begin. However, the results will have a game-changing effect on your company.

The key elements of the SEO for landscapers are:

• Keyword research
• Content marketing
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO
• Local SEO

Remember that each element of your landscaping SEO is equally important. If you want to make the most of your search engine marketing, you need to take care of them all. Now, let’s take a closer look at each element.

Keyword Research and Planning

If you want people to find your landscaping business online, you need to target specific keywords. To achieve it you need to pick a keyword, create a content piece optimized for this keyword and publish in on your website as a separate page (or a blog post)

In this section, we explain how to choose the keywords for your website. The next section will explain how to build content around them.

Keyword Characteristics

Understanding keyword characteristics is essential for a successful SEO strategy. You need to understand these characteristics to be efficient in your keyword research.

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Volume

Keywords differ in their popularity. Some enjoy thousands of searches per month. Others have these numbers in dozens. Marketers and SEO specialists use the term volume to denote this keyword characteristic.

Check out the screenshot below. It shows the characteristics of the keyword “landscaping.” It has a large volume of 12,100 searches per month. Quite impressive isn’t it?

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The bigger the volume the more people will get to your page, right? Not so fast! There’s another keyword characteristic that can become an obstacle between you and all the traffic.

Difficulty

In the screenshot above you can see the keyword difficulty (a red circle with a gray sector next to 79%). Landscaping is a difficult keyword. You’ll need 125 backlinks from hight-authority websites, something, you can’t do overnight.

When it comes to such generic keywords, the competition will be severe. You will stand against retailer giants like Home Depot selling materials for landscaping projects, popular image boards like Pinterest, DIY websites, and your other landscaping companies.

Unfortunately, if you do not get to the top of the search results, your chances of getting even the smallest portion of this traffic are slim. User behaviour research shows that only 9% get to the bottom of the first page, and less than 1% get to the second page.

Perhaps you can look for something more specific to your business, for example, “landscaping services”:

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Now, while this keyword has a much smaller volume, you have much higher chances to get to the top of SERP for this keyword.

Search intent

Another advantage of landscaping services over landscaping is the search intent. You can see the information about this keyword characteristic in the third column in the screenshot below:

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As you can see the intent of the “lawn maintenance near me” is transactional as opposed to the informational intent of landscaping and commercial intent for landscaping services. This means that people are looking for different types of pages when they use these terms.

Informational intent means people want to learn about the topic in general. They can be looking for the word definition, a broader explanation in the encyclopedia, or some generic knowledge.

When people want to learn about products or services available on the market as well as research the providers, their search intent is commercial. Transactional intent means they are ready to make a purchase.

Types of Keywords

Marketers usually have 2 categorizations of keywords: by their length (short-tail and long-tail keywords) and by their role in the content piece (focus and LSI keywords).

Short-tail keywords are words or phrases. An example of such keywords for landscaping SEO would be:

• landscaping company
• turfing
• mulching
• backyard
• backyard patio contractors
• artificial turf grass installation

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Use these keywords for service pages if they have commercial intent and low or medium difficulty. You can also use them as LSI keywords in your content.

Long-tail keywords are usually sentences that people use to ask questions. Most often, their intent is informational and they can be used for your blog.

The great thing about long-tail keywords is that you don’t need to think about the topic of your blog, you can simply find a question and write an answer to it.

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The focus keyword is the keyword you want to rank for in Google. To attain high rankings, you need to create a content piece dedicated and optimized for the said keyword.

Apart from content optimized for this keyword, you’ll need LSI keywords. These are the keywords related to your topic. They would usually appear in the text dedicated to your focus keyword. It will help Google understand that your text is truly dedicated to a certain topic.

For example, you choose paving stone installers near me. Search engines will expect to find words like natural paving stone, artificial paving stone, installation methods, etc.

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How to Conduct Keyword Research for Landscaping SEO?

Keyword research has several main steps:

• acquire a keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner;
• check for all the suggested keywords;
• look at your competitors;
• thinks about your clients’ FAQs;
• pick the keywords with the best volume-to-difficulty ratio of different intents.

Some tools like SurferSEO can help you with LSI search. Check out the screenshot below featuring LSI keywords for an article:

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The next step in the SEO for landscapers is to create a content marketing plan based on the chosen SEO keywords.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the basis of your SEO efforts. To rank for a keyword you will need a high-quality content piece and backlinks in some cases.

Understanding Content Clusters

One of the reasons why Google dominates the search engine market is its efficiency. According to User Behaviour Research by Backlinko, only 17% of users go back to Google search results. This means that this search engine does a great job of finding exactly what people are looking for.

One of the aspects that Google looks into is website specialization. Let’s say, all the website pages are dedicated to landscaping services.

If you upload a well-optimized blog post containing 10 tips for hiking in a desert, it will not rank high. The reason is that search engines do not recognize this website as an authoritative source of information about travelling (or deserts).

Furthermore, since the post about desert trip tips is the only one on this topic, the visitor cannot continue their learning journey on this website.

That’s why creating content clusters is one of the effective SEO strategies and we highly recommend it.

A content cluster is a collection of pages and blog posts dedicated to one particular topic. One cluster can have multiple subclusters.

For example, your website will have a general “landscaping business” content cluster. Next, you will have subclusters for each landscaping service.

We suggest building one page as the main page of the cluster with other pages referring to it. Apart from showcasing the content cluster, it will show search engines which page in the cluster is the most important one.

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How to Plan Content Marketing Strategy

We suggest planning your content strategy around content clusters. It’s easier to get the keywords ranking if you signal to Google that you have a whole cluster of written articles and pages on a certain topic.

We suggest picking several keywords and creating a content plan for the next two months. Your content plan will include major information about each content piece and in some cases their SEO performance.

Here’s the information we suggest including in the content plan:

• focus keyword + its volume and difficulty
• content type (page, blog, whitepaper)
• link to the document with the final version
• link to the published version
• the due dates for each step (e.g., image design, writing, staging, publishing).

Each content plan is unique and is based on your team composition and your unique publishing process.

For example, if you have only one content writer, it will be hard to produce more than 8 high-quality medium-sized articles per month.

On-Page SEO Optimization

On-page SEO is critical for strategic SEO for landscapers. Just writing a page isn’t enough. You need to place your focus keyword and some LSI keywords in certain places. It will help crawlers understand that your post is indeed dedicated to your focus keyword.

Here’s where crawlers will expect to find your focus keyword:

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Content

The rule of thumb is you put your focus keyword once per each 100 words of your article. In addition to this, we suggest placing it in the first paragraph of your text. Usually, the articles follow the general rule of essays where you talk about your topic at the very beginning of the text.

Headers

Headers help you break down a long text into more digestible pieces. They have special HTML code to discern them from other content on your page.

There are several levels of headers that are usually abbreviated to H followed by their level in the hierarchy:

1. Page titles (H1s) are the first-level headers. This is usually the main title of your page. One content piece can only have one H1.
2. Mandatory headers are the second-level headers (H2). They mark the separate sections of your content, each dedicated to an individual subject.
3. Non-mandatory headers (H3-H6). You can use them to further divide your content in each section into smaller subsections.

If you want good on-page SEO, use your keyword in H1 and at least one H2.

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Metadata

Metadata comprises title tags and meta descriptions. This is information that’s not visible on your page, it’s reserved for search engines.

You can see title tags and meta descriptions in the individual snippets on the SERP. They describe in short the contents of your page.

As a rule of thumb, title tags are copies of your H1. However, if your main header is too long or too short, we suggest tweaking your title tag to be around 40-50 characters. You can also rewrite it to be more catchy. The meta descriptions should be between 140-160 characters.

Both a title tag and the meta description should contain the focus keyword.

URL

Crawlers inspect your URLs and they expect to find your focus keyword there. So if you have a page dedicated to landscaping services GTA, your URL shouldn’t reflect that:

domain.ca/landscaping-services-GTA

Generally, there are several rules around URLs:

• readability is a must: a human must look at your slug and be able to understand what your page is about;
• avoid special characters except for “-“;
• avoid slugs like “1875”, “landscaping-9ab”, “psghw32r”, “?page-1”, etc.

Alt Texts

Alt text is the text that briefly describes what your picture is about. It’s necessary for people with visual impairments who use web page readers to browse the Internet. Google strives to be available to all humans equally, that’s why alt texts are an important practice.

Also, your image can rank in image searches if it has alt texts. This is especially good for the galleries of landscaping companies as well as articles dedicated to DIY landscaping and landscaping ideas.

Off-Page SEO Strategies

When discussing keyword difficulty, we mentioned that some keywords are hard to target. They require not only a high-quality content piece but also a number of referring domains, i.e., backlinks.

Your brand recognition also impacts your position in Google. The more notable your brand is the higher your rankings will be.

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The practice of supporting your SEO through referring domains and brand recognition is called off-page SEO. Unfortunately, working on the brand can be hard for landscaping SMB unless you work in the premium sector. That’s why we suggest focusing on the first practice:

Link Building

Links from other websites signal to Google that your content is valuable enough to share it with others. Remember, though, that not all backlinks are equally valuable in the eyes of search engines.

Links from encyclopedias, educational organizations, news outlets, and magazines dedicated to landscaping will have a positive impact on your ranking. Social Media Marketing can help you get the backlinks for free.

Links from unrelated websites or from websites with lower domain authority will have a lesser impact. In contrast, some websites will have a negative impact. Usually, these are the websites of semilegal businesses.

Your task will be to disavow these links in the Google Search Console. Check out an example of a digital marketing tool to find toxic backlinks:

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Technical SEO for Landscapers

Technical SEO is one of the most complex landscaping SEO strategies. Similar to most SEO projects, it requires continuous monitoring and control. Your SEO specialist and webmaster will need to do regular interventions to fix an error, improve the performance or tweak something on your website.

This work, though knowledge-intensive, will be rewarded. Google and other search engines assess the UX of your website and rank you accordingly. If two websites have similar quality of content and domain authority, the one with better Technical SEO will be placed higher in search rankings.

The jobs that comprise technical SEO are plenty that’s why we group them into 4 main categories (by their purpose):

• Optimizing navigation
• Assisting crawlers
• Improving website performance
• Miscellaneous

Optimizing Navigation

Navigation is essential for the experience of website visitors. Google wants to make sure that once a visitor gets to your page they can easily find all the necessary information on a certain topic and continue their learning or buying journey on your website if necessary.

If it’s hard to navigate your website, you will not deliver the optimal user experience. That’s why your rankings will be lower in the search engine results page. Now, here’s how you provide good navigation.

Website architecture

Get a list of all your pages and check how they are organized on your website. The idea is that you need to arrange them in categories (and subcategories if necessary) with a clear hierarchy. They must all be linked accordingly.

Your homepage is will be at the top of the hierarchy. It should have links to pages of the second level of the hierarchy which should link to the third level etc.

For example, a blog page is the second-level hierarchy, and individual posts are the third level. You will not place links to all your blogs on your main page.

Hierarchy is also reflected in your website URL. A second-level page will have the slug separated from your domain name with “/” sign (forward slash). For example:

domain.ca/landscaping-service

The URL of the third-level pages will contain the slug of the second-level page and their own slug divided by a forward slash. For example:

domain.ca/blog/how-to-hire-best-landscaping-company

Now you also need to find “orphan pages”. These are pages that do not have any website pages referring to them and do not link to any other pages. Orphan pages are considered bad navigation and a shady practice that search engines punish.

Navigation Menu

The navigation menu is one of the good practices of search engine optimization in general. It enables your visitors to get to all the important pages of your website easily.

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The navigation menu should reflect your website architecture. Usually, it contains second-level pages. If the hierarchy has two many levels, the menu can contain more levels, however, it’s usually the case for large retailers like Amazon that have many categories of products.

Individual blogs almost never get to the menu.

Interlinking

Placing links referring to other pages on a page eases navigation. It also shows which pages have the biggest authority on the website and within the cluster.

You can also use interlinking to build buyer journeys. For example, if you are writing an article, make sure it contains at least one call-to-action link that leads to the page where the visitors can convert to landscaping clients.

Breadcrumbs & Pagination

It’s best to provide breadcrumbs navigation on third-level pages. Usually, it’s a sequence of links to the higher level of navigation. For example:

Landscaping Company > Blog > Best lawn care companies in [your city]

Pagination is necessary when you have dozens of similar elements on the page, especially if you have pictures. Loading all of them will decrease the page download speed. That’s why they are usually divided into pages. An example would be a page with goods on a shop’s page.

Landscaping websites usually need pagination only on their blogs.

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Assisting Search Engine Crawlers

Search engine crawlers are programs that analyze your website and web pages to register them in the search engine (a process called indexing) and rank them.

There are several ways you can assist crawlers:

1. Create and submit XML sitemap

It’s a file containing all the links to your web pages that you want to index on search engines. Use Google Search Console to do it.

2. Manual indexing

If you already have a submitted sitemap, you can submit pages for indexing. It will speed up the discoverability of your pages. You can also do it if you make significant changes to your pages.

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3. Create redirects

When you delete pages that have been indexed on search engines, the page will stay in search results for some time. However, people will only see a 404 page when they click on the page’s link.

Google punishes such practices. To avoid it, create a redirect to another page.

4. Create robots.txt file

This file will tell crawlers which pages to crawl on your website (but it will not remove them from indexing). It prevents overloading your website with requests.

Improving Website Performance

Slow or glitchy website performance can deliver a bad user experience and lower your website’s ranking on the search engine results page.

There are several things you can do to improve your website performance:

1. Create a mobile version to deliver a seamless experience on mobile devices.
2. Decrease the size of your images by converting them to WEBP format.
3. Clean your HTML code of redundant elements.
4. Consider changing the domain provider to a faster one.
5. Avoid using videos that start playing automatically on your page or work with their size.

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Other Technical SEO Tactics

In this section, we discuss other technical SEO tactics that will help you improve your rankings in search results.

1. Remove duplicate content to avoid cannibalization
2. Assign canon tags if you don’t want to remove duplicates
3. Assign no-indexing to pages you don’t want to index.
4. Get HTTPS to improve security.

Local SEO for Landscaping

Many landscaping businesses have a limited area of service. That’s why they want to attract only local customers. You can achieve it by applying a local SEO strategy.

This strategy will enable your landscaping company to appear in local searches. Mostly, it is achieved by targeting keywords related to specific locations and creating a Google Business Profile.

Benefits of Local SEO:

1. You reach out to local customers.
2. You don’t waste resources on customers from other areas.
3. Aiming for local searches is easier than getting to the top of global search engine results.

Local Keywords

Adding keywords that contain a particular geographic name can help you appear in local search rankings.

A landscaping business usually creates a separate page for each large municipality within its area of service. An example would be lawn care Guelph:

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As you can see the keyword difficulty is only 6%. Basically, all you have to do is simply create and upload the page to appear in search engine results.

Google Business Profile

To establish themselves as local businesses and boost local SEO, landscaping companies can create a business profile with Google.

Benefits of Google Business Profile for landscaping businesses:

1. It boosts Local SEO.
2. Your landscaping business will appear on Google Maps.
3. You get backlinks and increase website traffic.
4. You can list important information like business hours, the address, and the website right on Google and Google Maps.

Landscaping SEO Tips

In this section, we list 3 SEO tips for landscaping companies to boost your search engine optimization.

Boost Traffic with PPC

When you’re only starting SEO for landscapers, it’s hard to get through to the top of search results. Pay-per-click advertising can get you above the organic results. Here are the benefits of PPC:

1. 200% ROI.
2. Your business gets exposure.
3. Your website gets more qualified traffic.
4. Local businesses can fine-tune the audience to only get to local customers.

List your Landscaping Company in Business Directories

Online directories for businesses can benefit you in several ways:

1. Get backlinks to your main page.
2. Get more traffic to your website.
3. Connect with your target audience.
4. Build the trust of potential customers.
5. Boost local SEO.

Hire Landscaping SEO Services

Find an SEO company that will strategize and implement landscaping SEO for you. dNOVO Group provides digital marketing services to landscaping companies and has vast experience in this field.

The benefits of hiring dNOVO Group include:

1. Cost-saving search engine optimization
2. Expertise in landscaping SEO.
3. Ability to get other digital marketing services.

Are you ready to get more traffic and qualified leads?

Book a free consultation with dNOVO.