How To Dominate Local SEO For Landscaping

If you’re in charge of local SEO for landscaping – Whether it’s your own business, or you’re an employee; These tips will help you to crush your competition for your chosen landscaping keywords.

When it comes to SEO, you’ll find that the overall strategies won’t differ too much between industries, but knowing the best practices for your industry, AND for your local area will put you a few steps ahead of your landscaping SEO competition.

1. Research Your Landscaping SEO Keywords

Keywords are the actual terms that people type into google (or other search engines) in order to get results. These days, more and more people are speaking their searching into their phones and tablets, rather than typing them. Not only that, but people expect and demand personalisation.

And for the purpose of your landscaping SEO, this means that you’ll be targeting longer, more specific keywords in order to rank well.

For example: Someone may type in “lawn care in London”.

Two of the problems you may run into right away are:

1. This keyword is very short, and pretty general. London is a huge area. And so not all London landscapers will actually work in all London postcodes. This means that although you may be able to get more landscaping calls for this keyword, you may be attracting work that you can’t even take on – Which is a waste of your resources. And that time and budget could have been used on SEO activities to bring you better enquiries.
2. It’s harder to rank for shorter, more general terms. This is because the obvious keywords are the ones that everyone thinks of first. This means more competition, and more time and money will need to go into ranking for such keywords. And as we’ve already found – They’re not even necessarily worth the effort.

Better keyword ideas in local SEO for landscapers:

• “lawn care specialist in South London” – If you only serve south London, then let your website reflect it, and only try to attract website visitors who will convert into genuine enquiries, and of course – business.
• “pattern imprinted driveways in Bristol” – This term shows user intent (i.e. what the person really wants) and user sophistication (how much they already know about what they want). Not only that, but people who are typing in terms like this are often pretty close to they end of the buying cycle.

So all in all, when you’re doing your landscaping SEO, try to select specific keywords that relate to your specific services, and the areas that you service.

2. On Page Local SEO For Landscaping

Once you know which keywords you’re going to be targeting for your landscaping SEO campaign, you’ll need to create pages that match your landscaping keywords. For each of your keywords, you’ll be creating a whole page which is dedicated to that keyword.

This means making sure google knows for sure what a given page is about – Because Google is all about relevance. By giving google absolute clarity as to the relevance of your page, you’ll be putting yourself in good standing.

Relevance and user experience in SEO

Relevance doesn’t simply mean mentioning your keyword hundreds of times on the page. Because although I mentioned that google loves relevance – Their main reason for that is because it helps them to increase user experience.

So if the user (the searcher) does not have a good experience on your website… Google will know – and it will affect hoe you rank. And no, google isn’t sending out questionnaires to your visitors.

They use cues such as “bounce rate” to get an idea of user experience. Bounce rate is the percentage of users who visited your website, and then left right away, “bouncing” back to google.

If there’s a clear pattern of a high bounce rate, then google will know that your page is not relevant, and you’ll be knocked down in the search results.

This is why matching your web pages to the intent of the user is so important. Give them what they’re looking for, and they’ll stick to your site.

And when you’re doing SEO for a landscaping  business, you’ll also need to make sure your visitors are made comfortable, and given enough information to get them to call you up and became a customer.

On-Page SEO semantics

It’s funny. As time goes by, SEO becomes less and less about the specifics, because google is getting better at working out what a website is about for themselves.

You may not know this, but there was a time that you’d actually give the search engines a list of keywords to look for on your web pages, because they couldn’t decipher it for themselves.

These days, they can read a page, work out what it’s about, and rank it for words that are never even mentioned on the page. For example… If an american website is talking about fuel economy and saving on “gas”… The page could rank for keywords such as “cheap petrol”, without ever mentioning the term.

This is both good and bad, because it means that you may have competitors who would have never thought o your keywords. But it also means that you can be a bit less careful about the semantics of “over-optimising” your page – and focus on user experience. But saying all of that… Here are a few things that still matter.

More specific on-page SEO factors

• Meta tags – These are little “notes” that we leave for search engines, such as the page title and description you want to be displayed in the search results. This used to include the long-gone “keywords” attribute I mentioned.
• Diverse content types – Including videos, images, and audio can help you to rank. Google loves websites who optimise user experience, so they’ll thank you for giving users multiple ways to digest your content.
• Optimising images – Google cares about load times. So use images that are big enough to look good, but not so big that your page takes 3 days to load. Also, google doesn’t know what’s in your images, so give them clues in your “alt” tags.
• Mention your keywords – Make sure you mention your keywords. I did say that you don’t NEED to in order to rank. But the more clarity you give to google, the easier it will be to rank for your keywords.
• Link to other pages – Your own pages, and pages that google already trusts. E.g. well-know landscaping websites, or news outlets and social networks.
• Pay attention to user experience – I already mentioned load times… But also make sure your website looks good in various browsers, and on different devices.

So in a nutshell… On page optimisation for local landscaping SEO means making sure you create a good user experience for people who actually want to find a local landscaper, and making sure your keywords are clear to google.

3. Off-page local SEO for landscaping

Off-page SEO means making sure the content that we create on our web pages is referred to, and “talked about” throughout the internet.

Okay, “throughout the internet” is somewhat of an exaggeration. But what I mean is that there should be other websites who found your content so interesting or valuable that they linked back to it.

Which is why we refer to these links as “backlinks”. As I mentioned earlier, google want to give their users the most relevant, useful results based on what they believe there user’s intent to be.

And so when google can see a lot of “buzz” around your content, they’ll assume its relevant and useful. Backlinks work like votes or endorsements. So if your website is being mentioned by important websites, local websites, and relevant/industry-specific websites, they’ll give you better rankings – Provided that they believe these backlinks are genuine.

On the flip-side… If you have 1000 random Chinese babysitting blogs talking about your landscaping website, google may suspect that something fishy is going on, and these links won’t help you nearly as much is if a landscaping magazine were to mention you on their website.

So how and where do you get landscaping backlinks?

• Directories – For example, landscaper.org.uk and other directories offer a free listing, where you can show your business. If your web address in clickable on your business, then that’s a valid backlink. There’s some more specific stuff about types of backlink, but we won’t go too deep on this article.
• Blog comments – Find a blog that talks about landscaping online. You can comment on one of their articles. You’l often be able to add a link to your website. There are right and wrong ways of doing this. But as long as you genuinely read the article, and leave a friendly, useful comment, you should be fine.
• Guest posting – As a landscaper, you could send in some photos of your best work to popular landscaping websites – or even less popular ones. You could simply ask for a linked credit to come with the photos. Not only will this give you a backlink, but it’ll help you to showcase your work.
• Social media – Post links to your content on social media (without spamming).

It’s also possible to pay for links on other websites. But when you’re paying to appear on another website solely for the sake of getting a backlink, you’re breaking google’s terms of service. And if you’re caught, you’ll be punished. So if you’re going for genuine advertising opportunities on other websites, then by all means, go for it.

Summary of local SEO for landscaping

1. Find relevant keywords that will attract the type of people you want visiting your website – The link of people who are most likely to do business with you. You can learn a lot about what someone wants based on what they search for online.
2. Make sure you pages give these people what they want by optimising your page for use experience. And before that – make sure the title and description appearing in the search engines actually gets them to click through to your website.
3. Make sure your website is being talked about online – by relevant and influential websites where possible. You can do this by offering other websites content (e.g. unique articles and images), and by promoting your content on social media.

By following these actionable steps in your local SEO for landscaping, you’ll be able to attract more website visitors through google. But if you’d like to learn more about where you currently are in your SEO journey, and what it’l take to level-up your landscaping website in terms of SEO, order a free SEO report using the form below:

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