As a lawn care company or landscape contractor, have you ever been asked by a client, "How long will it take for my aeration and seeding to fill-in?", or, "How long will it take until my trees and shrubs mature?"
As a marketing agency, one of the keys to our clients' long-term successes comes from investing in content marketing.
As we create in-depth blog articles, case studies, and larger written content resources, we're often asked a similar question: "How long will it take before this content marketing starts working?"
It will take 12-18 months to start seeing significant results from content marketing. However, this long-term strategy will create a sustainable source for quality website traffic and leads.
As in landscaping and lawn care, we like to use the sleep, creep, leap analogy when describing the natural progression of content marketing. The cliche, "It's a marathon, not a sprint", is also appropriate.
Spending time and money without immediate payoff can be frustrating. We get that. But, it's just the reality of modern-day landscaping and lawn care marketing. Instead of over-focusing on short-term spending, we encourage our clients to focus on building a strong foundation that will drive bottom-line results over the long term in a sustainable way.
Gaining Momentum With Your Lawn Care or Landscaping Blog
We're going to take a close look at blogging as it relates to building momentum because first, blogging is one of the most important elements of a comprehensive content marketing program, and second, measuring the growth and progress of a blog is fairly straightforward.
Image Source: Ground Source Landscaping
Starting a company blog can be very frustrating. Typically this is because a lawn care or landscaping company doesn't start with their expectations in alignment with reality, which leads to abandoning the blog prematurely. The misguided expectation tends to unfold like this:
- We'll write and publish our awesome, one-of-a-kind insights as a blog post.
- People will instantly read our wonderful blog post about lawns and landscaping.
- Those same people will then buy our services immediately.
It's not magic! Blogging just doesn't work like that, folks!
The Goals of Content Marketing
Here are the main goals of blogging:
- Improving Domain Authority: The more your website talks about a topic (landscaping or lawn care) and hundreds of related subtopics, the more Google sees your website as an authority, thus increasing your ranking in search results. The more a user interacts with your website's content (time on site, number of pages visited), the better signals it sends back to Google.
- Gaining Relevant Organic Visits: Each blog article has a unique chance to rank in search results. When users see an article that piques their interest, they click on it and end up on your website. In fact, we see that 83-90% of website visitors enter a site on a blog post. If your content marketing has a compelling call-to-action and your website is also optimized for conversions (meaning it's easy for people to see their next step to fill out the form), the more likely you will get a lead.
- Establishing Thought Leadership: In addition to impressing Google, there is the mindshare of your audience. Commercial property managers, affluent homeowners searching for design solutions, and even the lawn care customer will often interact with a brand's content many times before filling out a website form.
[RELATED READING: The Number of Pages on Your Website Matters! Here's Why]
According to the software company, MOZ, it takes an average of seven visits to their website before a visitor signs up for a free trial. Seven visits for a FREE trial!
Blogging takes patience. You don't build trust with a stranger with a single blog post. It can take multiple visits and views before you acquire the trust of your website visitors and earn their distinction as an authority or expert on a topic. It could be many months after the first touch — and many visits later — that a prospect decides to fill out a contact form or pick up the phone and call you.
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My point should be clear: Don't give up prematurely when your writing appears to be falling on deaf ears. You've got to keep pushing until you get traction.
How long can that take? Let's take a look at some real-world examples.
Ground Source Landscaping
The graph below shows the blog post views since we started working with Ground Source Landscaping in Orlando, FL. They primarily work with homeowners providing sod installation and landscape design projects.
The existing website had a few dozen blog articles that weren't doing them many favors. At most, all of the articles were getting 200-300 views each month.
However, you can see our sleep, creep, leap analogy really coming into play. As we started blogging in fall of 2019 through the next 12 months, you can see the views increased to over 5k per month (17x the views).
The second and third year results dramatically increased. Consistent content marketing took Ground Source from 300 views a month to over 51,000 in a single month in May 2023!
Our strategy included creating 3-4 in-depth blog articles each month. Each year, we re-optimized some of the lower performers which further increased their results.
KD Landscape
This next example is from KD Landscape in the south Chicago suburbs. They provide both residential design-build and have a rapidly-growing book of commercial installation and maintenance accounts. They had a few blog articles when we started working with them, but we really ramped up efforts with 3-4 new articles each month.
One of the goals of content marketing is to increase organic search traffic, overall. While blog post views are often one of the first pages that a visitor sees, they also impact the overall organic search traffic of a website.
As you can see in the graph above, KD Landscape was only pulling in about 400 organic search visits each month. Over time, you can see this sleep, creep, leap reflected in their overall organic traffic across all website pages. In April of 2024, they saw 5k organic visits. That's 18x the organic traffic of the past.
More Website Visitors & Leads
Another positive indicator of content marketing momentum is the steady growth in the number of website visitors and new leads from organic search month over month.
Organic search traffic refers to those visitors who found your website via an online search engine like Google. Perhaps they searched for a phrase such as "lawn care cost Cincinnati" on Google and found your comprehensive blog article ranked in the top position on the results page.
This traffic from organic search is crucial to your online and overall business success because these are the folks who are probably not familiar with your business yet they have a current need and a relevant question pertaining to your services. You want them to find your article, not your competitor.
Image Source: Lawn & Pest Solutions
Many of the landscaping and lawn care websites we look at have stagnant or highly fluctuating traffic (based on the season) from organic search. You want steady growth month after month and year over year which translates into more and more prospects — who aren't familiar with your company — finding you on a regular basis.
Oasis Turf & Tree
Let's look at another real-world example from Oasis Turf & Tree who serves Cincinnati, Dayton, OH and Northern KY. They primarily offer residential lawn care programs (fertilization, weed control, etc.).
The graph above only shows the website form submissions on their website, over time. If you factor in the phone calls, the numbers are even higher!
As you can see, Oasis Turf & Tree's commitment to blogging over the last 9 years has steadily created more and more leads for their sales team. You can see that sleep, creep, leap trend in the first 3 years. As you look at the years to follow, pay attention to how there are even more leads in the off-peak months. While March and April typically yield 1,000-1,500 monthly leads, the slower months are slowly increasing as well.
Wrap up
As I said in the intro, inbound marketing should be treated as a marathon, not a sprint. From these examples you should be able to see the sustainable, snowball effect content marketing can have, not just on the number of website visitors, but on your bottom line as measured in new leads and new sales. That said, it clearly takes patience. Often 12-18 months is needed to get real traction with your biggest gains coming in years 2-3.
The beauty in the content marketing approach is that your effort and inputs — even in the very early stages — build on each other in almost an exponential way. This is very different from direct mail and traditional advertising that many of you in the landscape and lawn care industry are accustomed to.
I hope you found this article to be helpful. This question of "momentum" is one we're asked often! If you want more marketing and sales insights be sure to subscribe to our blog. If you're ready for a comprehensive plan including content marketing, request a consultation.
