The No-Nonsense Guide to Lawn Care Marketing

If you are trying to get lawn care customers (fertilization, weed control, etc.) you probably already realize there are both tremendous opportunities and challenges. Consider these points based on data from the lawn care businesses we work with:

• Lawn care accounts average $500 - $750 and are commonly retained for five to seven years. That’s an average customer value of $2,500 - $5,000. 
• Fertilization, weed control, etc. is highly profitable with a gross profit of 50-60%. 
• The lawn care space is extremely competitive. There are international brands with deep pockets and countless local lawn care companies to contend with.

Image Source:  Lawn Buddies

This is why I’ve created this in-depth resource specifically geared to lawn care companies from $2M - $20M in annual revenue. And, if you’re aspiring to reach that revenue level, these tips can guide you on that path, too.

My goal is to provide you with comprehensive insights based on decades of experience to help you profitably break through your growth ceiling. Let’s dig in!

- Chad Diller, Vice President of Landscape Leadership & 25+ year green industry veteran

Every lawn care website embodies a "template". It boils down to whether you prefer something entirely personalized from the ground up or if you're fine with a ready-made template employed by hundreds (or even thousands) of others across all sorts of industries.

Image Source: Grassperson Lawn & Landscape

Design From a Mobile-First Perspective

We see that 59% of lawn care website visits originate from mobile devices. This figure has steadily increased over the past years.

Customers are frequently on the move each day and may not always have their laptops on hand, so ensuring your website design is mobile-friendly shouldn't be a secondary consideration.

Image Source:  RainMaster Lawn Systems

Use Lawn Care SEO Keywords Prudently

Handpick a few, closely-linked lawn care SEO keywords for each page. Ensure these phrases feature in the titles and URLs of those pages. For instance, you might opt for "lawn fertilization", "lawn fertilizing company", and "lawn fertilizing service" for a page dedicated solely to lawn fertilizing.

Integrate keywords naturally into your pages' written content. Steer clear of the pitfall of "keyword-stuffing". Be sure to also incorporate the right lawn care SEO keywords in your image names and their descriptive (ALT) text.

Connect Your Lawn Care Website with Google

I can’t tell you how many times lawn care companies come to me and we can’t see any historical results because someone missed this steps in their previous website. Be sure to take these steps. 

• Embed the Google Analytics tracking code onto your website.
• Submit your website to Google Search Console.

Within a few seconds, these positioning points should prompt non-target visitors (people looking for a cheap mowing company or in another state) to realize they're in the wrong place. Potential customers or job seekers should feel completely at ease.

Keep in mind that your homepage is like your doorway. It's not meant to accomplish everything, but rather, to begin the journey of a potential customer or job candidate.

Image Source:  Oasis Turf & Tree

One of the big mistakes with creating lawn care pages is to cram too much content on one page. Think about your content on different levels. 

If you offer lawn care, perimeter pest control, and plant health care, you could have a top-level page for “Services”. It covers them at a glance and then offers a link to venture into one of these options. Let’s say your user clicks “More About Lawn Care”. Then, they go to the following page. 

Image Source:  Seacoast Turf Care

Remember the other important audience you need to engage - prospective team members. As you grow your lawn care business, you'll need to focus more on lawn care recruiting efforts and give specific examples of how you build a great company culture.

You can do this with a basic lawn care jobs page, but our lawn care website design sometimes incorporates a more comprehensive career hub. 

Image Source:  Joshua Tree Experts

• Beautiful lawns you service
• Customers using lawn areas
• Team members performing treatments
• Support staff behind the scenes
• Examples of lawn problems

It's crucial to invest in professional lawn care photography over several years. This will lead to a collection of hundreds of excellent images you can utilize. 

Image Source:  Kingstowne Lawn & Landscape

Videos are wonderful tools to address a wide array of challenges. The most apparent production might be a lawn care promotional video.

But you can also utilize lawn care videos to explain services, share customer case studies, or answer very specific questions. You can even create videos to enhance your recruiting efforts.

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There are a number of places you can feature lawn care reviews on your website. Some of these include:

• Review Carousels:  This widget allows a visitor to cycle through a hand-picked assortment of reviews. This is common on a homepage but can be used elsewhere, too.
• Single Reviews:  This section may call out a single review on a page. It’s most impactful when it meets the context of the page. For instance, a weed control page should have a testimonial about someone saying how you helped get rid of their weeds.
• Reviews or Testimonials Page:  You may want to create a single page containing all of your reviews. You could create a small button that takes people there when they click “Read More Testimonials”.
• Animated Review Widgets:  Some review software platforms make it easy to embed a widget that cycles through reviews at the bottom of the page. This is a great element to include on a landing page where there is a quote request form. 

Valuable Content Marketing

Let’s face it. People aren’t always in buying mode when they come to your lawn care website. In addition to helping you rank for many long-tail keyword searches, lawn care content marketing will help prospective customers in these stages:

• Awareness:  A homeowner may just become aware of a potential concern in their yard. Create content giving them an overview and general info.
• Consideration:  This prospect knows their problems and needs to consider which solutions work best for them. Help them make good choices about their options.
• Decision:  Now that they know their problem and have considered solutions, this final stage is all about reaching out to potential service providers. Help them know how to fairly compare lawn care companies and what questions to ask them.

If you do a great job with your content marketing, your prospect will be informed and see you as a helpful expert prior to the sales process. Within your website content, be sure to provide clear calls-to-actions (CTA buttons) for users to click that take them to whatever next step makes sense. 

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E-Commerce Solutions

We can buy cars online today. Why not a lawn care program? E-commerce solutions are allowing the ability for homeowners to buy a lawn care program online, even in their pajamas on a Saturday morning. 

These solutions will capture contact information along the way as artificial intelligence measures the lawn. Postion exact pricing for lawn care options and you may come into the office to instant sales in the morning. At minimum, you will collect all of the contact info and measurements along the way which is a hot lead for your lawn care sales team. 

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Lawn Care Google Ads Campaigns

We typically divide campaigns into three main categories:

• Services:  These are the most obvious ads to target for things such as “lawn care service”, “lawn fertilizing companies”, and “lawn aerating service”. There are dozens of various ads you should create.
• Brand:  This targets your branded terms. It’s the cheapest ads you can place and can also knock competitors out of the rotation if they’re targeting your brand as well.
• Competitors:  You can target your competitors as well. This isn’t unethical. Just search for any product and you’re likely to see this. Just create ads positioning you as another alternative. Don’t say anything bad about your competitors but offer objective comparison points on your landing page. 

Whenever creating your ads, be sure to take advantage of most of the features that Google Ads offers including various levels of headings, descriptions, image links, callouts, sitelinks, offers, and more.

Image Source:  Seacoast Turf Care

Unfortunately, you can waste a lot of money with Google Ads. DIY approaches using Google’s “easy” settings benefit Google, mostly. Finding a quality Google Ads specialist is paramount to getting a good ROI. 

Marketing agencies often offer “management” but do very little past the initial setup and a few small monthly tweaks to adjust budgets. Your agency should be spending a minimum of 3-5 hours each month creating new ads and landing pages, finding new keyword opportunities, and negatively targeting certain undesirable terms (DIYers and people looking to buy materials). 

If they’re doing the right things, your cost per lead should end up somewhere around $15-35 per lead (not counting management fees). And, you should get more and more great leads over time.

Another lightweight tool is Google Local Services Ads (LSAs or Google Guaranteed). This simplified platform allows you to get verified with the right documentation and get a flashy checkmark next to your name in ads. 

It’s an easy way to get lawn care leads but there are a few things to know:

• Setup is a bit cumbersome and takes a lot of time.
• Google doesn’t currently have enough categories as it relates to lawn care. There is a “lawn pest control” and “weed control” but not a few other types you may like such as fertilization, aeration, etc. Hopefully, they’ll add them in the future.

• Optimum success on this platform means using it correctly. You have to use their mobile app or the web interface to manage leads. There is also a pipeline of various lead stages. The more you move leads through the “Booked” and “Completed” stages, the more it tells Google you’re taking your leads seriously. Many companies miss this.
• You can dispute leads. The calls are recorded. If it’s clearly outside your service area or a service you don’t provide Google can refund your money if you go through the right steps.
• The lead volume will likely be substantially lower than the traditional Google Ads mentioned above.  

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Every marketing agency has a core competency. In our case, we focus on all things digital. But that’s not to say we don’t get involved in other things that intersect this like video production, photography, and graphic design.

It’s important to understand the scope of your lawn care marketing agency’s services and consider which are critical for one primary partner to handle.