Get 25-30% off Pro, Pro Plus, and Elite!
Get DemoGet Demo
If one of your competitors is growing faster than usual, look at their lawn care website. Chances are, they're using it as an online sales machine.
How?
Lawn Businesses that have a strong SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Conversion strategy always come out on top. I’ve seen this with companies all over the country.
And after designing, building, and analyzing hundreds of lawn care websites for my web design business, RocketThruster, I’ve got the winning formula for attracting visitors and turning them into paying lawn care customers.
Today, I’m going to share that winning formula with you.
Here are the 7 most important elements that will turn your lawn care website into a profit-generating sales machine:
You can think of keywords as a way to tell Google what your website is about.
Without a specific set of keywords, your lawn care website will become buried in the millions of other lawn care websites all trying to rank for the same keywords.
How to pick the right keywords:
Once you come up with your list of keywords use them naturally throughout your website.
If you throw keywords here and there, it won’t necessarily hurt your SEO, but it will reduce the number of people who invest their time to read what you have to say.
When it comes to optimizing a lawn care website for multiple service locations, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to cram those keywords into one page.
Spread those important keywords across a number of pages!
If you try and cram those keywords into one page, there’s a good chance that you’ll be flagged for Keyword Stuffing, which is not good.
Back in the older days of Google, a large part of how they ranked websites were based on how many times certain keywords showed up on your page.
But, as Google got smarter, they began to pick up on this trick and started penalizing websites trying to shortcut the algorithm.
This is why it’s so important to spread your keywords across multiple pages.
For example, let’s say my lawn care company served the cities Dallas, Richardson, Plano, and Allen - I would have a page for each of those cities.
This not only helps keep your pages specific, where you’re not cramming a ton of different keywords onto one page, but it also helps improve your ranking potential.
If you create a page that very specifically addresses the keyword “Lawn Care in Dallas, Texas” and I answered every possible question a visitor may have, chances are that page would perform very well.
At the end of the day, Google wants to put the best content first!
They don’t want to serve content that may not answer the visitor’s question.
The secret is to create individual pages for certain keywords and really focus on answering people’s questions. This shows Google that you are providing value in turn, you’ll show up higher in the results.
Want more customers?
The key is to make it EASY on them.
Have a bold, easy to notice, phone number at the top and bottom of your website; these are the places people look the most.
When you're looking for contact info, you don't want to dig. You want it to be front and center.
If your visitors are having to actively search for your contact information, you will very quickly see a drop off in the number of phone calls you are getting.
Pro Tip #1: When it comes to displaying your contact information on your lawn care website, make sure it is up to date. Having an outdated phone number or email on your website that doesn’t work anymore can REALLY hurt your website’s SEO ranking.
Pro Tip #2: Did you know that 52% of web traffic is done from our phones? A clickable phone number is a big deal! When possible, make your phone number clickable.
Your visitor’s behavior is totally different from what you may think.
The reasoning behind a website not having Call-to-Actions is due to the owner assuming the visitor knows what to do next.
In reality, they DON’T.
A book called “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steven Krug is hugely helpful as I’m designing websites for lawn care businesses.
It emphasizes that people's behavior may be totally different from what you expect online.
If you want people to take a certain action, whether it be requesting a free quote or calling your business, you need to make things unbelievably simple.
The people who are visiting your website are there to answer one question, “Are You Right For Them?” Once they get that question answered, you need to direct them through the final steps.
You need to make the next steps so clear, that all they need to do is move their mouse (or trackpad) and click on the bright colored button.
Beyond that, they shouldn’t need to do anything else.
But, wait!
How do I make my Call-to-Actions effective? I have buttons and links on my website, but I still don’t see the results I’m looking for!
Let’s break down what makes a good Call-to-Action.
How do I create a Call-to-Action that converts visitors into paying customers?
Let’s look at some examples of two websites that nailed it with their Call-to-Action.
First, let’s talk about ClickFunnels. If you know anything about them, you will know that they have mastered the art of the Call-to-Action.
While they aren’t a lawn care company, nor do they cater to lawn care companies, there is still a lot that you can learn from their website.
Anytime they address a "Take My Money" topic - that is, something a visitor may really want - they use a bold, instantly accessible call to action.
Remember the easier and less daunting the onboarding process is, the more people will take action and become a lead or customer.
PRO TIP - One other thing they use to get the visitor to take action is the “FREE Trial.” It is much easier to persuade someone to start using something for free versus asking them to pay immediately. As a lawn care company, the easy entry for your visitors could be a Free Quote or leveraging your 100% Money Back Guarantee.
Next, let’s look at a lawn care company's website.
Before I started working with A Cut Above... they were struggling with their CTAs.
They had all this great information on their website, but when the visitor was finally ready to get a free quote and schedule a lawn care service, they didn’t know where to go next.
In short, we did a thorough look around their website and found a number of places where we expected that a visitor may be ready to take the next step and get started.
After identifying those places, we placed Call-to-Action buttons that made sense with what they were originally offering (Such as a “Free Quote” button).
3 months after we made that change, they saw a 980% increase in the number of people that filled out a form and contacted their business.
Don’t underestimate the power of telling your visitor what to do next! It helped them out significantly and it will help your business too.
Want help with your Lawn Care Website?
Get Your Free Website Audit with RocketThruster.
Based on a number of studies from multiple sources, they found that 97% of people read reviews for local businesses and 93% of people said those reviews affected their purchasing decision.
You can see this by just looking back at how we make decisions.
What’s the first thing you look at when you’re selecting a product or service?
Chances are, it’s the reviews or testimonials of the product or service.
Testimonials are a very easy way to establish trust and credibility from the very start, which is super important.
Why?
Because if the visitor doesn’t trust you, they will default to the “Lowest Price Wins” mentality, which is always a race to the bottom.
People nowadays are making buying decisions based on what others are saying, they don’t necessarily care about what the business owners have to say about their own business.
They want to know what the people who tried your business are saying.
This makes new potential customers more confident in their decision and more willing to give new businesses a chance.
Where should I display my testimonials?
When it comes to displaying your testimonials on your website, it matters where you place them.
Too early and people forget about them.
Too late and people never see them.
A good rule of thumb is to place your testimonials right above the final Call-to-Action on your page.
What you are aiming for is to show those testimonials just before someone is ready to try your lawn care services or request a free quote.
This helps to reassure them that you are the right business for the job.
PRO TIP - As you are adding testimonials to your website, if you can, add your customer’s headshot next to their testimonial. Having a face to place with the testimonial helps make it feel more real and personal.
Stock photos are empty and meaningless.
They do nothing to convey the quality of your lawn care services.
The photos you show on your website need to be real and show off the quality of your work.
At the end of the day, you only have so much room to persuade someone that you are the right business for them, so take advantage of every opportunity you have to show you’re the best.
A case study was done by Spectrum, Inc. of Harrington Movers, a New Jersey and New York City moving company, which showed that the company was able to increase its conversion rate – just by removing stock photos. How much? The company was able to increase its conversions by over 45%!
What if I can’t hire a professional photographer?
5 or 10 years ago, that was a fair argument, but now that phones have extremely high-quality cameras built into them, there’s no excuse anymore.
When you finish a lawn care project, you could grab your phone and take a picture that is website worthy in seconds.
But wait, I’m not a good photographer…
That’s ok!
You don’t need the best pictures in the world for it to be better than stock photos.
Remember, the ultimate goal here is to have real photos that show off your work.
If you can build up a nice portfolio of the work that you’ve done and also display those images throughout your website, that will drastically help improve the quality of your work in your visitor’s eyes.
In fact, to get you started, Service Autopilot has a feature within the Team App that allows you to add photos to your clients' accounts. Then later, you can use those photos on your website, Google My Business, and more.
To keep your business at the front of your customer’s mind, you need to be producing content that provides true value.
The two best places to do this is on your website (a blog) and YouTube.
But, in addition to staying relevant, the content that you are posting will potentially be seen by people searching for questions on Google - ultimately putting your business in front of more potential customers.
What if I don’t have time to write a blog post?
Hiring someone is a great way to get the task of writing off your shoulders, but it will cost you some money.
If you aren’t willing to spend much, you can find some freelancers to do the work for CHEAP. Be aware though, you get what you pay for, so if you’re going the cheap route, make sure you proofread their work!
If you’re looking to hire a freelance writer for your lawn care website, check out these places:
If you’re comfortable in front of the camera, record videos about a certain topic upload them to YouTube, then transcribe them to use as blog posts. That way you cover two media channels at once.
The great thing about going in this direction is that you are able to release content on two channels at once (YouTube and Your Website).
This spreads your content out, so more people begin to see it.
If this is the direction you want to go, there is a great transcription tool called rev.com that can help you transcribe your lawn care videos.
Statistically, the businesses that take the extra time to provide value first have customers that spend more money and stick with the business for longer!
To keep things simple, come up with a list of the most common questions you’ve gotten and start writing or recording videos.
There’s absolutely no down side to doing it, plus it will get you in front of more people that might be perfect for the services you offer.
Chances are, the people looking for a lawn care service like yours are doing so from their mobile device.
If they're at home, most people won’t be lugging around their laptop!
They’ll be sitting on the couch or in the kitchen looking at their phone to find the best lawn care company near them.
If your website doesn’t work on mobile devices, it’s time to do that NOW!
Nearly 60% of all Google searches are made on mobile devices, so there’s a really good chance that if your website doesn’t work on phones or tablets you are missing out on new customers, and fast!
Still not convinced that this is important?
Back in 2018, Google began to penalize websites that weren’t optimized for mobile devices.
This means that if your lawn care website didn’t work on mobile devices, Google would drop your website lower in the search results so fewer people would see it.
You are costing your business a huge amount of money by not having a mobile-optimized website, so if there’s one thing on this list that you get done today - it should be this one!
Get all 7 of these strategies implemented on your website, and your site will attract more new visitors and customers than you thought possible.
It’s like hiring 3 salespeople who work 24/7 and always do a perfect job.
I know we covered a lot in this post, and you might be thinking, “How can I possibly get all of this done?”
The good news is you’re in the right place.
My website-building company, RocketThruster, offers a FREE Website Audit for lawn business owners.
Sign up here and you’ll get a free walk through your website, where we highlight the areas that will have the greatest impact on your success.
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions!
Related: The Best 11.5 Lawn Care Marketing Ideas
Originally published May 28, 2020 2:30 PM
Tags: Business Operation
You must be logged in to post a comment.
