Check out GooglePhat.com

Lawn care marketing flyers? Landscape door hangers? That stuff used to work.

What works now? Watch the video below. One of my members got SO GOOD at getting his website to #1, now he makes an additional 30K doing it for other businesses in 6 months!

REAL guy, REAL truth. Didn’t know NOTHIN” about the internet before he joined GooglePhat.

Just click the video below to get 7 FREE videos on how YOU can own your city in the lawn care business!

Didn’t know how to make online videos either, now look at ‘im

Your FREE VIDEOS are NOT “Hey, watch my sales pitch and buy the”good” videos.”

You can rank #1 on Google and get more lawn care customers right now from just the free videos!

What would a new lawn care customer a week be worth to you? How about one new lawn mowing customer a day?!!!

This will blow you away, and it warms my heart when I give someone like Tanner the ball and they run with it !

Hey, it’s HOT outside, let’s get PAID!!!

lawn care business marketing

I often get asked the difference between lawn care business PPC (pay per click) and organic (natural ranking on the search engines.)

Well, the difference in terms of traffic (getting lawn care customers) is HUGE! That is NOT to say that organic traffic is free. Attaining top organic listings takes effort, although for the average smaller city lawn service business, not as much ass you probably think. Ranking #1 in Google for “Atlanta lawn care” is tough (but do-able.) Ranking #1 for “Gwinnet county lawn care” or “Marietta GA lawn care” would be much easier.

Back to the PPC vs Organic debate: there is none. Organic is far better, period. Let’s just forget the cost of PPC and just look at the traffic, or customers clicking a link and going to your site. Here it gets real interesting …Lets look at the photo below, these are GOOGLE’S NUMBERS. This is  for really high traffic keywords. Calculate the total traffic by Google’s estimated clicks on their ads.

Keep reading for some real “eye opening” information on how to use this!

Here is more proof: remember, this is based on Googles numbers.

Why is this? It all comes down to trust. Serarchers trust the #1 thru #3 organic results.

Look at the eye tracking chart below:

So how does all this apply to local lawn care business? Look at the chart below:

So, if you have a lawn care business, and want to get more landscaping customers, click the image below

lawn care business marketing

2010: the game has changed. Now, almost no one reads the newspaper anymore and the yellow pages book sits in your driveway until it get rained on and you throw them away. Everything is online, including your competition. Meaning, the internet has taken over advertising. According to Nielsen Media, eighty percent of all local consumers look for a business online first before calling. So how do you…

In other words, if you are not on the front page of the search engines for your search term  (“Austin TX landscapers” for instance) like Google, Yahoo or Bing, you will miss your chance to bid eighty percent of the available work.

So, how do you get your message on the first page of the search engines? There are two main ways; pay-per-click or organic search. Let’s take a look at the options for both methods.

Pay Per Click: Search engines serve ads for almost all search phrases. Type in “Raleigh NC landscaping” and you will see ads on Google along the top and right hand side of the page. If a searcher clicks your ad you will be charged a fee, anywhere from five cents to fifty dollars per click, depending on how competitive the term is (don’t worry, most local landscape websites are five cents) . The benefits of paid search advertising (also called SEM for “search engine marketing”) is that you can be on the first page within minutes of placing your ad. The disadvantages are twofold. Number one, you will always have to pay, forever. Another related problem is click fraud. Click fraud is where competing landscapers click your ad one hundred plus times to either use up your daily ad budget or make it too expensive for you to continue. The number two problem is that searchers know that these are paid advertisements and therefore place less trust in the listing than the organic (non paid) results.) This means paid ad’s get far less clicks.

Organic Listings: Organic listings are the main part of the search page, generally ten results per page. These are links to the landscape websites that the search engines think are best suited to the searchers keyword query. It is generally agreed upon that searchers will confine their clicks to the top five results, also known as “above the fold.” Above the fold means the listing that are visible without scrolling down the computer screen. The benefits of organic listings (also known as SEO for “search engine optimization”) are numerous, but we will concentrate on the two biggest positives. First, they are trusted. Searchers rely on Google and Yahoo to retrieve the best information on the internet. In fact, the number one organic result typically receives over seventy percent of all the clicks on the search return page! The second advantage is that those listings are free; organic returns are not for sale. They are earned. The disadvantage of organic returns is that it may take three to four months to optimize your website sufficiently to rank on the first page, and you need phone calls right now.

So which approach is best? The best approach uses both paid and organic strategies. While optimizing your website pages for first page returns, you use paid ads in the meantime. Once your lawn service website ranks on the first page, you drop the paid ads.

Which of course begs the question, how do you optimize your lawn care business website to rank on the first page? Just go to http://www.LawnCareSucks.com to watch free videos on how to rank your landscaping business website on the first page of Google!

Lawn Care Marketing Tips

Lawn care marketing tips: Everywhere you look you hear about “lawn care marketing tips.” Flyers, cold calling, yada – yada…

Here is the truth: the absolutely best advertising in the world is a satisfied client telling a potential customer that you should be called.

However, that is a real slow process that does not lend itself to rapid growth. What if you need more lawn or landscaping customers right now? Lawn care flyers? Puh-leeese! A .001 return rate for littering America? Yellow pages? They are still working….for now. At a huge cost. Worth it? Maybe in the mid nineties.

What works now? Landscape internet marketing. Period.

If your website is not on the first page of the search engines, you will lose 80% of your potential customers ( see graph below)

Like it or not, there is the proof. Nielsen Media, who are they? Only the largest advertising tracking company in the world.

If you can’t believe them, who are you going to believe, the fictional character “Dex” on TV?

When is the last time you saw a “let your fingers do the walking” advertisement? 5 – 10 years ago? “Dex” knows the yellow pages are dead.

Landscape marketing tips in 2010? Go what works now. Get your website on the first page of the search engines.

Need More Lawn Care Customers?

Forget Lawn Care Flyers, This is What’s Working NOW!

Click Here for Your FREE videos!

Nope.  If they already know about Bob they will call him! They will look under LAWN CARE. Same with the web. So, how do you find a good lawn care website name? Click the video below!

lawn care business marketing

Specific Domain names (like HoustonLawnService.net) carry far more weight with the search engines than company domain names (like LarrysLandscaping.) The domain (or URL) helps inform the search engines what the website is about, as do title tags and descriptions. Of course, the website content needs to match. Gone are the days when webmasters would name their sites www.BrittanySpearsNaked.org and have website content about applying for pay day loans (the old AltaVista.com days.) Google’s algorithms changed all that for the better.

So if you want to learn more about how this website ranking stuff works, start with lawn care marketing plan.

lawn care business marketing

I saw a lawn business truck going down the road today. Two hard working guys in the cab of an old Toyota PU square body. You could tell they were trying to keep up appearances. The lawn mowing truck was about as clean as they could manage. Yet, these guys in their dilapidated 80′s truck just looked, well, poor….

So, two young poor looking guys in an old lawn maintenance business truck, with a bought sign on the back that said “Lawns Mowed Starting at $23.00.” I don’t know about you, but $23 doesn’t get me down one aisle at the grocery store, and they are splitting this after gas, tires, repairs, etc. Living the American Dream.

It reminds me of the old Baptist curse “bless their hearts.”

You know what really caught my attention? The big sign. The professionally made “Lawns Mowed Starting at $23.00″ sign on the tail end of the truck. The friggin’ sign cost more than the truck was worth. It had to cost 200 bucks.

And I thought to myself ” they just don’t get it.” For two hundred bucks, if they knew what to do, they could be on the first page of Google. Hundreds of people searching for “lawn service Orlando”, targeted customers, would be calling them. They could look like TRU-GREEN if they wanted to, not a couple of broke SOB’s willing to work for peanuts.

Lesson? Get with 2010. Don’t work for peanuts. Get paid what you are worth.

How? To find out out click this link,    lawn care business right now!

I took that trash out to the end of the driveway this morning. On my way I saw a piece of paper inside of a baggie with a rock in it.

I had to laugh because I new what it was, but it made me kinda sad at the same time.

Here is some hard working person trying to promote his lawn business. He / she spent the money to print up some small lawn business flyers, roll them all up, put a rubber band around the lawn service flyer, and then place them in one of the 500 plastic baggies they bought.

And THEN, had to put rocks in the baggies so that they could “automate” their system by throwing them (takes two people) into driveways out of a slow moving vehicle (rusted truck on balding tires?)

Sad. Very sad.

If I’d seen them go by (probably very early in the morning so as to not catch grief by the homeowners feeling “littered”) I would have stopped them. Not to tell them they are littering (even though they are) but to explain to them that the financial return on their efforts, as valiant and commendable (I like people who try to influence their destiny through hard work) as they are, are so small as to be pitiful. These flyer throwing folks are still living in the early “90′s.

Christ, even a well titled Craigslist ad would be more beneficial to their lawn business.

The worst part? I live in a smaller Central Florida town. One article placed on line correctly, JUST ONE, would bring them far more business at a lower material and labor cost than throwing rock filled baggies into someones yard with a free  lawn mowing flyer inside it.

I guess it’s just Darwin’s theory being played out in the green industry.

Still, it makes you kinda sad….

Go to LAWN CARE SUCKS.com

Pay attention. I mean it. This stuff is right out of my SEO testing laboratory, deep in the Central FL woods.

I’m about to dispel a long standing myth regarding getting on the first page of Google with your website. Ready? Here ya go:

It’s not how many competitors you have, it’s how good is the competition is !!! To see the photo proof you gotta click “continue reading below. Do it.

Check this out. Using only a few of the back link tricks I show on my lawn business site (hint,hint) I was able to rank my test site (type into Google “Chicago lawn care”) much faster for 5 million competing pages than I was my Dallas lawn care site for around a million returns. A 5 to 1 ratio. Why, you may ask, is that? Hmmmmm. I know why, but I wonder where they learned it? Guess what? I found the reason.

It seems, from my “who is this guy” investigating, that last year Green Paws lawn care in Dallas TX was reading (and obviously implementing) my posts when I used to actively participate on the Gopher Lawn Forum. Yikes! 99.9% of all the Gopher readers didn’t listen to a word I wrote, and I just happen to randomly pick a city where I gotta compete with my own stuff? Rats. Just my luck! It also shows the power of posting on forums. Most of GP’s 400+ links come from forum posts.

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud Green Paws for actually using my info. I guess it was not entirely “pearls before swine” after all.  I guess my time was not completely wasted on that forum.

Also, please understand that if you read only ONE lawn care forum, it should be Steve’s. He is a tireless maniac hell bent on your success. Don’t look a “gift Steve” in the mouth

So, look at the screen shots below, and take my word for it that fighting Green Paws for “Dallas TX Lawn Care” was much harder than trying to rank for “Chicago lawn care.”

And, we both know ( if you have been reading this blog) that mentioning “GP” in a blog post about Dallas TX awn care, even without an anchor link, means he will overtake me again. Or, getting to the top with less than 100 links could be a short lived fluke.

That’s cool, I don’t mind going back to the drawing board. May the best man win    View the screen shots below: