Get More Lawn Customers Part 2

So let’s get deeper into lawn care marketing advertising…

This is not a manual on SEO theory.  There are far better online resources regarding how SEO works.

This is what works in lawn care marketing.

This is a nuts-and-bolts approach on what has worked well for me over and over again.   All of my clients are “above the fold” (the portion of the computer screen that you can see without scrolling down) or number one for their target keywords.

Search engines, especially Google, highly favor older domains. But my example website was brand spanking new!  How in the world was I going to compete with this older, well linked site?

Using the tactics I’ll be writing about, I brought a brand new lawn care website to #1 on Google and #1 on BING, in two weeks.

Your results will vary :)

And I didn’t even use all the tactics that I will be writing  due to the 30 day timetable that I placed on myself. If I had given myself a more reasonable timetable like 90 days, I would absolutely have owned that page, top to bottom.

Given, it was a small market, Gadsden AL. I have also taken a number one spot for ” Chicago lawn care “. meaning, anything can be done. That took about 9 months.

If you take action on the steps that I will be covering, you will own your Google page!

Make sure to “bookmark” or “favorite” any following links as you check them out, for future reference.

So, lets get started…

lawn-care-advertising

The Basics

Most of you reading this will already know the following information. I’m including it for those that don’t.

Just as the Dewey Decimal System helps library searchers find books, search engines (SE’s) help web searchers find the information (websites) they are looking for.

The  SE’s catalog (index) and review website content using software (called robots or spiders) which crawl the internet 24/7 looking for new information to index.

In order to let the spiders know what your site is about, you need to tell them using HTML text. This is why pure “flash” sites have difficulty ranking quickly.  Spiders have a difficult time reading flash (photos) although they are getting better at it all the time.  This optimizing of HTML text is called “on page” SEO. It consists of 4 main categories:

  • Title tags  (not as important for Google as  is for  Bing)
  • Description Tags
  • Header tags
  • Latent semantic indexing text or LSI  (More of a theory than provable fact, but we will include it)

We are going to run through a pretend case study about a lawn care website to see how those four categories can work for you. Let’s say you want to rank for the keyword “Denver lawn care” and have the website www.BobsLawnCare.com located in Denver CO.

Quick note on domain names: If you do not yet own a domain name, and you live in Boise Idaho, then www.BoiseLawnCare.com, or www.LawnCareBoise.com would be a wise domain name choice. MSN definitely gives weight to key worded domains, and some SEO’s say Google does not. In my experience Google does give weight to keyword domains (just research the SERP’s), but not as provable as MSN. Does that mean you should change your current domain to a keyword loaded one? If your URL has been indexed in the SE’s for one year more I would say no. To check age of indexing for your site click here. For Google, age of domain counts very highly. If your website www.JohnsLawnCare.com in Boise has been indexed for a couple of years you will rank above a brand new domain called www.BoiseLawnCare.com, if all SEO factors and back links are equal between the two sites. You can however, keyword load the name of your blog attached to your website. More on that later. Or you can do this. Let’s say you have a used car dealership in Cincinnati Ohio called “Johns Cars”. You can’t obtain the domain name www.usedcars.com because it is already taken (duh).  Not that UsedCars.com would be that relevant to your dealership anyway. However,www.UsedCarsCincinnatiOhio.com is available (as of this writing, I just checked). If it was not you could insert dashes between the words ,etc. The problem is that the URL is too long to remember or cumbersome to use in other types of advertising. The solution is that you 301 redirect your existing domain www.JohnsCars.com to www.UsedCarsCincinnatiOhio.com. That way you can use the easy to remember URL in your advertising and still get love from the SE’s due to your key worded domain.

Title Tags

As in a lot of SEO theory, the importance of keywords in your title is a

hotly contested debate. Both sides can present compelling arguments on whether or not it helps in SERP ranking. In my experience, it does help. One thing that is certain;

Searchers look at titles first and descriptions second. Having the keyword they were searching for in the title will draw their eyes.

The HTML title tag for each page on your site should be keyword specific for that page based on the page content. For instance, in your index page (home page) code, you would write your title as

<title> Denver Lawn Care Service |Denver Landscaping<title>.

Do not go over 72 characters, and leave out any non relative terms if possible. A word in your title either relates or does not relate to the content.

In your description, you want both your key words and a reason for someone to click on your link once they find you on a search engine (SE), such as:

<meta name = “Description” content = “Denver lawn care specializing in landscape maintenance for the Denver CO area. Download your online discount coupon NOW.”>

You want your keyword in the beginning, and the reason for clicking the link (online coupon) after.

Now for your other pages (let’s say you have 4 pages), your landscaping page title would be

<title> Denver Landscaping <title>

<meta name = “Description” content = “Denver landscaping and landscape installation. Call now for a free consultation.”>

The actual landscaping page would be named www.BobsLawnCare.com /DenverLandscaping.  Then you would have your sprinkler repair, landscape lighting, and holiday lighting specialty pages titled, described and named in the same way.

Header Tags

Search engines spiders deem any text between the <H1> and <H2> tags as a significant indication to the page’s content.  So make sure you have your most important keyword phrase included in this area (per page).

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

This is a fancy way to say use variations of your keyword in the body of your text.  (This is another hotly contested theory as to its ranking value). Here is something else that I know is certain. If the word “lawn care” is included in a body text of 500 words fifty times, it will look spammy.  Lawn care is also “turf care” or “landscape maintenance.” There is a lot of talk about keyword density. Personally I think it doesn’t matter, except in the case of keyword stuffing (more is not better).  Various theories shoot for a 2% to 5% density.

I say don’t worry about it. LSI means that the SE’s know that your keywords (turf maintenance, lawn care and landscape service) are all relevant terms related to your sites content. Writing “Denver lawn care” in bold every twenty words looks “spammy” to the SE’s and may even drop you in the rankings. LSI is not a proven theory and there are many online discussions debating its value. At the very least it will keep your page from looking “keyword stuffed.”

Write naturally for your human audience and vary your keywords. To see what words Google finds relevant to “lawn care“, go to https://adwords.goggle.com/select/keywordToolExternal.   Type in lawn care, child day care, pool cleaning, or whatever it is that you want to rank for, and see the variations that come up. You can even download your results in different file formats.  This free tool can also help you find your competitors keywords.

On Page Linking

Before we get into “off site” SEO linking, let’s first get our internal linking structure straight. Let’s say you have a row of internal link tabs on your index page. You know, the “buttons” that take you from page to page. Do not use photos as links. Use spider-friendly text that is the keyword for the page.  If you feel that you have to use photos, be sure to use “Alt. Tags” in your photo code.  For example, “anchor text “ (see below)the link to your home page “Denver lawn care”, to your sprinkler repair page “Denver sprinkler repair” etc.  When you do “anchor text” links on the web, make them specific to the page content versus always linking to the index (home) page.  Another helpful tactic is to include a Google site map that helps direct the spiders to the various content on your website. After making these tag changes to your site, ping your  web pages at www.pingates.com . Yes pinging html pages.  It’s not just for blogs anymore!

Stay tuned fore more. I got a lot more to tell ya!

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Go to part 3 here  get more lawn care customers