5 Must-Haves for a Killer Lawn, Landscape, or Outdoor Living Business Website
—
The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Originally published on December 2, 2015. Updated on April 10, 2023.
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If you’re curious whether your lawn, landscape, or outdoor living business website is good enough, the answer may be simpler than you think. You’ll find the answer by asking yourself if you routinely get enough leads from your website.
Give or take, successful green industry companies get at least 20 quality leads per month from their website alone. If you find yourself frustrated with losing to lower-priced bids, even though you know your work is of higher quality than your competitor, your website may not be working for you as it could be. Consider these five essential features for your business website to help increase the number of leads you get consistently.
1. Professional Visual Content
When information is paired with visual content, people remember 55% more than without visual aids. Plus, the average person will only read 20% of the website content but will view every image on the page. Leveraging visual elements can make your website more effective at converting leads.
The more professional and higher-quality visuals you have on your business website, the more high-end and legitimate your business appears. Top lawn, landscape, and outdoor living companies invest in professional photos and videos of their projects and team.
Professional Photography for Your Green Industry Company Website
Professional photography not only helps establish your branding but helps convey a feeling, which is essential to creating a connection. Psychologists have found that imagery has the ability to affect a person’s mood, whether they’re conscious of it or not. Appealing to emotions helps brands create deeper customer connections and helps sell the experience.
Using original photos of your work on your website provides authenticity and helps build trust, which is essential to making sales. Featuring photos of your crew and leadership on your About page, and original photos of people in general, can help increase your conversion rates. Your audience can often identify if a business is using stock photos, which can damage credibility. While sometimes using stock images is necessary, they should be used sparingly.
Professional Videography for Your Business Website
Practically all (91%) consumers want to see more online video content from brands, and your website is a great place to feature these videos. Using your videos to tell compelling stories about your brand, projects, and company culture will make them impactful, helping you build trust with your target customers.
Hiring a professional videographer to capture footage and tell your story will make your videos appealing. You can showcase your ideal projects to help pre-qualify your prospects, showing the size and scope of the type of work you do. These videos can also be used on your socials, as sales tools, and more.
2. Professional Website Design
Top green industry business websites have the right combination of design and functionality. Users expect your website to load within 3 seconds or less, and if it takes any longer, you risk them clicking off of your site and onto your competitor’s. Investing in a professional website design is essential not only in fast load times but in establishing brand identity, credibility, and discoverability.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A website optimized for SEO is key to attracting traffic from Google. The keywords used in headlines, articles, and text can help your site rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), increasing the likelihood that your business will be discovered.
Beyond SEO within the website copy, there are methods on the backend. For example, image file names can be named with SEO-friendly keywords, and alternative text can be used within the code to describe what’s shown in an image. This helps search engine crawlers index the pages of your website for keywords, helping increase your ranking on SERPs.
Responsive Website Design
Once a prospect has clicked on your website, you want to be able to keep them there in order to move them through your sales funnel. A responsive website design ensures that your website will look great and work well on all devices. Considering nearly 59% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, whether you should have a responsive website shouldn’t be a question. In fact, 73% of website designers cite a website not being responsive on all devices as a top reason visitors leave the site.
Visual Design Elements
About half (48%) of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business. If you want to be seen as a high-end landscape construction company, then feature professional-quality images and videos on your site of luxury poolscapes and outdoor spaces. Your website appearance can either pique the viewer's curiosity or turn them away, and the visual design elements have a large role in the outcome.
The strategic use of color, shapes, fonts, and layout is important in creating an aesthetically pleasing website that’s also easy to use. The design can create an intuitive experience for the user, minimizing their need to think and encouraging them to stay on the site longer.
3. Mirror the Voice of Your Target Customer
Working within the lawn, landscape, and outdoor living niche, we know how people speak about the industry varies. This is why getting to know the voice of the customer (VoC) is essential—so you can use language that the customer relates to and connects with.
The words used vary throughout regions, education levels, and income levels. To learn the VoC, you must know exactly who your target persona is. If you want to attract an affluent audience, you need to know the word choices that they will connect with. There are various methods to research the VoC, including surveying customers, reading customer reviews, social media comments, and feedback forms.
The information collected will let you know what your customers care about most and provide insight into how they speak. For example, if the majority of your customer reviews state they were happy with the excellent customer service and professionalism of your team, then that’s a company attribute that you will want to highlight in your website copy.
The right title and content will help you reach your target audience. Creating content that isn’t of interest to your target customer will lead to you wasting your time answering calls and responding to unqualified prospects. For example, you wouldn’t want to highlight the cost savings when your target audience is affluent, as this likely isn’t a top priority for most of this audience.
Professional copywriters are experts at mirroring the voice of your target customers. This is achieved with word choice and tone, but also in getting to know what is important to your target audience and building upon it.
4. An Informative & Inspirational Blog
Your blog is an instrumental part of content and attraction marketing. Featuring a blog on your green industry business website can increase your SERP ranking potential by 434%, resulting in more organic traffic and leads. With 92% of marketers considering written content like blogs to be worth the investment, it’s a strategy that offers a positive return on investment (ROI).
Every blog post is an opportunity to tell Google what problems your company solves. A blog isn’t meant to brag about how amazing your company is, and the content shouldn’t feel like marketing at all. Rather, the content will provide educational information and inspirational industry-related content, with the majority of content aiming to solve your potential customers’ lawn, landscape, or outdoor living problems. Think of it as marketing in disguise—the customer receives helpful information and views you as an expert.
Successful businesses share their blog content on social media channels, in customer newsletters, and may have their content featured on industry sites such as the National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP), helping establish credibility and trust in the industry. Whether featured by an industry organization or not, high-quality blog content helps establish you as a green industry authority.
5. Lead Generation Forms
While attracting prospects to your website is important, converting visitors into leads is the ultimate goal. With 74% of companies using web forms for lead generation, nearly 50% state online forms are their highest converting lead generation tool. Lead generation forms make it easier for you and your website visitors to connect.
What Makes People Fill Out a Form?
Oftentimes, you have to give to get. Potential customers will happily provide their contact information if you give them something in return. A discount, a subscription to a blog recap, or an ebook with lawn, landscape, or outdoor living educational content can be effective lead magnets.
Information to Collect on Lead Gen Forms
The information you request on your lead generation forms may vary depending on where it’s located on your website, but you’ll generally want to collect the same basic information. Request the customer’s first and last name, email address, physical address, and a brief inquiry description. Providing a checklist of the varied types of information they may be interested in can be helpful, such as outdoor kitchens, fire features, inground pools, lawn care, irrigation systems, and more.