5 Tips To SEO Your Landscaping Website
You built it...and no one came. Your beautiful website, that you paid for or completed yourself, is up and running. You've poured hours and hours into developing the right colors, font, messaging, everything! Perhaps you've even redesigned your logo. Everything about your site seems perfect - but why isn't anyone calling?
Don't fret. We've got some ideas for boosting your traffic and helping with your leads. We have to admit, there are a lot of ways to make this happen. This list is not an all-comprehensive approach, but it will get you started in the right direction!
1. Write for humans, not search engines.
People don't read like robots and robots recognize content that is written for robots! Google penalizes websites that have keyword stuffing (the same word 30x on one page!) and content that doesn't make sense. Plus, visitors will recognize that too. If a human won't enjoy what they found, they're gone. Every page on your website must be written for visitors and provide educational info. Ideally, your website has some info about your company while majority of info is written to solve problems and answer questions for your prospects. Everything serves a purpose!
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2. Get a marketing person, outside of IT, to help with SEO.
Yes, there are many technical components to SEO. However today's SEO requires way more than just technical chops, so think long and hard before handing an entire SEO project to an IT or a web designer. The best approach is to start with a marketing specialist (inside or outside your landscaping business) and then ensure that they will handle the technical aspects or the IT person will. The magic happens with the combination of both. Read more about SEO for landscaping and pool companies in this related post.
3. Optimize for local search.
If you’re a local business, optimizing for local search will help you get found by people who are nearby and more likely to buy from you. It'll also increase your overall ability to get found. This includes those prospects searching for landscaping in your state - and specify the state in the search bar as well as those don't specify the state (but Google recognizes that they are in your state, or city, etc.). Make sure you have consistent spellings of your address across various pages. "Street" isn't the same thing as "st." Read more about optimizing for local search here: 5 Step Plan to Dominating Local Search.
4. Eliminate any "Page Not Found" Errors
Your old pages might still be coming up in search results and turning interested landscape customers away with "page not found" errors. Every page, even those not easily accessible from your main website pages should be redirected. Tools like Google webmaster can help identify these 404 error pages that you might already know of as well as some surprising new errors. These permanent 301 redirects are important for SEO, so don't skip over this!
5. Check your Meta descriptions to increase click-through rate.
Okay, you've got the rankings, but if you're not seeing the traffic, or click-throughs, revisit those Meta Tags! This is the summary of each page that searches see, right under the headline of the search result. You likely read these summaries before clicking on search results yourself and you can be sure that most people do. If this description is written for robots, then revisit item number one above! Meta tags won't be a significant help in increasing your rankings, but these descriptions should encourage visitors to click on your page! These short summaries must pertain to what the page is all about, not be keyword stuffed, and be fairly short (a sentence).
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