"Landscaper" means two different businesses
Ask two landscapers what they do and you get two unrelated answers. One runs a route: forty lawns a week, contracts signed in March, margin built on how tight the stops are. The other builds: patios, walls, drainage, plantings, one project at a time at several thousand dollars each.
Most landscaping websites try to serve both, and the result serves neither. The homepage leads with mowing because that is the volume, then buries a patio gallery three clicks down. Meanwhile the homeowner who just decided to spend eleven thousand dollars on a backyard never sees it.
Search barely helps the mow route
This is the part most marketing people will not tell you. Weekly maintenance is won on route density and proximity, not search rankings. The homeowner picks whoever already services three houses on the block, because the price works and the truck is already there.
Ranking for "lawn mowing near me" gets you scattered stops across four towns, which is the worst thing that can happen to a route. If maintenance is your whole business, door hangers and neighbor referrals beat SEO on cost per acquisition, and I would rather tell you that than sell you a plan.
Where search earns its money is the build side.
The searches that actually pay
Project work gets researched. A homeowner thinking about a patio spends weeks looking at photos, comparing materials, and reading about what it costs before anyone gets a call. Every one of those is a page:
- Paver patios and walkways. The highest intent search in the trade, and the one homeowners research longest.
- Retaining walls. Often a drainage problem in disguise, which means the homeowner is searching a symptom, not a solution.
- Yard drainage and grading. Water in the basement sends people searching at eleven at night. High urgency, high ticket.
- Landscape design and full yard renovation. Longest sales cycle, biggest number.
- Sod installation and lawn renovation. Seasonal spikes you can plan content around.
Notice none of those is "landscaping." That word is what you call yourself. It is not what the homeowner types.
Hardscape puts you under PA HIC
Patios, walkways, and retaining walls are residential home improvement work in Pennsylvania. That brings the Home Improvement Contractor registration into it, and the number has to appear in your advertising, website included.
Worth being straight about the sequencing: if your registration is not current, those pages should not go live yet. Advertising the work without the number is a compliance problem, not a stylistic one. Build the pages, hold them until the number is in hand, then publish.
The season is brutal and the calendar has to run ahead of it
Search volume for patios and yard work climbs in February and March, well before anyone breaks ground. It collapses in July when installers are already booked, and comes back briefly in the fall.
That means the content has to be published and indexed months before the phone should ring. A patio page written in April is competing for a season that is already spoken for. Written in December, it is settled and ranking when the searches start.
Winter is also when you write, because you are not in the field. The calendar works out better than it does for most trades.
What we do, month to month
- Build the page structure. A page per project type, a page per town in the build radius, and project pages for completed jobs with the town named.
- Handle the technical layer. Titles, descriptions, headings, schema, internal links, sitemap, image sizing, mobile behavior.
- Run the Google Business Profile. Categories, service list, and a photo cadence that follows the build season.
- Clean up citations. Matching details across directories so Google trusts the data.
- Publish ahead of season. Patio and drainage content lands in winter, not spring.
- Report monthly. What moved, what is next, in plain English.
What it costs
Plans run $497, $997, or $1,997 a month with a one-time $499 setup. Six months to start, month to month after.
Most maintenance-heavy operations do not need the top plan. Outfits doing real build work across a wider radius usually need Growth to cover the town count. A one-time build is $999 or $2,499 depending on page count and carries over onto a plan later.
Common questions
I do mostly mowing. Should I be doing this?
Probably not yet, and I would rather say so. Route work is won on density. If you want to grow the build side, that is when this pays.
Do I need a page for every town?
Every town you would drive a mini excavator to. Not every town on the map. Pages for towns you will not service is how sites get flagged as doorway pages.
What about snow removal?
Worth one page, published by September. It is a short, sharp search window and almost nobody prepares for it in advance.
Related
The broader picture: SEO for contractors. On the build itself: contractor website design. Why one page cannot rank for everything: location pages and local SEO.