Landscaping Websites: A How-To Guide for Success

In the digital age, a well-designed landscaping website serves as the cornerstone of any successful business. For landscaping businesses looking to grow, it’s no different.

A compelling website not only showcases your work and specialties but also helps you remain competitive, capture the local market, and build trust with your customers.

This guide provides a comprehensive roadmap to creating a successful landscaping website. From initial considerations such as budget and tech features to the basics of preparation like competitor research and media assets, we’ve got you covered.

We delve into planning your website’s pages, developing engaging content, and implementing SEO strategies. Plus, we offer tips to enhance your website’s user experience, like using garden photography and ensuring mobile-friendliness.

Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned professional, this guide will equip you with the knowledge to navigate the digital landscape successfully.

Why websites for a landscaping business?

If you’re in the landscaping business and don’t have a website yet, it’s high time you considered getting one.

What do you need to consider for creating a landscaping website?

From marketing agencies to DIY website builders, there are several options. Experts from the Maplescape marketing team suggest looking at the options that fit your budget, your time, and plans for your business.

We’ll briefly state the pros and cons of the most prominent options available today if you are in the market for building a website for your lawn and garden business.

The best choice depends on your specific needs, budget, and the amount of time you can dedicate to this project. It’s important to weigh these pros and cons before making a decision.

If you are starting a landscaping business, it is better to go for a freelancer who can use a website builder to quickly launch your website within your budget, while still using best practices so you can scale your marketing later.

If your main goal to build a landscaping website is to sell products or digitize your offline shop, getting an e-commerce website could be expensive.

For small businesses, you can either go with Shopify (DIY e-commerce website) or build a website with WordPress and Wocommerce.

You should go with a landscaping web design company if you have no prior knowledge of websites, SEO, or graphic designing because you’ll have to research and train yourself. And this can take around 6 months from start to finish.

Costs

As mentioned above, what you decide will depend on how you are getting your landscaping company website created.

The DIY costs for building landscaping costs are really low. As low as $100 for a year (not including hours you’ve spent on it).

On the other hand, costs for a custom website with all pages, running blog section, and regular maintenance for 6 months will set you back $3000 easily.

It all depends on who is creating your website. An experienced developer with knowledge of the landscaping industry can help you create a website that is both functional and performs better (bring you calls).

Here are some of the approximate costs for you. Know that there always are alternatives that might cost you less.

The only trick is to use things that work out for you.

If they are free or if they cost you, you should be able to guess some returns on your investment.

Preparing for your new landscaping website

Competitor research

Check out your competitor’s landscaping web design. Get a sense of their organic traffic (you can use similarweb for estimates). A high-converting website will have higher traffic and will give you an amazing experience.

The purpose of competitor research is not only to find inspiration but to get a benchmark of the minimum action items you need to take up, to outcompete them.

Remember to look at websites that are not just your close competitors, but at indirect business websites that serve the same audience that you do.

Some expert tips to select competitors:

• Curate the websites of the biggest players in the landscaping industry (Brightview, The Ground Guys, Davey Tree Experts, etc). Also, look at some international players.
• Look at your local competing websites and service providers.
• Do not limit your research to your direct competitors. Look at manufacturers, nursery centers’ websites, and landscaping blogs.

What to look at:

• Check their website traffic with similarweb.
• Their offerings and the page structure. How are these services presented and described? Check if they have specific local pages.
• Look at the overall layout, color scheme, and visual appeal of their websites. Is it modern and user-friendly? Does it reflect the brand’s identity?
• Look at the imagery they’re using on their pages.
• Look at their blog section and topics.
• Notice the information they’re putting out and look for social proof (testimonials, reviews and ratings, case studies, etc).
• Call to action: notice what are they asking the visitor to do. do you feel compelled to push a button or give your details? Is it easy for a potential customer to contact them or request a quote?

Choose a domain

Choosing a good domain is paramount because this is the word that your prospects would remember or feel compelled to visit when your company is mentioned.

Your domain name should reflect your business name or the brand you want to build. It should be unique, memorable, and easy to pronounce.

While keeping it short and simple, think long-term.

Your domain name should capture the essence of your company value, and industry, and take place in long-term memories of people.

The best practice is to use your company name, but you can also do business as a brand with a different name.

Take the help of AI (ChatGPT), or free domain name generator websites to get new ideas.

Create media assets

Now that you’ve looked at your competitors and chosen a domain, you need to get some media assets created.

For a basic landscaping website launch – you need a logo (company logo), favicon, hero image, animations/video clips, and images for website sections and icon packs.

Make sure the images are of higher resolution so they make your website look high quality.

Do not use AI-created images for general imagery on the website – they look unnatural and do not appeal to emotions. You can use AI to create animations, icon packs, and your logo easily.

Note that these images will be used at prominent places and to complement text on your landscaping website, so hold on to buying images until you’re sure they will be used.

One trick that most landscapers use to save money on buying images is to document their projects.

With mobile devices or cameras, it is easy to do before-after photos. These can then be edited and used on your website for your website imagery.

Once you have basic media assets, it’s time to think about website layout, structure, visual elements and typography.

Website foundations

Your competitor research should help you get inspired and finally think about how your website is going to look.

While thinking about layout and stuff, you also need to think strategically. Keeping business growth in mind, decide how the following things should look and what should they contain.

• Header – navigation and information
• Lead capture form design
• Colour scheme
• Typography including fonts, sizes, spacing
• Footer
• Overall page structure

Plan for website pages

As you think about the overall design, you also need to plan for the initial set of pages.

What pages you need to create on your landscaping website will depend on the type of services you provide and the industries you cater to.

Apart from these, there will be some general pages you need to create.

The general pages that you need to create once and forget:

• Privacy policy
• Terms and conditions
• Refunds and shipping information
• Company legal information

These pages can easily be created with online generators but should be vetted by someone from legal.

Other type of pages you need to look at:

1. Landing pages
   • Products
   • Services (commercial, residential)
   • Locations
   • Industries/markets (sports, retail, parks, government, etc)
2. Why/About page
3. PPC landing pages (if you plan to run ads, you need a CRO page to get maximum conversions)
4. Pricing page
5. Contact us
6. Portfolio page
7. Blog section (for case studies, articles, news, press releases, etc)
8. Careers

Nailing the landscaper’s website navigation

Best practice says visitors should be able to access every important page in your website in just three clicks from the page they are at.

You should choose a header navigation structure so that your main target audience can view the service they want.

Your visitors should also be able to know about you and if they are curious, with the help of a navbar, they should be able to explore what you have to offer.

Keeping the header minimal with extended navigation on interaction is an industry-leading practice. It is also followed by the best businesses in the landscaping industry.

Another trick is to use multiple headers. Use the secondary headers for promos, contact information, social icons, search bars, announcements and logins.

Writing content that gets you landscaping leads

The content on your website (website page copy) is one of the most important things that can help you get leads.

Copy is what appeals to people’s emotions and gets them to trust you.

Even if you can bring people on to your website, without awesome content, no one will trust you enough to give you their personal information or fill out a form.

Even if there is a need for a service, bad website content drives people away.

Your content needs to be engaging enough to get people thinking about you and contact you through your landscaping website.

You might need to get a copywriter who has experience in writing content that converts. They will help you with a landing page framework and set you up for success.

Expert tip: Make sure to look at the results of a copy rather than just looking at the portfolio of a writer.

Since copy is present at all prominent places on your website, iterate over time to fixate on the piece that works best for you.

Also always get meta title and meta description written with your copy. It helps with SEO.

Designing a landscaping website

If you are using a landscaping website template, landscaping website design and development will go hand in hand.

No-code website builders help you to design a landscaping website in no time.

Make sure you follow the design best practices to complement your design with the website copy and imagery.

If you are going with a custom website build, the designer will share the Figma/Miro/inVision files with you to hear your thoughts.

Make sure you get the design nailed down to make it extremely relevant to your target audience. Your landscaping website design should complement every part of your website.

Keeping accessibility in mind (especially if you serve elder communities for their landscaping service needs), plan your web design in a way that its easier for people to find out more about you, reach you and navigate your website.

Thinking about your target audience in this process will help you make your website ROI-driven.

A good website for customers will help them easily read the information, call you, ask queries and trust you with their projects.

That means no tripping colors, small fonts, deceptive designs and a family-friendly tone of voice.

While your inner voice will motivate you to paint everything green, you should get equally motivated to experiment and stand out from the crowd.

Getting your website developed

Now that you’ve got the media assets, content and designing done right, the next step includes getting your vision implemented on a web address.

You’ll need a place to store all of that text, images and website code on the cloud called hosting.

Whenever someone types in your domain/homepage in Safari/chrome or clicks on your website link, your hosting will serve all of that beautiful content to your visitor.

Hosting is necessary as your personal computer cannot be turned on 24/7 (that’s just expensive and inefficient) and you cannot use personal cloud storage as hosting (since they are not optimized for serving web content).

If you are a startup, do not invest a lot of money in hosting.

While good hosting will help you with website speed (which is a good thing), you do not need to be locked in for a year if you do not expect millions of visitors to visit you in that year.

It is imperative though that you get an average one since bad hosting will drive people away as your website will load so slowly, that no one is going to wait that long.

Now that you’ve got your hosting with you, get the developer to code your lawn care website design.

If you are using a web builder, everything that is designed will be developed simultaneously, and you can publish your pages right away.

While you get the development of your lawn care website design, make sure you get the following right:

1. Your designs should look exactly like you envisioned them in your design files.
2. Functionality should be complete. No element should feel like it’s clickable but it’s not.
3. Reduce the friction points to get people to sign up or call you.
4. Sense check on the copy, design and formatting so that every prominent element looks top-notch.
5. Make sure that your website works on mobile devices perfectly.

SEO for landscaping websites

SEO for landscaping website done right = organic traffic from Google & Bing = more landscaping leads

When you’re building a website, it is essential to look at SEO from the beginning.

The outcome of having SEO built in while website development is that you get to appear in the search results when people type in their queries related to landscaping on Google or other search engines like Bing or even Duckduckgo.

SEO helps Google and Bing to better understand your website and you as a business. With a better understanding, search engines can rank you among your peers based on numerous factors.

Getting your website on the first page of Google doesn’t generally happen overnight (Unless you’re doing some extraordinary PR), having set the right foundations helps you get set for success in the future.

Your SEO will help you with the following things while you prepare for your landscaping website launch:

• Research landscaping SEO keywords that you should rank for.
• Suggest keyword placements for your landing pages and blog pages.
• Set up Google search console, Bing Webmaster and Google Analytics to track and report on performance.
• Set up a Google My Business profile for you to appear on local searches.
• Perform on-page and tech SEO as per best practices.
• Register your business at directories frequently visited by people searching for the services you offer.
• Help you partner with relevant websites to help you reach a wider audience.

Setting up tracking and analytics

You cannot manage what you can’t measure

Peter drucker

Now that you have your website, it is important to measure how it is performing. You need to see how many visitors visit your website and how many engage actively to give you leads.

This is important for measuring ROI as well as improving on what could help your visitors stay on your website and buy services and products from you.

There are several Free (and freemium) tools for you to do this. Some of them are:

• PostHog
• Google Analytics
• Microsoft clarity
• Hotjar
• Smartlook

Some of these tools like PostHog, clarity, and hotjar allow you to replay session recordings and visitors to visit your website and engage with the content.

You need to think about website maintenance too

You need to think about continuously maintaining your landscaping website. Here are 4 prominent reasons why:

1. A good SEO strategy to increase your website traffic and landscaping leads would require you to iterate over design and content to rank it higher on search engines. It would also require you to publish more high-quality content regularly to help solve your audience’s problems. It’s how they notice you are someone who can help you with your experience and expertise.
2. You’ll need to refresh your pages to stay relevant and at the top of your competitors.
3. You will need website maintenance to get on top of any security issues that might harm your online reputation and also to make it a better place for your prospects and current customers.
4. For posting announcements, keeping your customers and landscaping services prospects up to date, and introducing new features for your visitors.

If you are going with a website builder, the most necessary parts of it are going to be easy and with some training, your admin should be able to do most of it.

Your go-to agency should help set up SOPs for basic maintenance anyway.

If you plan to build a customized website, you’ll need someone on a retainer to continually test, analyze, and improve your website over time to help you grow your business and reach your online sales goals.

Features of best-performing landscaping websites

We’ve analyzed some of the best landscaping websites, and here are our key observations:

The best-performing landscaping websites have:

• Image gallery of projects along with every case study.
• Online shop for letting customers purchase packages and products.
• Awesome landscaping websites make it easy for customers to reach you. They offer phone numbers, contact forms, office addresses, social links, email, quote request forms, and a live chat widget on the website.
• Differentiated pages for every product (Services, industries, helpful article content, about the company, and more).
• Process explanation on how the company operates for complex projects.
• Landscaping business videos with client testimonies and company project success stories.
• Social proof – customer testimonials, number of projects, reviews, ratings.
• Documented projects and used those media assets on Portfolio pages, blog sections, website page images, and Google My Business updates.
• Customer referral or a landscaping affiliate program.
• They build trust by mentioning contractor licenses and certificates, landscaping insurance numbers, courses and training taken by their team, diplomas, and schooling.
• Pricing information – the industry leaders do not waste time on people. People will select to buy from those companies who have their pricing on the front. Others that do not have the pricing upfront, are generally left out in the prospecting stage of potential buyers.
• Great landscaping websites have phenomenal site speed and a great user experience.

Blog section: Does every landscaping website need one?

Depends on your goals.

If your goal is just to have an online presence and a place for people to get your contact and some information about you, then a blog section is not required.

If you want to get more visitors and more landscaping leads with digital marketing, publishing blogs regularly is a good idea.

Why?

When you publish blogs – no fluff, consistent pieces that are problem-focused to help others find solutions, search engines analyze and help your website blog page appear on search results when your target audience is searching for related topics.

It helps the person to find the information they’re looking for. In the process, they also get to know about you.

This brings your brand much-needed visibility. A person who has never heard about you now knows that you have the solution to their problem.

And if that person is motivated enough, they’ll ask for more of your help with their problems and you’ve got a customer (well a landscaping lead first and a customer only if you’re able to qualify and convert them).

What should you post?

Well, that’s a post for another blog post on Maplescapes!

We’ll post some definitive topics that you should cover for your landscaping website next!

Stay tuned! (you can contact us or let us know in the comments that you need those blog topics NOW!)

Questions that landscapers ask us frequently on website creation