When you’re trying to market your landscaping business by driving traffic to your website, you need a homepage that sells—and quickly! Research shows that prospective clients decide whether or not to explore a website in about 50 milliseconds, so your homepage design needs to pack a lightning-fast punch.
Suffice it to say, when it comes to brilliant landscaping marketing strategies, an excellent website design is key, and it all starts with a compelling homepage. Landscaping companies can boost their search engine ranking and get more customers from online traffic with a homepage with the right keywords and images arranged in a user-friendly layout.
We’re not website designers (though we do know a few good ones), but we know a thing or two about homepage content—the keywords, headlines, and copy that make potential customers want to convert to paying clients.
In this blog, we’ll outline a solid homepage structure and tell you how to write headlines and copy to encourage customers to book your landscaping services.
Why homepage content matters for your landscape business
Landscaping customers want to find your services online. To do that, they’ll use a search engine like Google to look for keywords like “landscape companies” or “landscaping services near me”; ideally, your website would come up first in the rankings.
A solid landscape marketing strategy will incorporate many elements, like blogs, social media, paid ads, and a direct mail campaign. But the best way to generate leads online is a well-written landscaping website with a homepage that immediately grabs users’ attention.
Your homepage sells your services to local customers
For starters, effective homepage copy sells your landscaping service to customers when they land on your site. Your homepage should include gorgeous images of your work and positive customer reviews, as these help show website visitors the quality of your work.
The text on your landscaping website should tell users how you’ll solve their landscaping problems, and it should be professionally worded and edited. We’ll cover the specifics of what to include on your homepage below, but it’s essential to understand how good homepage copy helps your landscaping business.
Your homepage helps with search engine optimisation
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a part of most digital marketing strategies and should inform the content on your homepage. When you perform SEO, you pinpoint the words, images, and information that will encourage search engines to rank your website higher in their rankings pages. Once you’ve found them, you use them on your homepage.
Search engines prioritise websites that offer users relevant, helpful information. To show search engines that your homepage is valuable to customers, you should include the keywords that your customers use to find landscaping services.
We identify the right keywords by performing keyword research with tools like Surfer and SE Ranking. These are paid tools, but you can get good results with free tools like Moz and Ahrefs. Choose two or three keywords to focus on and ensure they appear on your homepage.
When a search engine sees that your website, particularly your homepage, includes relevant keywords, it will rank your website higher in searches for those words.
Key elements of a landscaping company homepage
When we write copy for a landscaping business, we follow the structure outlined below. We write the copy to reflect each company’s unique brand and add keywords in a way that still reads naturally.
Hero image and headline
The hero image and accompanying headline should get to the heart of your services in just one powerful image and a few well-chosen words.
In this example from Prestige Outdoor Living, an attractive image of the landscapers’ work, overlaid with a succinct headline, combines to grab the readers’ attention quickly:
What your potential customers ultimately want
The headline should describe what your customers ultimately want. This landscaping business caters to luxury clients, so the headline describes an upscale service with words like “luxurious” and “expert craftsmanship”.
What you do and who you do it for
We often include a subheading across the hero image, and it’s another good place to add some keywords to your homepage. In this example, we’ve included “swimming pool installs” and “landscaping in Milton, Oakville, Burlington, Canada”. Since landscaping companies usually try to attract local clients, it’s critical to include keywords that link your company to your local service area.
The problem your potential customers have
In the next section, discuss the problems your potential customers want to solve by hiring landscaping services. Luxury landscaping clients are usually interested in more than just weekly lawn care; they want to create something special in their yards. So we address that need here:
If you’re unsure about your customers’ pain points, start with the examples below. Your clients are likely using your services to solve one of the following problems:
No time to spare
Lawn care takes time, and clients wanting to hire a landscaping company are likely busy professionals with little spare time for mowing lawns and pulling weeds. They want to spend their weekends relaxing, not gardening. By highlighting their problem, you show prospective clients you know how to solve it.
If you work with corporate clients, like owners of business parks, you’ll want to talk about the challenge of keeping their properties in top condition so they look professional at all times. Managing multiple retail parks or large commercial properties is time-consuming, and you can encourage owners to book your services by showing them you understand their challenges.
Overwhelmed
Many people find yard work overwhelming. They’re not trained to tackle the problems in their yards and don’t know how to get started. Highlight this as a problem and help guide clients to a great solution—your landscaping business!
Wrong equipment and tools
Landscaping requires specialist tools and equipment to make it as painless as possible. Clients living in an urban area with little space for storing landscaping tools will definitely understand the challenge of not having the right tools for the job. This is another pain point you can hit for a prospective client: highlight how difficult landscaping can be without proper equipment and how easy it can be if they use your services—tools and all.
Lack of expert knowledge
Without making the customer feel completely clueless about landscaping, remind them how easy it is to rely on expert landscapers to make the right decisions for their garden. This is especially effective for landscapers who also work in garden design, as customers might want to change their outdoor spaces, but aren’t sure how.
Your landscaping services
Now’s the time to talk about how great you are! In this section, sell your services. Talk about your expertise, your years of experience, and all the benefits you bring to your prospective clients.
In the Prestige Outdoor Living example, we discuss their 20 years of experience and their service’s specific benefits, like “finer points of garden design” and “hard landscaping construction”. We also remind potential customers that they’ll get what they want with Prestige: “a turn-key solution to realising complete backyard transformations”.
Proof point section
Online reviews are an excellent way to showcase your value to potential customers and are critical to any homepage. We recommend sharing at least three testimonials from previous clients. If possible, add their picture along with the text.
Don’t be shy about asking for testimonials! You’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that your past customers are happy to share their positive experiences with the world.
Your process
This section walks the client through the process of working with you. It helps them understand how to get started and allows them to envision booking your services.
We recommend stating 3 steps a prospective client can take to start working with your landscaping business. These might be:
- Book a call to discuss your backyard vision
- We’ll provide a free quote for the projects you’ve requested
- When you’re happy with the scope of work, we’ll start building your beautiful backyard
Breaking your process down into clear steps helps people feel more comfortable taking them. They’ll know precisely how to get started, making them more inclined to book that first call.
Marketing for landscapers: Headline writing tips
When we’re writing headlines, we follow these simple tips:
Include an action word: Make sure your headline has a word that conveys action. In the Prestige example, we’ve said “Luxurious Outdoor Spaces Built with Expert Craftsmanship”, so “Built” is our action verb.
Speak to the right audience: Prestige’s audience is high-end customers who don’t mind paying top dollar for landscaping services. So, a term like “luxurious” tells them they’re receiving a premium service, and “expert craftsmanship” reminds them that they’re paying for excellence.
Include keywords: Try to include a keyword in every headline you write. This is especially important in the top headline of the page, but it helps to include one in every headline. Search engines will see those keywords in the headline and view your homepage as a relevant resource, making it more likely to receive a higher place in the rankings.
Follow a protocol: Decide which capitalisation protocol you’d like to follow for your headlines and then stick to it. In sentence-case headlines, only the first letter of the first word is capitalised. In title-case headlines, you capitalise everything except for conjunctions, articles, and most prepositions. It doesn’t matter which you use as long as you’re consistent throughout your homepage (and the rest of your website!).
Marketing for landscapers: Copywriting tips
When we write copy, we always ensure it serves the client’s digital marketing strategy, and our approach is no different for our landscaping customers.
Don’t oversaturate with keywords: This tip might be surprising, considering we’ve told you several times in this blog to use lots of keywords in your copy. But it’s possible to include too many keywords, a practice called “keyword stuffing”. Stuffing your website with keywords will make it seem illegitimate to search engines. They’ll demote your page in the rankings, so it’s a practice best avoided.
Keep it client-centred: It’s tricky to balance selling your services and talking about yourself nonstop on the homepage. Your copy should always address the client’s problems, needs, and solutions for their yards. Try to remove “we” and “I” from your copy as much as possible, turning those phrases around to speak to the client instead.
Keep it local: Your landscaping company likely thrives on local customers—people easy to reach within your service area. To improve your ranking in local searches, include locally focused keywords like “landscaping in Denver” or “greater Boston landscaping services”. That way, your website will also come up in Google Maps searches.
You should also make sure your Google Business Profile is complete so that local customers will know your company is active when they see it on a Google Maps search. Companies without an up-to-date Google Business Profile look less professional to clients (and some clients might even assume you’ve closed down!).
Clear, content-driven homepage copy from The Content Lab!
f you want brilliant homepage copy for your landscaping business but don’t have the time or expertise to write it yourself, set up a call with The Content Lab owner Abby Wood. She’ll talk to you about how The Content Lab can support your landscaping business’s digital marketing strategy with keyword research and compelling copy that helps bring traffic to your website and encourages customers to book your services.
Get in touch using this contact form or by emailing Abby at abby@thecontentlab.ie.
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