As a small business owner, building a strong online presence is crucial if you want to grow your business and gain long term success. When it comes to building a presence online for your landscaping business, you need to make sure that you have a well designed, attractive website which showcases both your skills and your past work.
However, just having a decent website isn’t enough anymore. People need to be able to find your site, otherwise there’s absolutely no point having one! This is where search engine optimisation – SEO – comes into play.
What Is SEO?
As a landscaper, you might never have heard of SEO before. Don’t worry, it isn’t too hard. Basically, search engines like Google rank different websites based on a huge range of factors, including keyword use and the quality of their content.
If you want your website to rank well – and to therefore appear high on the search engine results pages for relevant keywords – then you need to perform some sort of SEO. There are a range of different SEO factors that you can manipulate, which we will look at shortly.
Why Is SEO Important?
Basically, having a website which is optimised for search engines will help you appear in high on the results pages for relevant keywords. For example, when someone in your area searches for ‘landscaper’, you want to be in the first couple of results, otherwise no one will ever see your site.
Having a good SEO ranking will help drive organic (unpaid) traffic to your website. This will help reduce your reliance on costly marketing techniques like search engine marketing (SMM) and pay per click marketing (PPC).
How Do I Perform SEO On My Landscaping Website?
There’s a wide range of different SEO factors that you need to think about optimising if you want to achieve the highest SEO ranking possible. However, you can make a start by thinking about the following:
Backlink building – Building links back to your website is arguably one of the most important parts of SEO for small businesses, and it can help you rank very highly.
Keyword use – It’s important to make sure that you use relevant keywords throughout your website and within any content that you create, otherwise the search engines won’t know what your site is about.
Meta descriptions and titles – Make sure that you spend a bit of time writing high quality meta descriptions and title tags, as these are major SEO ranking factors.
Image descriptions – In the same way, you need to make sure that all of your images are named properly with good descriptions and alt texts.
Final Word
If you’re serious about building a strong online presence for your landscaping business, you need to work on creating a high quality, SEO optimised website. The best way to do this is arguably to use a professional web design company, but there’s no reason why you can’t do it yourself if you’re willing to spend a bit of time on it.