If you were in business 10 years ago, you might remember a new customer calling to find out more about your company because you did her neighbor's patio a few years back. Perhaps you remember walking away from a local home and garden show with enough leads to keep you busy for the next three+ months.
This simply isn't the case anymore.
While word-of-mouth referrals are still a great source of work for many landscaping companies today, homeowners are rarely getting your telephone number from a friend and simply calling you blindly. Instead, they’re researching online.
So what does this all point to? Your company’s blog. It’s the foundation for the best marketing strategies today and one of the best vehicles for growth. Sure, you can get website traffic and some leads with Google AdWords, but this is “rented” land – once you stop paying, your traffic and leads stop as well.
While blogging is not an easy, one-size fits all approach, it's pretty close. Think of it from your own point of view. How do you or your spouse research? Where do you go for information about a new piece of equipment your thinking of purchasing? Then, consider your target customer and where they might go for their information.
One commonality will be online search.
Your customers are trusting search results to help them decide, just as you are. Your goal is to have your company show up in these search results as much as possible. This is done with high quality, regularly updated content posted to your website: your blog. This type of content marketing is today's best search engine optimization or SEO.
So how exactly do you drive leads with a blog? Here is your seven-step plan.
1. Write about solutions and answers – not about how great your company is!
When your target customers search something like “how to entertain teenagers at home” or “top landscaping companies in __,” you want to come up in their search results. If you only write about your recent work at Mrs. Johnson’s home, then you don’t have a great chance of coming up in these search results! The content on your website has to reflect what your target customers search for.
2. Maintain high quality.
Google displays website pages that best respond to the user’s searches and they base that on an algorithm that favors high quality content (because content is and should be helpful). What is high quality? It’s truly helpful articles that are free of grammatical mistakes, packed with beautiful imagery, posted recently, and that are original. As for length, longer isn’t always better. Blog posts should start at around 400 words and can be as long as necessary to explain the point. For local companies, around 600 words is usually the right amount.
3. How often?
Remember: Blogging and SEO go hand-in-hand. The more traffic you want, the more high quality posts you’ll need. The right minimum is usually around four blog posts a month and can go as high as 20 a month. It all comes down to the return you’re looking to get. Going back to the importance of quality, quantity is never better than quality. Don’t sacrifice the quality of well-written blogs just to meet a number. Poorly written articles will not get ranked and will not interest your target customers! In fact, it very well may do more harm than good.
4. Write about stuff they really search for.
So what makes a blog bring traffic to your website? It starts with keyword strategy. That is, understanding what your target customers search for online when looking for a landscaping company in your service area, and choosing those keywords that are searched the most. There are a lot of tools out there to help you with this research. Perhaps the most popular one—it also happens to be free—is called Google Keyword Planner. The tool provides similar keywords to the one you input and the volume of each combination of keywords. Every blog you write should be strategically connected to this keyword research—never write
5. Back-end SEO.
If you just write it, they will not come. Sorry to burst your bubble. Back-end SEO, such as image descriptions, strategic urls, and page titles help to show Google what your blog post is about. The more that Google understands what it’s about, the more likely it will show your blog post to their searchers. This is where a lot of people make big time mistakes. Don’t fool Google with descriptions that don’t reflect the contents. If Google starts showing this page to searchers and they don’t click on it, that page will not continue to show up for that search result. Click-through rate refers to how many people actually clicked on your result versus those who just scrolled past it and it is extremely important.
6. Work with Social Media.
For B2C companies, Facebook should be the finishing touch on every article. After all, 1 in 5 page views online are Facebook! Make sure it's yours. By posting your company’s blog articles on social media, you reinforce your credibility and experience, while reaching a large, well-focused audience of potential customers.
7. Maintain customers and get more referrals with recurring emails.
Similar to Facebook, get the most out of your blog articles by allowing visitors to subscribe to your blog. Enable this sign-up form throughout various places on your website (not just on the blog pages). Then, send a recurring email to those people who subscribed that summarizes all the latest articles posted by your company. Many people like to receive this type of truly helpful email as it’s not the intrusive, “buy this, buy that” type of email.
About the Author:
Corey Halstead has over 15 years of landscape industry experience, both on the jobsite and in leadership roles. He now specializes in digital marketing and lead generation for this industry and is a partner at Halstead Media Group—a marketing company that works exclusively with home improvement professionals. To learn more visit http://www.halsteadmedia.com.
