Like it or not, your landscaping website often determines whether a homeowner chooses you or a competitor. Fortunately, most landscaping websites suck, which means you can dramatically increase your landscaping leads by making a few changes.
Read on to learn how to turn your landscaping website into a lead generating asset (not just a bad digital brochure).
The Best Landscaping Websites Have These Things in Common
Speed
Speed makes a huge difference in the success of your landscaping website.
If your site takes 3 seconds to load, you lose 32% more visitors.
Google knows that prospects’ patience is thin (and Google has the data to show it). Site speed is often the first impression a homeowner uses to assess your company.
If your site takes too long to load, homeowners will leave your website and find someone else to take care of their landscaping.
You obviously don’t want that so don’t skimp here. Half seconds matter, especially as more and more people use their mobile data to browse the web. If you don’t know how to improve your page speed, hire a landscaping web design company that does.
If you want site visitors to become leads, your landscaping website needs to be fast.
Mobile-Friendly
Along the same lines, your landscaping website needs to be mobile-friendly.Over half of all traffic comes from mobile devices. Mobile searchers often have a high purchasing intent as well (translation: they want to buy your stuff).
If you don’t have a website that works well for iPhones and Android devices, prospects won’t convert – contact you, sign up, or ask for an estimate – and Google will penalize you.
There’s no reason not to have a mobile-friendly landscaping website. It’s 2020, everyone uses their phones for everything.
Easy-to-Navigate
Good landscaping websites are easy to navigate.
You can steer visitors a bit, but they generally know what they’re looking for. Your job is to make it easy for them to find it.
Rules of thumb to follow:
- Have five or few items on your header
- Display your phone number on every page
- Use only one call-to-action per section
Attractive
Do you believe people judge a book by its cover?
I think they absolutely do, and that’s why your landscaping website needs to look sharp, especially in a business such as yours, where you’re helping people create a more attractive home for themselves.
Easiest way to create something that looks great is to borrow elements from other sites you like. We’ve included images of some of our favorite landscaping websites throughout this post.
After checking out several landscaping sites, expand your search by reviewing HubSpot’s top website designs for 2020.
Secure
As of January 2019 Google Chrome, and other browsers started warning people that the sites they are visiting are not secure.
This is around the same time that security became a Search Ranking Factor. So if you and a competitor have similar sites with similar content, you will come after them in search results because your site is not secure and the competitor is.
Using and SSL and enabling HTTPS is important not only for ranking, but it also helps keep your leads and customers safe. An SSL encrypts the traffic between the customer and your website.
If you’re asking your customers and leads for information like; name, address, phone number, and email, or other identifiable information it’s your responsibility to keep that information protected from third parties who would use it maliciously.
Quality Content
Sometimes landscapers believe their website doesn’t need to have much content on it to be successful. They think that potential customers just want to see that you’re legitimate, and that content is a distraction from the main call-to-action of calling in or completing a lead form.
This sort of thinking is short-sighted. While it’s true that many prospective customers won’t read your blog content, you can be sure that Google uses it to assess the E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) of your site.
E-A-T is Google’s proxy for quality, something that every page needs. Without it, your site won’t rank.
Your Turn to Create a Top-Tier Landscaping Website
Armed with these six essential components, you should be able to hire a website design firm to update or create a top-tier landscaping website.
If you have any questions or want us to build a landscaping website for you, get in touch!