Your business is likely one of many landscape industry businesses in your area, so how can you stand out from your competition? The key to outperforming your competition is appearing higher in the search results—and local SEO is the strategy to help you do it. 

If you’re only attracting smaller-scale projects or large volumes of time-consuming consultations with unqualified prospects, look closely at your website analytics to see if your business website is really working for you. 

In August 2022, Google rolled out the Helpful Content Update (HCU). The largest update began in December 2022 and was completed 38 days later in January 2023. There is hope for those negatively affected by this update, but only if you make immediate changes.

Professionals in the landscape industry who excel at SEO recognize that the keywords they might search for are likely not the keywords their target customers are searching for. They see the importance of keyword research to ensure their content creation efforts land their web pages on page one of the SERPs. 

While all successful landscape construction companies tend to have a blog, not all landscape construction companies with a blog are successful. You need an inbound marketing strategy for blogging to be an effective component of your marketing plan.

You may be wondering if optimization is even necessary, and the answer is absolutely yes! But what is the best way to optimize your website? A good place to start is what you should not do when you are optimizing your website, which will be an effective guide throughout the process.

When you’re investing in a website for your landscape or pool building business, you may have questions about how you can receive high-quality leads that actually convert. Do you need to invest in ad campaigns? Should you be focusing on search engine optimization (SEO)? The answer to both of these questions is “yes.”

Having an online presence with excellent visibility means SEO and is key for landscape and pool contractors in today’s market. The customer journey often begins with a Google search, and so your website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) will have a huge impact on whether your business is discovered.

The need for transparency in SEO services is the main driver in HALSTEAD’s mission to change landscape and pool contractors’ perception of this area of marketing and help them understand how it all works. Our strategies align with data-fueled insights from hundreds of case studies—our approach is based on experience of what works, rather than assumptions or guesses.

Old-school contractor marketing was largely limited to display ads in regionally focused, industry-specific magazines, and setting up booths at a home show or two. These marketing methods are referred to as “outbound marketing.” They still have their place in the world, but are often compared to “yelling” at prospects and hoping they’ll listen. Sometimes they do, but it’s more effective to gear your strategy more toward inbound marketing and effective content marketing.

It’s time to separate SEO fact from SEO fiction and highlight 15 of the biggest myths that still seem to find their way into modern strategies for search engine optimization in the construction industry.

You need leads for your remodeling or design/build firm, and that’s one reason you’ve looked into investing in SEO. That’s a smart move—but how you go about it, who you partner up with to help you, will matter in terms of the quality of your leads and how bogged down your growing firm gets with smaller, perhaps less desirable jobs.

Around October 2016, we kicked off their Search Engine Optimization efforts. We began by identifying the most searched keywords in their service areas along with cities that had the best HHI (household income) and population combination. Weekly, professionally written articles targeting these keywords along with ongoing new local landing pages, and now high-quality backlinks, this landscape design/build company now has 45% of the keywords being tracked on the first page (first 10 spots). They began with only 5% of their tracked keywords on that page! 

Home improvement review sites like HomeAdvisor and Angie’s List are not a necessary fact of doing business in the digital age for landscape or design/build companies. If you will choose to live on there, it may not be in your best interest to put all of your marketing dollars into these platforms. There are be better ways to generate leads and build your business, such as SEO or Facebook/Instagram Advertising.

For the 2018 FY, the cap for the first half was met on December 15, 2017 and the cap for the second half was met on February 28, 2018. This is the earliest these caps have ever been reached by a significant number of days, demonstrating the high demand for seasonal laborers. Prior to 2016, workers who had previously been employed via the H-2B Visa were exempt from this cap, but when the federal budget bill recently expired, the cap exemption expired as well.

In our fragmented world, brands must provide content that smoothly leads prospects through the buyer’s journey and ensure no gaps exist that will lead them to drop off.

As long as landscapers have been landscaping and hardscapers have been hardscaping, we have also been, in our own ways, marketing. Over the last score of years, however, the introduction into the “age of technology” has vastly warped design-build marketing. Businesses, regardless of industry, can barely function on simple word-of-mouth anymore. To show our design-build pros just how far we’ve come in the last decade-and-a-half, and our predictions of the next few years, we’ve developed an “evolution of design-build marketing” timeline.

As a design build professional, there is probably a specific skill set or passion you had that led you to start a business around it. But along the way, we know it’s easy to get swept up in all the other aspects of the business – probably the aspects you don’t know how to manage and aren’t very interested in. STOP TRYING TO DO IT ALL. Outsourcing is a great way to free up your time and produce quality work. Here's a list of some position that are totally worth it to outsource. 

…you need to read this. Cutting-edge web design, excellent SEO, and an active social media presence will do very little for your business if there is no foundation for these strategies to build upon. You need professional etiquette, marketing basics, and conceptual ideas before you can dive into digital marketing.

Online reviews are one of the more subtle arts of inbound marketing. Business owners are often confused and disappointed about the lack of reviews they receive from happy clients. Many times the initial reaction is simply to just shrug and move on, assuming that there isn’t anything that can be done to bolster their online reviews.But it’s not true! We've compiled some useful rules to help you understand why you need to work on getting online reviews and who are the best customers to ask.