Welcome to the resource hub for landscape and outdoor living contractors.

Sometimes running a business feels like a rollercoaster. Challenges can have that stomach-dropping sensation as you quickly begin your descent into the unknown. But consistent marketing efforts help create stability over time, and the challenges that once felt like gut-wrenching moments when you questioned your choice of career, and maybe even your sanity, become more like little bumps that quickly even out.

If it has been a few years since you updated your website, it’s time to take action now. Your website is at the forefront of your business, where potential clients form their first impressions. In this fiercely competitive online arena, ensuring your website not only looks great but also functions seamlessly and provides an exceptional user experience is non-negotiable. Let’s explore six common signs that your lawn, landscape, or outdoor living business website needs to be updated.

Imagine if your lawn, landscape, and outdoor living business could instantly stand out from the competition. Picture having a customer list filled with affluent homeowners who appreciate the finer things in life. Envision your projects being nothing short of breathtaking outdoor paradises that belong on the cover of a prestigious magazine. In today's digital age, where first impressions are often formed online, your brand is the key to ensuring your business thrives in the industry.

Did you know nearly 70% of consumers prefer to message a business on social media? It's their go-to way to connect with companies, and this trend is transforming social media into a vital customer service channel. In today's fast-paced digital landscape, businesses, including those in the lawn, landscape, and outdoor living industry, are constantly searching for innovative ways to meet and exceed customer expectations.

Gone are the days when the roar of gas-powered equipment was synonymous with lawn maintenance. Today, many businesses in the lawn and landscape industry are moving toward a quieter, cleaner future—and using marketing strategically to build credibility and trust with homeowners and property managers. As municipalities across the globe grapple with environmental concerns and the need for stricter regulations, industry businesses face new challenges and opportunities that even marketing plays a role in.

While the ultimate goal is for your target customer to accept your project proposal, it’s what happens between the first click and you handing them over your proposal that influences the outcome the most—even more than pricing.

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. 

In the lawn, landscape, and outdoor living world, where impeccable aesthetics and customer demands intertwine, strategically allocating your marketing budget is crucial to propelling your highly successful business toward even more significant growth and brand recognition. Marketing is an investment that builds upon its success over time.

Leading lawn, landscape, and outdoor living firms use email marketing for various purposes, including building relationships, nurturing leads, keeping your brand top-of-mind, and promoting content and services. When you create purposeful content that provides value to your recipients, there’s no question whether you should include email marketing within your strategy.

At the end of the snow season, it’s time to evaluate overall performance and create a strategy for the following winter. Top commercial snow contractors don’t wait until August or later to start this process. The more time you have to prepare and implement your strategy, the better results you’ll see.

While the ultimate goal is for your target customer to accept your project proposal, it’s what happens between the first click and you handing them over your proposal that influences the outcome the most—even more than pricing.

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. 

Give or take, successful green industry companies get at least 20 quality leads per month from their website alone. If you find yourself frustrated with losing to lower-priced bids, even though you know your work is of higher quality than your competitor, your website may not be working for you as it could be.

With the average buying cycle for landscape projects lasting almost 80 days, now is the time to strategize and start executing to ensure an efficient and profitable season ahead. Here are nine actionable ways that top landscapers prepare for the next busy season now and how you can too.

Successful landscape contractors and pool builders may have a digital sales brochure featured on their websites so they can share it with prospects, but it’s a small part of the website, not the entirety of it. Instead, these firms have invested in an effective content marketing strategy that transforms their websites into lead-generating machines.

In the high-end landscape industry, whichever company does the best job educating the prospect of the value they’ll bring to the project is the one that wins the bid, regardless of price. Being at the top of your content game is critical.

Value-driven original content is key to moving your target customer through the buying process, and the reason leading landscape companies invest in producing quality content regularly. But what is content marketing, and why are so many companies across all industries using it?

Building product manufacturers in the landscape and outdoor living industry face specific challenges when it comes to content marketing. In this jam-packed field guide, we take you behind the scenes of the exact framework that empowers our clients to produce industry-specific content at scale.

Professional landscapers put considerable time and effort into creating and caring for outdoor spaces, to make them look polished and practically perfect. Similarly, this is exactly how a professional website should be constructed. When the right balance of design and function is met, your website can act as a critical sales and marketing tool that will educate and pre-qualify potential customers and generate qualified leads that result in sales.

Websites are now where prospects of your design/build business are likely to start. To seek out where they can find a pro for their particular project, to find out what kind of business you run and services you provide, and to decide whether to reach out and get more information from you. Make yours better with these 7 tips.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Making the most of your Facebook business page means taking a strategic approach to maximize visibility. Leading lawn, landscape, and outdoor living firms produce engaging content, and have optimized Facebook pages that are set up correctly and thoroughly to reach their target audiences.

In the lawn, landscape, and outdoor living world, where impeccable aesthetics and customer demands intertwine, strategically allocating your marketing budget is crucial to propelling your highly successful business toward even more significant growth and brand recognition. Marketing is an investment that builds upon its success over time.

There’s never a convenient time for a business slump, but it inevitably happens. When it does, many landscape contractors scramble to find a quick win. While quick solutions may work in the short term, inbound marketing is a long-term solution that will create stability in your business and create a consistent flow of traffic, leads, customers, and potential recruits.

Value-driven original content is key to moving your target customer through the buying process, and the reason leading landscape companies invest in producing quality content regularly. But what is content marketing, and why are so many companies across all industries using it?

When comparing LinkedIn to Facebook, LinkedIn generates leads 277% more effectively. And if that’s not reason enough, we have more reasons why landscape professionals need to take advantage of the power of LinkedIn Ads.

Running an effective Facebook Ads campaign looks different for landscape industry professionals than it does for other industries. Here we’ll highlight seven common mistakes that we see industry pros make when it comes to running Facebook ads

Explore the upcoming Facebook advertising updates for 2021 as they pertain to the outdoor design/build, landscaping, hardscaping, and pool industries, along with their implications and how your brand can take action now to prevent unwelcome surprises.

Ignoring the importance of online marketing would be a costly setback for your growing design/build company and so would failing to evaluate the effectiveness of your chosen marketing strategy. So, what is the best way to approach marketing your landscape or remodeling services online?

As a leading website providing remodeling and home-improvement ideas and inspiration, Houzz quickly jumped to the top of the remodeling industry’s radar. But does spending advertising budget on Houzz’s Pro+ program reap the benefits that it boasts for construction contractors, building product manufacturers and dealers, and designers?

Sometimes running a business feels like a rollercoaster. Challenges can have that stomach-dropping sensation as you quickly begin your descent into the unknown. But consistent marketing efforts help create stability over time, and the challenges that once felt like gut-wrenching moments when you questioned your choice of career, and maybe even your sanity, become more like little bumps that quickly even out.

If it has been a few years since you updated your website, it’s time to take action now. Your website is at the forefront of your business, where potential clients form their first impressions. In this fiercely competitive online arena, ensuring your website not only looks great but also functions seamlessly and provides an exceptional user experience is non-negotiable. Let’s explore six common signs that your lawn, landscape, or outdoor living business website needs to be updated.

Imagine if your lawn, landscape, and outdoor living business could instantly stand out from the competition. Picture having a customer list filled with affluent homeowners who appreciate the finer things in life. Envision your projects being nothing short of breathtaking outdoor paradises that belong on the cover of a prestigious magazine. In today's digital age, where first impressions are often formed online, your brand is the key to ensuring your business thrives in the industry.

Did you know nearly 70% of consumers prefer to message a business on social media? It's their go-to way to connect with companies, and this trend is transforming social media into a vital customer service channel. In today's fast-paced digital landscape, businesses, including those in the lawn, landscape, and outdoor living industry, are constantly searching for innovative ways to meet and exceed customer expectations.

Gone are the days when the roar of gas-powered equipment was synonymous with lawn maintenance. Today, many businesses in the lawn and landscape industry are moving toward a quieter, cleaner future—and using marketing strategically to build credibility and trust with homeowners and property managers. As municipalities across the globe grapple with environmental concerns and the need for stricter regulations, industry businesses face new challenges and opportunities that even marketing plays a role in.

Making the most of your Facebook business page means taking a strategic approach to maximize visibility. Leading lawn, landscape, and outdoor living firms produce engaging content, and have optimized Facebook pages that are set up correctly and thoroughly to reach their target audiences.

Leading lawn, landscape, and outdoor living firms use email marketing for various purposes, including building relationships, nurturing leads, keeping your brand top-of-mind, and promoting content and services. When you create purposeful content that provides value to your recipients, there’s no question whether you should include email marketing within your strategy.

Nearly 90% of consumers read online reviews to determine the quality of a local business before contacting them. Your green industry business may have a fantastic website with helpful content, the right calls to action, and a stunning digital portfolio of your outdoor living projects. Still, if your reviews aren’t good, you’ll lose. 

There’s never a convenient time for a business slump, but it inevitably happens. When it does, many landscape contractors scramble to find a quick win. While quick solutions may work in the short term, inbound marketing is a long-term solution that will create stability in your business and create a consistent flow of traffic, leads, customers, and potential recruits.

In the high-end landscape industry, whichever company does the best job educating the prospect of the value they’ll bring to the project is the one that wins the bid, regardless of price. Being at the top of your content game is critical.

Standing out from the competition and selling more pools requires an effective and scalable digital marketing strategy that encourages potential customers to set their hearts on a custom pool built by your firm in their backyards—but how is that achieved?

Value-driven original content is key to moving your target customer through the buying process, and the reason leading landscape companies invest in producing quality content regularly. But what is content marketing, and why are so many companies across all industries using it?

One of the biggest challenges that landscape industry pros face with social media is creating engaging content that also converts. Properly managed social media accounts both engage customers and help keep a business top of mind, drive traffic to its website, and spread the company’s word to their target audience.

Building product manufacturers in the landscape and outdoor living industry face specific challenges when it comes to content marketing. In this jam-packed field guide, we take you behind the scenes of the exact framework that empowers our clients to produce industry-specific content at scale.

Leading landscape firms—both those with commercial and residential focuses—prioritize professional photo shoots every year because they experience firsthand the incredible positive impact it makes on their business. Our team pulled together this 101 to address some of the common concerns we hear from landscape professionals.

At the end of the snow season, it’s time to evaluate overall performance and create a strategy for the following winter. Top commercial snow contractors don’t wait until August or later to start this process. The more time you have to prepare and implement your strategy, the better results you’ll see.

With the average buying cycle for landscape projects lasting almost 80 days, now is the time to strategize and start executing to ensure an efficient and profitable season ahead. Here are nine actionable ways that top landscapers prepare for the next busy season now and how you can too.

When comparing LinkedIn to Facebook, LinkedIn generates leads 277% more effectively. And if that’s not reason enough, we have more reasons why landscape professionals need to take advantage of the power of LinkedIn Ads.

If done right, social recruiting is one of landscape and pool contractors' most effective recruiting strategies. This comprehensive guide covers everything you need to know about recruiting on social media platforms, including which platforms work best.

Professionals in the landscape industry know how to put the nose to the grindstone and get work done. This physical labor can be accompanied by job satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment every day—yet it’s only possible when everyone works together as a team.

For landscapers, hardscapers, and outdoor living contractors, there are many benefits of using an Application Tracking System, or ATS for recruiting. Without an ATS system, recruiting fast becomes an overwhelming task.

A tightening labor market is making it harder and harder for companies to attract and hold onto top talent. But nothing seems to work. That’s why leading landscaping companies are turning to recruitment marketing as a way to nurture happy, productive, and innovative workforces.

Your employer brand is the reputation your company has among team members—and, perhaps more importantly, potential future team members. A strong employer brand attracts top talent, while a weak brand attracts low quality talent, or in many cases, none at all.

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. 

Making the most of your Facebook business page means taking a strategic approach to maximize visibility. Leading lawn, landscape, and outdoor living firms produce engaging content, and have optimized Facebook pages that are set up correctly and thoroughly to reach their target audiences.

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. 

With modern tracking and data analytics technology, the world of marketing—once gray and mysterious—becomes crystal clear. Today, landscape business owners can see exactly where each and every lead is coming from, and modify their marketing budgets accordingly.

In the lawn, landscape, and outdoor living world, where impeccable aesthetics and customer demands intertwine, strategically allocating your marketing budget is crucial to propelling your highly successful business toward even more significant growth and brand recognition. Marketing is an investment that builds upon its success over time.

Leading lawn, landscape, and outdoor living firms use email marketing for various purposes, including building relationships, nurturing leads, keeping your brand top-of-mind, and promoting content and services. When you create purposeful content that provides value to your recipients, there’s no question whether you should include email marketing within your strategy.

At the end of the snow season, it’s time to evaluate overall performance and create a strategy for the following winter. Top commercial snow contractors don’t wait until August or later to start this process. The more time you have to prepare and implement your strategy, the better results you’ll see.

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. 

Nearly 90% of consumers read online reviews to determine the quality of a local business before contacting them. Your green industry business may have a fantastic website with helpful content, the right calls to action, and a stunning digital portfolio of your outdoor living projects. Still, if your reviews aren’t good, you’ll lose. 

With the average buying cycle for landscape projects lasting almost 80 days, now is the time to strategize and start executing to ensure an efficient and profitable season ahead. Here are nine actionable ways that top landscapers prepare for the next busy season now and how you can too.

Successful landscape contractors and pool builders may have a digital sales brochure featured on their websites so they can share it with prospects, but it’s a small part of the website, not the entirety of it. Instead, these firms have invested in an effective content marketing strategy that transforms their websites into lead-generating machines.

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.

In the lawn, landscape, and outdoor living world, where impeccable aesthetics and customer demands intertwine, strategically allocating your marketing budget is crucial to propelling your highly successful business toward even more significant growth and brand recognition. Marketing is an investment that builds upon its success over time.

There’s never a convenient time for a business slump, but it inevitably happens. When it does, many landscape contractors scramble to find a quick win. While quick solutions may work in the short term, inbound marketing is a long-term solution that will create stability in your business and create a consistent flow of traffic, leads, customers, and potential recruits.

In the high-end landscape industry, whichever company does the best job educating the prospect of the value they’ll bring to the project is the one that wins the bid, regardless of price. Being at the top of your content game is critical.

If you set up a booth at home and garden shows expecting high-quality leads, you’ve likely had your fair share of disappointment. Deciding whether it is worth it requires taking an honest look at your numbers and deciding if the cost of going still belongs in your marketing budget.

If you are always scrambling to find work when cold weather arrives, you don’t have an effective marketing strategy and likely aren’t investing in one. Competing in the landscape industry means budgeting for marketing, even during slow seasons.

If your landscaping or pool building business is using generic text-based estimates while trying to close sales rather than interactive, digital sales proposals with visual appeal, you're leaving money on the table. With content overload in the digital world, your business needs exceptional sales proposals if you want to close more sales faster.

If you live in an area with snow, welcome to the slow-season cash flow slump. Many people think it’s an inevitable part of running a landscaping or pool building business, but is it? It’s possible to enjoy cash flow stability despite the weather when you’re strategic in marketing all year round.

Our living spaces, indoors and out, form the backdrop for our lives. A quick look at the home goods and interior decorating market demonstrates the mass potential to expand this trend into the outdoor living space. The relatively new field of exterior design offers the opportunity for landscape businesses to scale by providing expertise and services to an underserved market with high demand.

Leading landscape firms—both those with commercial and residential focuses—prioritize professional photo shoots every year because they experience firsthand the incredible positive impact it makes on their business. Our team pulled together this 101 to address some of the common concerns we hear from landscape professionals.

As the landscape and outdoor living industries continue to grow, more and more entrepreneurs are entering the market. Some, of course, being new direct competition for you. There is, more than ever before, a need to set yourself apart from the other businesses in the neighborhood or region.

Digital business cards can completely transform the way that landscapers market their business. Instead of relying on a piece of paper that only contains contact information, landscapers have the opportunity to use digital business cards to give a bigger picture of the services they offer.

With the average buying cycle for landscape projects lasting almost 80 days, now is the time to strategize and start executing to ensure an efficient and profitable season ahead. Here are nine actionable ways that top landscapers prepare for the next busy season now and how you can too.

In the high-end landscape industry, whichever company does the best job educating the prospect of the value they’ll bring to the project is the one that wins the bid, regardless of price. Being at the top of your content game is critical.

Value-driven original content is key to moving your target customer through the buying process, and the reason leading landscape companies invest in producing quality content regularly. But what is content marketing, and why are so many companies across all industries using it?

One of the biggest challenges that landscape industry pros face with social media is creating engaging content that also converts. Properly managed social media accounts both engage customers and help keep a business top of mind, drive traffic to its website, and spread the company’s word to their target audience.

Building product manufacturers in the landscape and outdoor living industry face specific challenges when it comes to content marketing. In this jam-packed field guide, we take you behind the scenes of the exact framework that empowers our clients to produce industry-specific content at scale.

With the highly competitive state of the landscape industry today, you know that your company is just one of many that a prospect is scoping out. Knowing how to stand apart from your competition is essential, and it takes an intentional effort to develop a strategy.

Leading landscape firms—both those with commercial and residential focuses—prioritize professional photo shoots every year because they experience firsthand the incredible positive impact it makes on their business. Our team pulled together this 101 to address some of the common concerns we hear from landscape professionals.

Outdoor living contractors have a huge advantage over other industries when it comes to marketing, but few notice the gold mine sitting right in front of them—even though it’s built into every amazing project they have ever completed.

Your talented team’s detailed craftsmanship deserves to be seen. Since your focus is always dedicated to the current open projects, it’s understandable that carving out the necessary time to pull together proper case studies for last year’s projects is hard to do. But it’s critical to ongoing marketing success.

There's nothing quite like a beautiful flyover of a clean, gorgeous swimming pool and glistening waterfalls set against the earthy colors of a paver patio and lush landscaping. It’s a special view—often made available on Instagram or on your website—that very few would be able to see firsthand (unless they were a pilot).

As a remodeling/construction firm, Your work is your best advertising. If you're among the many design/build professionals who take pride in their work and want to increase awareness of your business, this article is for you. Here, we cover four tips for getting your projects to the pages of magazines and design websites.