Landscaping has the most brutal seasonality of any trade I have pulled numbers for, and almost everybody responds to it backwards. The enquiries arrive from February, so that is when landscapers start advertising, by which point ranking for anything takes until the season is over. The work that fills your spring has to happen in the dark.
01The trade Why landscaping searches work differently.
Three things set this trade apart, and they push in the opposite direction to the emergency trades.
It is the slowest decision in the trades. A garden redesign is thought about for months, discussed by two people who disagree, and compared against a new kitchen. Nobody rings a landscaper in a panic. That means your site is read properly, at length, on a laptop, in the evening, which is unusual and worth building for.
The work photographs better than anything else on this site. A roofer's finished job is thirty feet up and a plumber's is behind a wall. Yours is the thing the customer wanted, in daylight, from the kitchen window. A landscaper without a proper gallery is throwing away their biggest advantage.
Your scarce resource is quoting time, not leads. Most trades want the phone to ring more. You probably do not. You want fewer, better-qualified people, because every unqualified enquiry costs you a Saturday morning and a tank of diesel.
02The season The seasonal trap, in actual numbers.
Your customers behave the same way. The first warm Saturday in March is when the nation looks at its garden and decides something must be done, and everything you have published is either ranking by then or it is not.
Pages take three to six months to settle. So a page written in March is ranking in August, for a customer who wanted the work done in May and has now given up. A page written in October is ranking in February, which is precisely when it matters.
That is the whole argument for starting in the autumn, and it is the opposite of what almost every landscaper does.
03The levers What actually moves the needle for a landscaper.
- Photographs of finished gardens, by job type Nobody buys a garden from a paragraph. Your portfolio is the product, and it wants splitting by what people search, patios, driveways, decking, fencing, full redesigns, because each of those is a different customer with a different budget.
- Pages that separate design-and-build from maintenance A homeowner spending twenty thousand on a redesign and a managing agent wanting the grounds cut fortnightly are not the same person and do not search the same way. One page trying to serve both loses both.
- Qualifying before you drive there Your real cost is not advertising, it is the Saturday spent measuring a garden for somebody who wanted a rough idea. A form that asks about budget range and timescale before it books you in is worth more than another twenty enquiries.
- Publishing in autumn for spring Search interest in this trade collapses in November and climbs from February. Pages need three to six months to rank, so the work that fills next April happens while the ground is frozen. Almost nobody does this, which is the opportunity.
The map pack matters here too, but less than it does for an emergency trade. Somebody planning a twenty-thousand-pound garden will happily scroll, compare three firms and look at all their photographs before ringing anyone.
04The site What a landscaper's website has to do.
Show the work, then make it easy to tell you what they want. Those are the two jobs, and most landscaping sites do the first one badly and the second one not at all.
A gallery is not a wall of forty photographs. It is jobs. This garden, this problem, this budget band, before and after, ideally with a line about what the customer actually asked for. Six jobs told properly beat sixty photographs every time, and they give you six pages that can rank.
Then price bands. I know that is uncomfortable in a trade where every job is different. But "patios from £X per square metre" and "full redesigns usually start around £Y" does more qualifying than any form, and it means the people who ring you have already accepted roughly what this costs.
BALI and the Association of Professional Landscapers belong on the page if you have them, along with CHAS if you do commercial grounds work. At the top end of design-and-build they carry real weight, because somebody handing over a large deposit is looking for a reason to believe you.
07700 900447
Mobile
Included, and it runs on its own
A missed call still becomes a job.
This is the same system every site here is wired into. The text goes out whether you remember or not.
- It fires in about eight seconds Before they have scrolled to the next name in the results.
- They reply while it is still in their head And it is waiting for you when you come down off the job.
- You do nothing at all Evenings, weekends, and the days you leave your phone in the van.
05The price What it costs, and what you get.
£297 a month. The website, missed-call text-back, a review funnel, automatic follow-up on every enquiry, one inbox and a business number.
No build fee, no minimum term, and you can stop in the winter if you want to, though I would tell you that is the month it is doing the most for you. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
The follow-up is the piece that pays here. Landscaping enquiries go quiet for weeks and then come back, because people are waiting on a bonus or an argument about the budget. A quote that gets chased politely three times converts far better than one that was sent once in April and forgotten.
06The awkward ones Common questions from landscapers.
01 When should I actually start, if the season is February to June?
September or October. The website side takes three to six months to do much, so starting in March means you are ranking properly just as the enquiries stop. Starting in autumn is the single biggest scheduling advantage available in this trade and it costs nothing extra.
02 What do I do in the dead months?
Two things that pay. Get the photographs off your phone and onto the site while you have time, because in June you will not. And go back through last year's quotes that went quiet, a lot of them stalled on money in April and have had a winter to think about it.
03 Is BALI or APL membership worth it for getting found?
Not for rankings directly, but the member directories are genuine links from respected sites, and the badge changes whether somebody trusts you with a large deposit. For design-and-build work at the higher end I think it earns its fee. For grass cutting it probably does not.
04 I get plenty of enquiries but they all want a price over the phone.
That is a qualifying problem, not a traffic problem, and more SEO would make it worse. Published price bands on the site do most of the filtering, "patios from", "full redesigns typically", and the ones who ring after reading those are a different quality of enquiry.
05 Should I be on Instagram instead?
Do both if you have the time, but they do different jobs. Instagram is where people who already found you decide they like your work. Search is where people who have never heard of you find you at all. Neither replaces the other, and only one of them still works while you are on a job.
06 Commercial grounds maintenance, same approach?
Different enough that it wants its own pages. That work is won on contracts, insurance, CHAS and being able to show you can cover a site every week without fail. It is far less seasonal, which is exactly why it is worth having alongside the domestic work.
Anything I have not covered, ask me on a call. If it is August and you are flat out until next spring, the honest answer is that this is exactly the right month to start and the wrong month to think about it. Other trades are here if you have landed on the wrong page.
If you want me to look at what your spring enquiries would need to have in place by February, that's twenty minutes and it costs you nothing. Book a call. Tell me what's going on.