Tree surgery is the only trade here where the customer may be legally forbidden from buying what they want. A protected tree cannot be touched without the council's consent, and breaching that is a criminal matter. Almost every tree surgery website ignores this, which leaves the most-searched question in the trade sitting unanswered.
01The consent Permission comes before pruning.
A Tree Preservation Order makes cutting, topping or felling an offence without written consent. Conservation areas work differently again: you must give the council notice and wait, even for a tree with no order on it.
Your customer half-knows this. They have heard something, they are not sure whether their tree counts, and they are slightly worried they are about to break the law in their own garden.
That is a search, and what they find is usually a council PDF written for planning officers. A plain page explaining how to check, what an application involves and how long the council takes is one of the easiest pieces of genuinely useful content available to any trade on this site.
02The year Nesting season, then storms.
Your calendar is shaped by law and weather rather than demand. Between roughly March and August, nesting birds restrict a great deal of work under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, and a responsible contractor turns work away or delays it.
Which pushes the routine work into autumn and winter, when the storms are. So your quiet season and your emergency season are the same months, and the difference between a good year and a bad one is often just the weather.
You can see it in the search data. Enquiries for this trade spiked in February, which was storm season, and fell away by May. That is not a marketing pattern, it is a weather pattern.
03The levers What actually moves the needle for a tree surgeon.
- Pages about consent, not about cutting Tree preservation orders, conservation areas, how to apply to the council and how long it takes. This is the first thing your customer needs and the last thing tree surgery websites write about. It is the largest open goal in this trade.
- Be findable at seven in the morning after a storm Emergency tree work arrives in bursts, from people who have never needed you before and will not compare three quotes. Ranking for emergency and storm phrasings in your area matters more here than steady positions for routine pruning.
- Insurance figures, in numbers You take large heavy things down next to houses, cars and power lines. Your public liability figure is a headline claim, not a footer detail, and stating it plainly separates you from whoever turned up with a chainsaw and a van.
- Your tickets and your Arb Association status NPTC and LANTRA certificates, and Approved Contractor status if you hold it. Almost no customer knows what these mean, which is exactly why explaining them in one plain sentence each does more work than listing the acronyms.
The map pack does most of the work for emergency calls and much less for planned work, where somebody is comparing three quotes over a fortnight and reading who you are.
04The risk What the customer is quietly worried about.
Not the price. Whether a large section of tree is going to end up through the roof of the conservatory, and who pays if it does.
Yours is the most visibly dangerous trade on this site. Everybody has seen a video of a removal going wrong, and your customer is picturing it while you quote.
What settles it, in roughly this order:
- Your public liability figure, written as a number.
- Photographs of dismantles in tight spaces, which show competence better than any claim.
- Your climbing and chainsaw certificates, each explained in one sentence.
- Arboricultural Association Approved Contractor status if you hold it.
- What happens to the waste, because everybody forgets to ask and everybody cares.
05The price What it costs, and what you get.
£297 a month. The website, on-page SEO, missed-call text-back, a review funnel, follow-up on every enquiry, one inbox and a business number. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
No build fee and no minimum term. After three months the code can be bought outright for £1,000.
The no minimum term matters in a trade this seasonal. You are not signing up to pay through a quiet spring on the strength of a busy February.
06The awkward ones Common questions from tree surgeons.
01 Why write about tree preservation orders? That is the council's job.
Because it is what your customer searches first and nobody answers well. Someone who suspects their tree is protected wants to know whether they can do anything at all, and the pages that come up are usually council documents written for planners. Be the plain-English answer and you meet them before they have chosen anyone.
02 How much of the year is actually workable?
Less than people outside the trade assume, and the constraints are legal rather than practical. Nesting season restricts a great deal of work between roughly March and August under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. That pushes routine work into autumn and winter, which is also when the storms are, which is why your year feels either empty or impossible.
03 Emergency work pays best. Should the whole site be aimed at it?
No, and this is the mistake I would guard against. Emergency work is unpredictable and you cannot build a business on weather. Aim the site at the planned work that pays the bills, and make sure the emergency pages exist and load fast for the mornings when a tree is through a conservatory.
04 What is a tree surgery enquiry actually worth?
Bidding on "tree surgeon leads" reaches around £65 a click, which is the highest figure I found across every trade in this research. Lead resellers do not pay that out of generosity. It is a fair measure of what one of your enquiries is worth, and a straightforward argument for owning the channel yourself.
05 Should I write about specific trees?
Yes, and it works better than it sounds. Oak, ash dieback, leylandii disputes, storm-damaged conifers. People search by the tree in front of them, not by the service they need, because they do not know what the service is called. Those pages are easy to write because you explain this daily.
06 How is this different from the landscapers page?
Almost entirely. Landscaping peaks in summer and is about how a garden looks. Tree work peaks in winter, is often about safety or legal consent, and needs a completely different set of qualifications. If you genuinely do both, they want separate sections rather than one blurred page.
If most of your work is garden design, patios and maintenance rather than trees, the landscapers page is the better fit. Other trades are listed here.
Send me your site and your area and I'll tell you whether the tree preservation searches near you are winnable. In most towns nobody has written that page at all, which makes it the cheapest ranking available to you. Book a call. Tell me what's going on.