The #1 Mistake Landscape Professionals Make On Their Websites

If you want to get found online by the right customers in the actual neighborhoods or cities that you service there's one key thing you've got to do on your website. But having looked at literally thousands of landscaping websites, I can tell you there's one key mistake that I see time and time again. And if you make this mistake, you're simply going to have to wait for referrals when, if you fix this, you could start attracting people in the right neighborhoods, time and time again.

My name's Jack Jostes and welcome to The Landscaper's Guide to Modern Sales & Marketing? podcast. This show is all about helping you get found by your hell yes customers, so you actually create a profit and enjoy your business.

Now, recently, I was the keynote speaker at Kubota USA's Turf Talk, where we had thousands of commercial landscape contractors from all over the country attend. And what you're about to see and hear is a clip from the live website review portion of this event. And I hope you learn a few things that you can implement on your website to start getting found by the right customers.

Website Reviews

I'm going to share my screen and we're going to do some website reviews. So, if you'd like for me to take a look at your website live, type the address of your website in the chat. And I want to let you know that we have phenomenal, phenomenal internet speed here right now. I just ran a test, some of the fastest internet I've ever used. And I've actually taken a look at one of these sites and I wanted to show you just how slow it is. Oh, it's loading faster now. So, I looked on the site earlier and it still doesn't seem like everything is fully loaded. So, I like this. Oh, see, the logo just popped in.

So, that would be one thing is the speed of your website, and you can see that my browser is still trying to load it, it's really important because a lot of people are looking at your sites on mobile. But I do like that you share a vision of the company, you list the services you offer. We've got a photo of you and your spouse here, Dave, looking good. And you've got some testimonials.

Some of the things that I would change. One is I would get your own email address. So, I'd get something like [email protected], because you don't work for Gmail. And so, Gmail is a little less professional looking than, say, your own business email.

The other thing that I'm not noticing on this site is the geography point. So, when I was talking earlier, you've got to make it really clear which cities do you service, where are they? And that's not clear in here. We've only got one services page. So, you'd want to build this website out to have individual pages for each of these services for the individual areas that you have. That'll help you actually generate leads and talk with your web host or whoever built this, see if we can get this to load a little bit faster.

The #1 Mistake We See On Landscaper’s Websites

Another site was from Alex. And, similarly here, I don't see any geography. So, this would be the number one mistake that I see landscape contractors make is not mentioning where they work, because you're not just a landscape company, you're a landscape company in your town, in your city. And that's how people Google, they look for either landscapers near me, commercial landscapers near me, or commercial landscaping and whatever city you're in. So, I don't even see it on the footer of this website.

So, one thing I do like though, that you have is it looks like you have individual pages for each service. We've got a mulching page, you've got a hardscape page, excavation. So, good job with that. Increase the geographic mentions of the areas where you serve, and now you'll start getting leads in those area.

Our next website review is from Ed, from Doucet Lawncare. And so above the fold, which is the fold being the bottom of the site, I don't know where you are. Now, I was able to scroll down, and see that you're in New Hampshire. So, I like that you have that. One of the other websites didn't have that. But I would get this geographic, this Canterbury, New Hampshire above the fold. And the other thing is, I don't know if you do commercial. I'm assuming you do. But one of the tips earlier was that, if you're trying to sell to commercial landscape clients, you want to use the word commercial. And then also then, also the photo here is clearly a residential property. Now, it could be that you're attending this event, and you're not a commercial landscape contractor, that's what it looks like. If you are trying to sell commercial, you've got to get a better photo of a commercial property that you're maintaining. And then, also get the word commercial on there, and also the geography.

Q&A

Tom:

Paul, we got a question for you that came in. How often should you change the oil in a Hydro-Gear hydrostatic transmission?

Paul:

Well, thanks Tom. We mentioned a little bit about it that we encourage you to do it at the beginning of each mowing season. But if you look at our troubleshooting guide and our product guides, we usually talk about changing that first oil change at about 75 hours. That first oil change is pretty critical. You get that one out of the way, and then you can do it about every 4 to 500 hours after that. You should be in real good shape at that point.

Tom:

That's great.

Jack:

Good. And Randy, from Kawasaki, what kind of oil do you recommend for your engines?

Randy:

That's a great question. And I'm glad somebody asked that. And we have a saying at Kawasaki, and that is that motor oil is not mower oil. And the reason is because oils are formulated differently, depending on the application. And Kawasaki has air cooled engines for our landscape applications. Air cooled engines are extremely demanding on oil. And so, we are able to formulate oil very specifically for those applications.

Randy:

Another thing is that we can put zinc in our oil because of the fact it's an off-road application. So, we have some greater latitude to use some things in our oil that make it even better than what you're going to find for motor oil in your pickup truck. So, what I tell people is, so Kawasaki motor oils, or Kawasaki oils are especially formulated for small air cooled engines. If you can't use Kawasaki oil, or you can't find it, then use an oil that is specifically formulated for small air cooled off-road engines.

Tom:

One last question that came in, and this one's for you Ken, does ECHO offer any cordless battery products?

Ken:

Oh, a great question. Yeah so, even heard earlier in another presentation about battery. And so, the answer to the question is, yes, we do. One of the things that we do at ECHO is building our cordless plastic arm, it's 58 volt. It either uses a two amp hour battery or four amp hour battery. All of the units come with a rapid charger, which cuts the charge type down in about half of normal.

Ken:

But what you'll find in our tools is that they're very similar to gas like performance. We really tried to take that into consideration because a lot of folks that have been running gas powered equipment for a long time, and maybe you've got a job commercially that you're coming across, where they want something that's very quiet, and they're restricting you to use gas products, of course, cordless is a great alternative to that. And so, I think you'd be very impressed with our product line because there is very similar gas like performance on a battery platform. Great question.

If you're making some of the mistakes that we pointed out during these live website reviews at the Turf Talk, you're not alone. In fact, I've personally reviewed over 1,000 websites over the last 11 years, and I find that most lawn and landscape contractors are making a few key mistakes that, when you fix them, can make a big impact in the quality of leads that you're getting, and the amount of time that you're spending on sales. In fact, we recently interviewed Jake Harris who literally cut 40 hours out of every single week because of one key sales process enhancement.

So, I'd love to work directly with you on this, on your website, on what you need to do with your sales process. And we're accepting a limited number of people in our upcoming workshop, The Landscaper's Guide to An Optimized Sales Process. So, if you haven't registered yet, buy your ticket at landscapersales.com. Again, it's landscapersales.com. Look forward to seeing you there. And thanks so much for tuning into The Landscaper's Guide to Modern Sales & Marketing? podcast. We look forward to seeing you next week.