Skip to content If your landscaping business is centred around referrals, word of mouth and lead sites for generating work, you’ve most likely experienced the unpredictability that comes with these methods. Months where you can’t keep up with the demand, and others where you’re trying to find work or dropping prices to stay busy.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), when carried out effectively, fixes that issue. This practical SEO checklist for landscaping businesses clearly outlines everything that your website and Google Business Profile need to generate consistent local enquiries.
This guide can be used as a checklist for your own setup, or to help you understand what a proper landscaping SEO service should actually be doing for you. No technical theory or jargon, just clear steps linked to real outcomes.
Let’s get right into the checklist!
Every effective SEO campaign revolves around keywords. They truly are the foundation of every SEO strategy. Choosing the right keywords can make the difference between clicks that convert into leads and clicks that never result in contact, or in prospects who get in touch but waste your time.
While keyword research can sound technical, it’s straightforward for landscaping businesses once you know what to look for. To make it super simple for you, the only keywords that really matter are the search queries people use when they are ready to hire a landscaper.
These keywords are typically referred to in the marketing world as ‘bottom of funnel’. A keyword strategy that only targets bottom-of-the-funnel cuts out all the trash enquiries from DIY gurus, price undercutters and people that aren’t serious about employing your service.
Common examples of bottom of the funnel keywords you should target include things like:
✅ “landscaper near me”
✅ “patio installers in [town]”
✅ “garden fencing company [area]”
✅ “driveway landscaping [postcode]”
In terms of how to find the best keywords for your website and GBP, just ask yourself what type of things potential customers would type into Google when they’re ready to hire a landscaper.
You can also use Google itself to see what people are searching for. Here’s how:
Type your main service into Google and look at autocomplete suggestions
Scroll to the bottom of the search results and check “related searches”
Search your service in Google Maps and note the wording competitors use
Your goal here is to identify a list of bottom-of-funnel keywords for every core service you offer. These keywords will be the backbone of your SEO campaign and will be used to optimise your website and GBP.
Before building out your GBP and website, you should learn why certain landscapers are already ranking above you, so you can understand the strategy of the businesses that are already dominating local search results. By understanding their strategy, we can determine how much work is needed to outcompete them and capture their leads and enquiries.
Despite what you may think, National landscaping blogs or big landscaping chains aren’t who you’re competing with. Instead, it’s local landscaping businesses that are currently dominating search results and are your true competitors.
Begin your research by typing in the main services your business offers to both Google and Google Maps, and create a short list of 3-5 of the top websites that appear most often.
Then look for patterns between them, such as:
How many service pages do they have?
Do they cover multiple services separately (patios, fencing, turfing)?
Do they have specific location pages for different areas?
How many reviews do they have?
Competitor analysis tells you what Google already rewards in your local area, giving you a minimum standard to meet and eventually beat, rather than guessing that what you’re doing is right.
Once you have run this analysis, you’ll have a good idea of what standard is expected to compete with them in search results. From here, we just need to do what they are doing, just bigger, better and faster.
Once you have your keywords locked in and competitor analysis completed, it’s time to build the assets that are going to drive you leads and enquiries for years on end. When it comes to SEO, these two assets are your website and Google My Business Profile (GBP). Let’s start with your GBP first.
When it comes to getting leads from Google Organic, most landscaping enquiries are generated from your GBP. While your website may take a few months to start delivering leads and enquiries, your GBP can, in some cases, start generating leads within a few weeks.
With just a few hours of upfront work and an hour a week of adding content, your GBP will start delivering you regular leads and enquiries, making it one of the best return-on-investment opportunities when it comes to landscape marketing.
When setting up and optimising your GBP, your profile should include:
✅ Accurate business name
✅ Correct primary and secondary categories
✅ Business description
✅ List of services
✅ Service areas
✅ Website link
✅ Phone number
✅Social profiles
✅Opening Hours
✅Map Pin Location
Make sure you fill out every part of your GBP, as Google rewards fully completed profiles.
Once you have set up your GBP, make sure you update it regularly. Regularly add new photos of your work, chase reviews, and post weekly. Doing all this shows Google that your business is fresh and active, thereby maximising search visibility.
Above all, prioritise getting reviews, choosing the correct categories and ensuring you add services under these categories. You can learn how to do all of this by reading our more extensive master guide on how to optimise your Google My Business Profile.
To strengthen your GBP’s performance and appear in organic results, building your own website is absolutely crucial. Without building a website, you’ll find it hard to compete with local competitors that have one.
These are the four non-negotiable pages that must be included in a website for landscaping businesses:
Homepage
About Us
Contact Us
Testimonials / Reviews
A homepage should clearly communicate:
The services you offer
The service area you cover
Social proof (reviews, testimonials etc)
What sets you apart from your competitors?
Your about us page isn’t about sharing your life story. It’s about building trust with Google and potential customers. Make sure to mention the areas you serve and the type of landscaping work you specialise in.
A contact page’s purpose is to make it easy for customers to contact you and address any questions they may have. Make sure to include:
✅ Quote Form
✅ Contact Details
✅ Address
✅ Embedded Google Map
✅ Reviews
Not only do reviews help get conversions. They also boost local rankings. Testimonial pages are a great way to provide Google with more proof that people have chosen your business and are pleased with your work.
If your website has only one service page with a short list of what you offer, the number of enquiries SEO can drive will be limited. You see, Google doesn’t rank your entire business as a single entity. It ranks each page individually.
To optimise for maximum Google visibility and lead and conversion generation, each service you offer should have a dedicated page on your website. For landscapers, examples of service pages include:
✅ Patio installation
✅ Block paving driveways
✅ Garden fencing
✅ Turfing and lawn installation
✅ Garden clearance
✅ Retaining walls
✅ Full garden redesign
By having dedicated pages for each service, Google has a clear motive to display your website when someone searches for a specific job you offer.
Each service page should clearly address:
✅ What the service is
✅ Who it’s for
✅ The areas you offer it in
✅ Examples of completed work
✅ Why someone should choose you
This is one of the quickest ways for landscapers to increase their visibility without increasing their ad budget.
You want to aim for 20-30 pages each, with a minimum of 600 words. Although this sounds like a lot of work, it’s something 90% of your competitors won’t do, leaving the door open for vast amounts of leads and enquiries if properly executed.
Once your service pages are in place, location pages help expand your website’s reach to more areas you serve. Ensure your location pages are written from real on-the-ground experience, because that’s exactly what you have.
The page should include:
✅ The service area name in the page title and main heading
✅ A short intro explaining the type of work you do in that area
✅ References to nearby landmarks or towns
✅ Real examples of work completed nearby
✅ A clear call to get a quote
✅ Google will spot if you’re copying and pasting the same text with town names swapped across different pages. Avoid this simple mistake.
Make each location page as specific as you can. This can be done by mentioning specific elements related to the location, such as monuments, geography, or the challenges the area faces with landscaping.
On-page SEO is not overly technical; it’s about leveraging the list of keywords you put together and putting them in key places within pages so that Google can understand what each page is about. When creating your service and location pages, here are just a few key places to include your keywords:
Each service page should have a clear title that states:
✅ The service
✅ The location
Example:
Patio Installation in Reading | Local Landscaping Company
This tells Google what search queries to show that page for.
The main heading (H1) should be the core service of each page, with subheadings (H2) to break up the page for clarity and help it be found for related searches. Your writing should be tailored to people first and Google second.
URL’s should be kept brief and obvious:
/patio-installation-reading/
/garden-fencing-oxford/
Avoid including random numbers or vague wording.
Real images of your work are more impactful than using stock images from Google.
Your images should include a brief sentence describing what is shown.
While they don’t affect rankings directly, they do affect click-through-rates. Meta descriptions should be written as a short sales pitch, not just a list of keywords.
Once your website pages are all dialled in, it’s time to boost your website’s performance with backlinks. A backlink, put simply, is when another website includes a link to your website, typically a page of your website that’s relevant to theirs.
In regard to local landscaping SEO, the quality of the link, meaning which website has linked to yours, is more important than how many backlinks you have. One strong local link can perform better than dozens of random ones.
For landscaping, the highest quality links are usually from places that already operate in your local area, such as:
✅ Local sports teams you sponsor
✅ Charities or community groups you support
✅ Schools or nurseries you’ve done work for
✅ Local business directories with real traffic
✅ Links from these sources signal to Google that you’re a real, active business in the local community. A backlink from your town’s local football club’s website can help your business more than one from a national site unrelated to landscaping or your service area.
Aim to get one quality backlink per month for around 12 months. This is just another step that other landscapers would have overlooked, allowing you to easily outrank them and dominate search results to benefit from the maximum amount of leads and enquiries possible.
Citations operate like a background check for your business. If Google can see your business listed across various industry directories, it signals you’re a legitimate business and gives Google confidence to show you in first-page results for local search queries.
When adding your business to directories, it’s important to ensure your details are:
✅ Spelt the same way
✅ Listed in the same format
✅ Matched across your website, Google Business Profile, and directories
It’s not about getting hundreds of citations; it’s getting the right ones. Focus on high-quality directories such as:
✅ Google Business Profile
✅ Bing Places
✅ Apple Maps
✅ Trusted UK business directories
✅ Trade-related directories were relevant
Social media presence can’t directly push your landscaping website to the top of Google search results, but it can support your local SEO when set up correctly. Think of your social media profiles as proof points rather than as a marketing channel that requires a new post every day.
An account on every platform is not needed; for the majority of landscaping businesses, these accounts are more than enough:
✅ Facebook
✅ Instagram
✅ YouTube (optional, but powerful long-term)
When Google sees:
✅ A website
✅ A Google Business Profile
✅ Multiple social profiles
Providing all the details match and pointing towards the same business. You will have a clean, consistent online presence that supports rankings, reduces doubt, and encourages potential customers to feel comfortable and confident about calling you.
If your website takes a while to load, customers will leave and call someone else. Google monitors this behaviour and adjusts rankings accordingly. Some common causes of slow site speed are:
Large, uncompressed images of past jobs
Cheap hosting
Bloated page builders
Too many plugins
You can use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to show:
Load time
Mobile issues
Basic fixes
You don’t have to understand every metric, but if your site is slow on mobile, it needs attention. Faster load times keep visitors engaged long enough to turn searches into calls.
Most searches for landscaping services come from a phone. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, no amount of SEO will save it.
Common mobile issues include:
Tiny text
Buttons too close together
Forms that are hard to fill out
Pop-ups covering the screen
These issues not only impact the user experience but also reduce the number of enquiries your business receives. A mobile-friendly website converts far more clicks into conversions, giving Google fewer reasons to hold you back.
Internal linking is the process of linking pages on your website to other pages on your own site. In terms of landscaping SEO, internal linking enables Google to know:
Which services matter most
Which locations are important
How pages relate to each other
How to internally link:
On service pages, add links to other services that are closely related
On location pages, link back to the main service the location page is about
On your homepage, link out to all the core service pages that are most important
This is one of the simplest fixes to do and one of the most overlooked parts of an SEO checklist.
There’s nothing wrong with doing SEO yourself; many landscapers start out that way. Studying the basics, setting up your Google Business Profile, and creating a website can all be done in-house and are valuable skills to have. Ultimately, time is what holds most people back.
SEO isn’t something you can set up and forget about. It requires consistent work, testing and adjusting your work. At the same time, you need to be pricing jobs, managing staff, sending out quotes, and actually being on the tools. SEO is often the first thing to slip down the list and get done half-heartedly. This is where the brakes are applied for SEO progression.
A dedicated landscaping SEO service is there to remove that barrier. Here at Landscaping Leads, we offer advanced SEO services exclusively for local green-industry businesses. There are no contracts; free website maintenance is included, and we provide monthly progress reports to keep you in the loop.
Book a call to discuss your goals, and we’ll provide an honest assessment of whether SEO is right for your landscaping business and exactly what’s needed to achieve local results. No pressure, no hard selling, just honest advice from SEO professionals. If you don’t decide to partner with us, you can use our advice to implement the campaign yourself. It’s a win-win for your business!
Joe is the founder of Landscaping Leads. With years of experience in digital marketing and entrepreneurship, he is very experienced in developing and executing effective digital marketing strategies that help companies generate more leads.
Fill in the form below to request a free SEO audit or a consultation call. No hassle, no pressure, just honest advice from experienced digital marketing experts!
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