5 Reasons You Should Start a Blog for Your Landscaping Company

image_pdf

Do you believe that a blog can help your bottom line?

For the past month, I’ve been blogging on my site about how lawn care and landscape companies need to find solid Internet marketing agencies to help them with their digital marketing. For the series, I interviewed Steve Wolgemuth, CEO of YDOP in Lancaster, Pa., who’s an SEO expert. And I learned more about how blogging and other forms of social media are essential for today’s landscape and lawn care business owners.

So, I’m going to dissect a blog here and give you five reasons why it would benefit your SEO and social media needs.

A good blog will:

1. Take your customer’s FAQ’s and provide answers. Well-researched answers can educate you clients on topics like lawn maintenance, LED lighting, turf diseases and fungi as well as hardscape design. Not only can you point your existing clients to your blog to keep them well-informed, but you’re also answering universal landscape or lawn care questions that prospects in your region may be asking, too. Finally, it shows your clients and prospects that you care about them, their needs, their questions and their budgets.

2. Organize the information. Bite-sized chunks of new info will be easier for your readers to digest. Your clients and prospects don’t care about the scientific names and history of pink snow mold. They just want to know what is on their lawn and how to get rid of it-fast. They also want to know if you know what you’re talking about before they call your office for an appointment.

3. Include pictures and videos. Write in a way that readers can understand in captions and description. Again, there’s no scientific jargon—just the facts, ma’am. And a picture (or video) is worth a thousand words and helps to break up the monotony of words.

4. Be localized. You know that localization is important because you serve specific regions. Some of you cover two states that border each other. Others will take on the eastern or western part of their state. Still some of you serve a tri-county region within your state. But each region you serve is unique-in weather patterns, in the people who live there and in governance. For example, Maryland adopted a new law restricting the use of nitrogen and phosphorous in their fertilizers because of the Chesapeake Watershed. Maryland lawn care companies needed to know about nitrogen and phosphorous alternatives to ensure that their clients’ lawns get the nutrients to grow and develop. At the same time, they need to obey their state’s laws. So, a lawn care blog would bring up this topic with handy and reassuring advice for HOA’s, homeowners and property managers.

5. Not be stuffed with keywords or any kind of padding. Believe or not, Google sets up algorithms to test Web content. And if these algorithms find any kind of keyword manipulation, they will ensure that your website isn’t gaining in the ranking’s department. Also, if you hire an SME writer (subject matter expert), make sure that they don’t resell their articles/blogs to your competitors. Again, it ends up hurting your business by lowering your Google rankings.

Granted, I didn’t take this blog apart using a laser scalpel, but I hope I reminded you of a blog’s importance to your company’s overall digital marketing plan, as well as some new information to motivate you to invest in this new marketing medium.