Hi everyone. I just wanted to have just a quick talk with you guys and share some thoughts that came up a couple days ago when I was speaking to another client, who was actually wanting to postpone their campaign and wait until next year to start marketing for their lawn care season. It’s something that I realize a lot of people don’t know is that the amount of time that it takes, not just to produce the work but the amount of time it takes for search engines and websites and all your marketing efforts to come into play online.
Let me give you a couple examples. For instance, if you have a brand new website and you want to use organic search engine optimization to rank high in organic listings, these are the not pay per click listings, these are not the local listings, you want to use SEO to do that. You have a brand new website. Well, you can set up your website, get it all optimized, get in great content, but it’s not going to show up in the top ten immediately.
It’s going to take months, it’s going to take quite a bit of work, and if it’s a brand new site, it’s going to be very tricky to get that in the top ten in a short period of time. That’s why you really need to do your online marketing efforts. It’s something that you have to plan ahead. You need to do it in advance, especially if you have a seasonal business. It’s not something you want to procrastinate on.
If your lawn care season is starting at the beginning of March, you need to be starting your online marketing now. You need to start it now. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that. Online marketing is not something that you want to procrastinate. The more you procrastinate, the further behind you’re going to be, and you will not be ready for next season. So, very important, don’t procrastinate on it. It takes a long time for you to show up in the listings.
This has to do with Google’s algorithm. This is one of the ways they try to keep spammers out of the top ten results. They can see a brand new site come up, get tons of links to it, and it pops up in the top ten rankings, but it’s a spam site or it’s selling spyware or junk or whatever. You want to plan these things in advance, get your site up, running, optimized and have it slowly rise through the index. That’s the best way to do it. That’s what you need to do. But you need to start in advance and do it now.
But this isn’t just SEO that it’s important. If your strategy revolves specifically, exclusively around local listings, you need to do that now as well. That will take you a good two months or more to get up there in the position that you want for your key phrases in the city where your address is for your local listings. So you need to start that now.
Keep in mind there are a couple different factors that affect where you are ranked in your local listings, there are hundreds, actually. But some of the important ones are reviews, the number of citations you have, which means Google Local wants to see that you have a bunch of other business listings in other directories with the same address and the exact same info. That’s how it determines whether or not you have a legitimate listing that it can deem credible in display next to other businesses.
So keep that in mind. That’s another thing to keep in mind. Like I also mentioned, you need reviews. You’ve got to have reviews and that’s not something that you can do overnight. That’s not something you can do in a week. It’s something that takes time and that’s another thing that you need to start now. So you’ve got to get your reviews, you’ve got to get your citations, and you have to keep all this in mind that it’s going to take a while for Google to get you up there. It’s not instantaneous.
The only thing that is instantaneous it pay per click. Pay per click, it can be pretty expensive to run a campaign. A lot of my small budget clients don’t, they avoid it. My higher budget clients do really well at it. Pay per click is one of the three things, the only three things that you can set up and have it running and start getting leads today. The problem is it’s expensive, not everybody can afford it for their market, and it does take some time to configure and set up.
It will take you a day to set it up, to really set up a ton of different ads, to really split test them thoroughly, to really do thorough key phrase research and to really craft some ads that really talk to those markets. Or your target audience, depending on where you ad is running and who you’re trying target specifically. So, in that sense it’s not completely instantaneous.
It is something that you need to plan in advance. It’s something that you need to put in some work to get your ads up and running and have them ready for the first day the season starts. When it’s time to put out door mailers, if you’re not already running the pay per click campaign, you should be running it by then.
So, that’s three of our main strategies that I just wanted to touch on and just tell you that you really need to be thinking about these things now. If your lawn care season starts at the end of February, March you’ve got to start before Christmas. If you don’t start before Christmas, you’re going to be at a disadvantage before the season starts. So get started now, I just wanted to put in my two cents. Good luck and get started, get to work. Please keep the questions coming, I’m getting some great questions. Please send more. Thanks.
KEY POINTS:
Its not like hanging door hangers. You have to be ready and ranking before the season starts or miss out on all those customers for the entire season.
In order to have an online marketing campaign actively bringing in new leads at the very start of the season you must begin your online marketing campaign at least 3 months prior.
SEO
○ Can take 3 months to index
○ Can take even longer to achieve desired ranking
LOCAL
○ 2 Weeks to authorize
○ Can take 2 months to show up.
○ Dependent on citations ( references) and # of reviews
○ It takes time to get client reviews and it not something you can do in a week
PPC
○ Instant to start but takes a lot of time to setup properly. Prepare now during slow months.
○ If not running now go ahead and setup up your campaign and have it ready to launch as soon as season is about to start.
Incoming search terms:
- landscaper marketing
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