Industries / Landscaping
Online marketing for landscaping.
A seasonal business where the maintenance contract pays the year and the design build job pays the quarter.
Online marketing for a landscaping company has to serve two businesses that share a truck. One is recurring maintenance, where the customer is worth a season and then several seasons after it, and where route density decides whether a customer is profitable at all. The other is design build and hardscape, where a single job can be worth more than a year of mowing and the decision takes weeks. Those are different queries, different budgets and different measurement, and blending them is the most common mistake in the category. The work is five things: paid search separated by job type rather than blended, a Google Business Profile ranking across the neighbourhoods the crews already drive, reviews and photographs of finished work, a quoting flow that does not require three phone calls before a price, and measurement that ends at a signed contract with its annual value rather than at a form fill. CurrentAds runs that as one program, on accounts your company owns.
The discovery path
How customers actually find you in this industry
01
Two buyers, one company
The homeowner who wants their lawn cut and the homeowner planning a patio are not the same person on the same day. One is solving a chore, the other is spending real money on a project. Sharing a campaign between them means the cheap clicks eat the expensive budget.
02
Spring decides the year
A large share of annual maintenance signups happen in a short window as the season turns. Budget held flat through that window is the most expensive kind of underspending, because the contracts signed then are the ones that renew.
03
Route density is the hidden margin
Two houses on the same street are worth far more than two houses twenty minutes apart. Targeting a wide radius wins customers that cost more to serve than they pay, and nothing in the ad account shows it.
04
Photographs do the selling for design build
Nobody buys a patio from a paragraph. Finished work, shot properly and shown on the profile and the site, is the strongest asset this industry can build and the one most companies leave on a phone.
05
The maintenance customer is worth years
A mowing contract that renews for four seasons, with cleanups and mulch on top, is worth a large multiple of the first invoice. Marketing judged on the first cut will always look unaffordable.
Priority order
The pillars that matter most here
We run the same ten services for every client. What changes by industry is the order they are built in and where the budget goes. For landscaping, this is the sequence we argue for.
01
Paid Media
Maintenance and design build are separated into their own campaigns and budgets, and paced against the season rather than the calendar month, so the spring window that produces the year's contracts is not capped like an average week.
02
Local and Maps
Residential demand is neighbourhood level and the map pack is where it is decided. Service areas set to where the crews already are, rather than the widest circle available, is both a ranking decision and a margin decision.
03
Creative Studio
Before and after photography and short video of finished work is what sells design build. It is the cheapest high value asset in this industry and the most consistently neglected.
04
Reputation
Reviews carry a maintenance business, because the buyer is choosing who comes onto their property every week for a season.
05
Analytics and Tracking
The measurement has to end at a signed contract and its annual value. A form fill and a signed maintenance agreement are different events and a program optimised to the first will quietly produce fewer of the second.
06
CRO and Landing Pages
Most landscaping sites make a homeowner call for a price on work that could be quoted from an address and a photograph. Shortening that is usually the fastest available gain.
07
SEO
Service and neighbourhood pages that rank through the season, so the spring rush is not entirely rented from the auction.
08
Email and SMS
Renewal at the turn of the season, plus cleanups, mulch, aeration and irrigation start ups to the existing list. This is the highest margin revenue in the business and the least advertised.
09
Web Design and Speed
A fast site that shows the service area, the work, and a way to get a price without a phone call.
10
AI Search
Assistants are asked what a project of this kind should cost and who does it locally, and clear factual pages are what get a company named there.
See all ten services and how they compound, or what it costs.
Why that order, in full
Keeping maintenance and design build apart is a measurement decision before it is a budget one, and the general case is in why most conversion tracking is quietly wrong, handled by the analytics and tracking program.
Neighbourhood demand is decided in the three local slots, and what moves them is in what actually moves the three map slots. Pricing is published on the pricing page, and the commercial terms are in the trial and money-back terms.
What we report
The metrics that actually matter
Live in your portal, not a monthly PDF. These are the numbers we commit to reporting for landscaping, whether they moved in the right direction or not.
- Signed maintenance contracts by source, with annual contract value attached
- Cost per signed contract, kept separate from cost per design build lead
- Design build proposals issued and close rate, because the cycle is weeks and a thirty day window judges it wrongly
- Route density of new customers, measured as jobs per square mile rather than jobs total
- Contract renewal rate at the turn of the season
- Share of annual budget spent inside the signup window
Where it goes wrong
Three ways this gets broken
01
One campaign for mowing and for patios
Lawn care queries are cheap and plentiful, hardscape queries are expensive and rare. Blended, the cheap clicks consume the budget while the job that would have paid for the quarter never gets shown. The blended cost per lead looks healthy the whole time.
02
A flat budget through the spring signup window
The weeks when homeowners choose a maintenance provider for the year are worth several ordinary months. A monthly cap sized for an average month runs out in the middle of them and the contracts go to whoever was still visible.
03
Winning customers outside the route
A wide targeting radius produces customers that take forty minutes to reach and cost more to serve than they pay. This never appears in the advertising report, only in the margin at the end of the season.
Compliance and practical notes
What we work around in landscaping
Tree work and chemical application are licensed differently
Pesticide and fertiliser application, and in many states tree work, require licences and carry their own advertising rules. CurrentAds writes to what a company is actually licensed to perform in its states.
Commercial grounds contracts are a different sale
Property managers and HOAs buy on bid cycles and relationships, not on search. That work should be reported separately or it will distort every number that belongs to residential advertising.
Weather makes month to month comparisons misleading
A wet April and a dry April are different businesses. Reporting compares like periods and says when weather, rather than the program, moved the number.
General information, not legal advice. Rules change and vary by state. Your business stays responsible for the legality of its own offers, claims, and disclosures, and nothing goes live without your approval.
FAQ
Landscaping questions
Should lawn maintenance and design build share a budget?
No, and separating them is usually the single largest improvement available. They have different query costs, different job values and different decision lengths. Sharing a budget means the high volume, low value queries spend it before the project enquiries are ever shown, and because the blended cost per lead looks acceptable the problem is invisible from inside the account.
What is a landscaping lead actually worth?
That depends entirely on which business it belongs to. A maintenance enquiry should be valued on the annual contract and the number of seasons it renews, not on the first cut. A design build enquiry should be valued on the proposal close rate and the average job. Targets are set from those two numbers rather than from a single blended figure that describes neither.
How is seasonality handled?
The year is planned against the season before it starts. The signup window gets the budget and caps that can absorb it, the winter is used for the work that compounds, which is content, photography, reviews and the profile, and reporting compares like periods so a wet month is not mistaken for a failing program.
Does CurrentAds have landscaping clients?
No. CurrentAds has no paying clients yet, in this industry or any other. What is published here is an approach and a set of published industry figures, not a client history.
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