I Passed a Landscaper’s Website on a Technicality

How many of your signs are standing on lawns tonight?

Most landscapers can answer that inside four seconds without getting up. You know the streets, you know which two came out of a referral, and you know which one the neighbor asked about while your trailer was still open.

Nobody taught you that, and you’d carry on doing it whether or not anyone was keeping score, which is exactly why it fooled me for as long as it did.

A trade this good at the human half of the job looked to me like a trade with the other half handled. So I stopped reading one part of my own audit properly, and a client of mine paid for that.

The February call

Ray runs a crew of six and a website his nephew built him three years ago. He called in February to ask whether the site was holding him back.

So I ran the lot. The padlock, the phone check, the stopwatch, the headings, the pictures.

It all came back green enough to be dull, and when I reached the point where I note whether a page carries a title tag, his did, so I wrote yes and moved on to the next thing.

98.5% of the landscaping sites I opened carry one, which sounds like a clean sweep until you put all 47 trades in order on it and find wineries and travel companies above them, accountants and solar installers underneath, and landscapers down at 43 of 47.

I told Ray his basics were fine. I billed him for two hours, and I’d take that invoice back if the morning ever came round again.

What was in the box

A title tag belongs to one page and describes that one page, in a line short enough to read at a glance.

Ray had five pages. All five of them said Ray’s Landscaping and Design.

My audit never read those words. It asks whether the field is empty, his wasn’t, and I allowed a yes to stand in for a sentence.

Would you have caught it? His nephew didn’t, and neither did the two people Ray paid before me, so I wasn’t in unusual company. I was just wrong in better handwriting.

Your website carries a version of that line on every page it owns, and you have almost certainly never laid eyes on a single one of them. Not because you don’t care about your own business. Because nobody hands them to you, and they never show up anywhere you’d think to look.

Then the other thing I found, which I wrote down as good news and left sitting there in the notes.

His Google listing was stuffed. Years of it, going back to before the website existed, built one driveway at a time by a man who asks while he’s coiling a hose.

94.8% of landscaping businesses hold at least one Google review, with orthodontists a hair in front of them and chiropractors a good way back, which lands the trade 13 of 47.

Getting a review at all is the one habit small business is broadly good at, 88% across everything I sample, and Ray had been collecting them since before he owned a website to point them at.

So Ray had the attention. He had nothing for the attention to land on.

That gap is why a landscaper with a full listing can still watch the phone sit quiet on a Thursday evening in June.

The two habits are opposites

Asking a customer for a review is a thing a person does out loud, while tired, at the end of a job that went fine and that nobody made a fuss about.

No software does it for you. No agency sells it to you in a bundle. Your trade sits near the top of that check because thousands of owners decided to open their mouths in a driveway.

You built that yourself, one awkward minute at a time, and it’s worth more than anything I could put on an invoice for you.

Asking out loud, while the work is still fresh, is the whole method, and your trade worked it out without any help from me.

The line on a page runs the opposite way. Every website builder on the market drops something into that field the day the site goes live, so the box is never empty and the job never looks outstanding.

One habit needs a human being. So does the other one, except everybody involved assumes the software already handled it, and for years I was one of the people assuming.

Which of the two would you guess your own website is failing?

The service he killed

Ray dropped snow removal that winter.

He’d built a page for it two years earlier, he had never once taken a call off the website for it, and he decided his town simply didn’t want that service from him.

His town wanted it. Three of his own summer customers hired someone else that winter, and one of them mentioned it to him in the spring, cheerfully, the way people do.

Nothing on his website ever said the words snow removal anywhere a search engine could reach them. The page was there. The page was called Ray’s Landscaping and Design, exactly like the page about mulch.

Have you ever dropped a service because the phone never rang for it? Have a think about which one, and then ask yourself whether your website ever said that service out loud where a stranger could hear it.

What’s the quietest thing you sell? Type it into your phone with your town after it, tonight, and see whether your own website turns up anywhere at all.

Another owner drove across town to ask me about that, and the answer was that nobody types grounds maintenance into a phone. They type the job they want done.

What I do differently now

I read the words. Out loud, off the screen, with whoever is paying me sitting right there beside me.

Eleven minutes on a five page site, and it’s the least clever thing in my whole process.

Two more habits came out of that winter with Ray:

• I ask an owner to name a service the phone doesn’t ring for, and the two of us go hunting for it together before I quote a penny.
• I open the Google listing before I open the website, because in this trade the listing is nearly always the better built of the two.

How many of the pages on your own website could you name from memory right now? Most owners get as far as the homepage and then start guessing.

Landscaping sites finish on 72 out of 100 once my scoring is done with them, 28 of 47, a thoroughly ordinary place for a trade to sit.

Ordinary hides things. Ray’s number would have looked respectable on any report I could have printed for him, and he still spent an entire winter believing nobody near him wanted a driveway cleared.

Most of the landscaping websites I take on don’t need rebuilding at all. They need an afternoon with a person who will name the pages after the work.

Back to the sign

Someone is going to walk past one of your signs tonight, read the name off it, and put that name into her phone before she’s through her own front door.

She’ll find you. Your trade is uncommonly good at the part of this that makes a stranger want to look you up in the first place.

Accountants would swap places with you tonight. The average one holds a fraction of the reviews the average business does.

What she reads next is a line one person typed in a hurry three years ago and never opened again.

Give me the address and I’ll read you every page name on your website, out loud, the way I should have read Ray’s. It takes ten minutes and you’ll hear the problem before I get to the third one.

Would you have let that line go on the sign?