A Landscaper Drove Across Town. Nobody Types Grounds Maintenance.

There’s one job I turn down about twice a year, and landscapers are perfectly happy to pay for it: write me a new title for every page on my website.

I’ll do it after we’ve talked for an hour. I won’t do it out of a keyword tool, and I won’t do it off a list someone emailed me, because the words that belong in those lines are words your customers say out loud, and I don’t yet know what your customers call you.

Marc found that out on a Tuesday in March, in my kitchen, with the report I’d sent him folded in half on the table.

He drove forty minutes about one line

He’d come across town with that report on the passenger seat, which is how I learned that an owner sitting 43 of 47 on one check will rearrange a working Tuesday over a single line of text.

“Title tags. We’re near the bottom of the whole trade. What do I fix?”

I asked him to read me the top of his services page instead.

“Commercial Grounds Maintenance Solutions.”

Has a customer ever said that to you out loud, I asked him. He thought about it for longer than he wanted to.

“The property managers do.”

How many of your jobs come from property managers?

“Two.”

And the rest?

“Word of mouth. Homeowners, mostly. People who saw us on their street.”

The number he was upset about

Marc had landed near the bottom of a check that almost nobody fails. 98.5% of the landscaping sites I audited have a title tag, against 99.1% of everything I run through the same check, so his trade’s very worst showing is a check it passes on nearly every site I open.

The only landscaper I’ve ever met with no title tag at all had a site built by a cousin in 2011, and when his pages turned up in the results, the line across the top was the address of the page with the slashes still in it. Whatever gets written into that line is what a search engine prints there.

Marc’s pages all had one written. Someone sat down and typed all of them in a single afternoon years ago, then closed the laptop and went home, and nobody has read a word of that afternoon since.

Titles get written in that rush, along with everything else on the list a site has to clear before it goes live, and then they sit there for a decade.

My audit can tell him the line exists. It can’t tell a lawn from a loading dock.

Whole cities read the same way. Nearly every Seattle site I opened carried a line nobody wrote, and all of them passed.

“So the ranking is nothing?”

The ranking tells you the box got filled in. It doesn’t tell you who filled it in, or who that person had in mind when they did.

“The guy who built the site filled it in.”

What did he ask you first?

“What we do.”

And you said commercial grounds maintenance solutions.

There was a pause I’ve heard on about a hundred calls, and it lasted the length of a mouthful of coffee.

”…Yeah.”

Two vocabularies, and yours is the wrong one

Every trade has two ways of talking about itself, and only one of them ever gets typed into a phone.

Marc has the words that go on an invoice, on a tender document, on the side of the truck when he’s feeling formal. His customers have the words they use standing in a driveway: the lawn, the hedge, the strip along the fence, the tree that’s getting close to the roof.

Nobody has ever typed grounds maintenance solutions into a phone. His wife hasn’t. His own mother hasn’t. The woman two streets over who watched his crew all summer and finally wants a quote certainly hasn’t.

Which vocabulary is on your website tonight? You already know the answer, and you know exactly which afternoon it got there.

Say your own services page out loud, as you would to a woman standing on her drive with her arms folded. Are those the words that are actually printed on it, or is the page wearing the suit you keep for the bank?

What that ranking is worth

What worried Marc at my kitchen table wasn’t the wording at all, because he took the wording to be the cheap part of a much larger repair. He’d driven over expecting to be told his website was finished and that replacing it ran into thousands of dollars, which is what the last two people who looked at it had told him.

My scoring gives the title tag five points out of a hundred and gives having Google reviews fifteen, so the check Marc drove across town about is one of the cheapest things on my whole list.

He’d read that ranking as a verdict on his website, when all it says is whether a field on the page was left blank, and his wasn’t, and yours almost certainly isn’t either.

I have signed a landscaper’s site off on that basis myself, a pass earned by a filled-in box, and he lost most of a season while I felt clever about it.

Rankings get sold that way on purpose. A check where a trade lands near the bottom makes a tidy opening line in an email from an agency, and the email never mentions that all 47 trades are packed into the space between one number and another.

If one of those emails reached you this year, and I’d bet a coffee that it did, go back and read the first line of it again. Then ask the sender which of your pages he read before he wrote to you, and watch how long the reply takes.

The verdict he actually wanted was on the words themselves, and no crawler on earth is ever going to hand him that, because software can confirm that a sentence exists without having any opinion about whether the sentence is any good. A person has to read them, and the person reading them has to know what a spring cleanup is.

What we changed

Nothing structural. Same site, same photographs, same builder, same hosting, no invoice from me for a rebuild he didn’t need.

We wrote nine lines. One per page, each of them naming the work and the towns his trucks actually reach, in the words his customers use when they ring him.

The hedge page stopped being called Commercial Grounds Maintenance Solutions and started being called hedge trimming and shaping, followed by the three towns he covers, which is about how a neighbor would describe him to another neighbor over a fence.

Your list would come out as different words in a different order, because your towns aren’t his towns and your customers don’t want what his want.

It took a morning, and the majority of that morning was Marc talking while I typed and asked him to say the last bit again.

He called in July to say a woman had booked a hedge job and mentioned she’d found the hedge page. One call, in four months, and I’d be lying to you if I dressed that up as proof of anything. His phone still rings mostly because of the lawns his crew already cut.

But she found a page about hedges, because for the first time there was one with that name on it.

Every landscaping website I write for now starts with the same twenty minutes: what do people say when they call you, in their words, before you translate any of it into yours.

Go and get the list tonight

Ask whoever holds the login to send you a list. Every page on your website and what each one is called. Not a screenshot of the homepage, and not a phone call about it either. The list.

Then read it and count how many lines open with your own company name before any word for the work you do.

If it’s all of them, you found the thing, and you didn’t need my report to find it. You needed nine minutes and a person who’d send you the list without arguing.

What’s the third page on yours called? Go on. I’ll wait.