Specific to landscaping and home services

Applies to landscape design, lawn care, pool service, pest control, and similar work sold as a considered purchase rather than an emergency call-out.

The schema.org type for your trade does not exist — and that matters

There is no LandscapingBusiness type in schema.org. The URL 404s. It is nonetheless emitted by a number of website vendors, and search engines silently discard markup they cannot resolve, so you get nothing while being told you have something.

What we did. Your site uses HomeAndConstructionBusiness — a type that genuinely exists — combined with Service entries describing what you actually do. Where a business does several trades, Google explicitly supports listing several types at once.

Source: schema.org · Google, local business markup (updated 2025-12-10) · verified by us 2026-09-04 · 🟢 six-monthly

Service-area pages: the trap most contractor sites fall into

What the rule is. A page per town is one of the most-sold products in contractor marketing. It is also named directly in Google's spam policies:

"Doorway abuse: … pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page."

A template with the town name swapped in is exactly that pattern.

What we did. Your areas are listed as real text — county, town and neighbourhood — on pages a visitor genuinely uses. A town gets its own page only when there is something real to put on it: a project you actually did there, specific conditions, specific pricing. If we ever propose more town pages, ask us what goes on them; if the answer is "the same thing with the name changed", the answer should be no.

Source: Google, spam policies (updated 2026-08-28) · verified by us 2026-09-04 · 🟡 quarterly

What actually decides local ranking

What the rule is. Google names three factors for local results: relevance, distance and prominence. Notably, Google's local ranking documentation does not mention your website's design or its speed at all. What your site contributes is being a consistent, crawlable source of facts that Google's profile draws on.

What follows from that. Your Google Business Profile does more for local ranking than your website does, and the two need to agree. Name, address and phone number must be byte-identical everywhere they appear — "Ste 200" on one and "Suite 200" on another is a real inconsistency.

What we did. Your details appear once in the site's data and are rendered from that single source, so they cannot drift apart between pages.

Source: Google, improve your local ranking · verified by us 2026-09-04 · 🟡 quarterly

Reviews are worth more than your website — and this one is measured

Of everything we researched, the strongest evidence in the field is about reviews, not web design. A Harvard Business School study matched Yelp ratings against Washington State tax records and found that a one-star increase causes a 5–9% increase in revenue for independent restaurants — and no measurable effect for chains.

That is a causal finding on real revenue, and it applies to independents like you far more than to franchises. If you have an hour to spend on marketing this month, spend it asking satisfied customers for reviews, not on your website. We would rather tell you that than pretend the site is the lever.

One rule that goes with it: we cannot put star ratings in your search listing by marking up your own reviews. That is against Google's policy — see the general section. Reviews earn their value through your Business Profile.

Source: Luca, M. (Harvard Business School Working Paper 12-016), Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com · hbs.edu · verified by us 2026-09-04 · 🟢 six-monthly

Showing prices

What the evidence says. Homeowner survey data suggests most people are substantially more likely to contact a contractor who shows some price, while only about a quarter of contractors do. We should be honest that this is survey self-report rather than a controlled test — but the one properly controlled test we found, on lead-generation forms, did show a meaningful lift from an attractive "starting at" price.

We also measured it directly: across 22 well-built trades sites, only one published an actual rate. Almost everyone else showed a coupon instead.

What we did. Your site has a place for a price signal — a starting figure, a survey fee, a typical range — and it is your call whether to use it. It is one of the cheapest advantages available to you, because so few competitors take it.

Sources: 2024 Homeowner Roofing Survey (industry survey, self-report — treat as indicative) · iProspect A/B test, ~22,000 visitors · our own measurement of 22 trades sites, 2026-09-04 · 🟡 quarterly

Photographs

The honest constraint. You supply the photographs, and they will have been taken on different days, in different light, on different phones. That is normal and it is not a problem we ask you to solve.

What we did. Your images pass through a single colour treatment at build time, so a set of mismatched photos reads as one consistent body of work. Layouts that collapse without professional photography — full-screen video, edge-to-edge hero imagery with text over the middle — were deliberately not used.

What helps most, if you want to improve them: shoot in even light rather than midday sun, get the whole job in frame rather than a detail, and take a "before" every time. Before-and-after pairs are the single most persuasive thing you can give us, and nobody can produce them retrospectively.

Verified by us 2026-09-04 · 🟢 six-monthly

Seasonality

Search demand for outdoor work swings hard through the year, and your site should not read as though it is January in July. The pages are structured so seasonal content can be swapped without touching anything else, and you can make that change yourself.

Verified by us 2026-09-04 · 🟢 six-monthly