Lawn care marketing on line—it’s not a mystery. There’s a right and a wrong way to get the search engines to recognize your material so you can rank on Google.

You Need Great Content

We all know now that content on the Internet can be distributed through multiple channels. These would be documents, PDF, RSS,  pod casts and video. But if it’s not the right material or the material sucks, then all your effort is wasted. The main underlying trigger to going viral is valuable text content.

Search engines index text. So if your text or your content is not compelling or original, there will be no reason for the search engines to consider it a source of high user experience.

What is high user experience? As far as search engines are concerned, user experience is defined as, “did the searcher find valuable information from visiting your web site or viewing your content?”

Search engines use different ways to measure, or different metrics, to determine this. Although the search engines do not give up their ranking secrets, we can conclude from the bits and pieces that have been available to analyze that some of their metrics include the length of time the searcher stays on the page, how many pages are visited, how many pages are bookmarked on social sites , and does that searcher return.

So if you are trying to market your lawn care company on line, how do you provide the user experience that the search engines will then reward you for by ranking your page higher? Here are five key mistakes that will keep your landscape website from ranking higher:

1. Write boring content

Writing a boring piece of material on how you should fertilize your lawn and trim your bushes may give you a few links but it will not make your content go viral in the social media world. Be outrageous. Go against the grain. Take a stand. Back up your opinion with facts. This will start a conversation. Any conversation is good. This will make other people read it and send it to others saying, “Look what this guy wrote. Do you agree or disagree.” In essence, don’t be boring. Be bold.

2. Write a non compelling title

I am as guilty as anyone of trying to limit my titles to pure SEO tactics as anyone. However I have found that this approach is a sure fire way of making people NOT read your material. Meaning, even though you are writing for the search engines initially, in the long wrong—in terms of staying power—you have to write for human beings. This can be difficult when you are trying to write for search engines because when you limit your title to just your key words, that works well with search engines. As you add more words to your title to entice human beings to read it, the keyword title density becomes diluted. In other words, I could have titled this article landscape marketing on line. By adding “five ways to fail” I am actually diluting the SEO benefit to limiting the SEO title to the key word only benefit. However, there is little chance that anyone would read this article if it was titled “lawn care marketing online.” The reason for adding the “five reasons to fail” is to make it interesting enough for human beings to want to read it.

3. Write a poor description

Anytime you post a piece of content on an article directory or html site, there will always be a description. If possible, put your key word in the beginning of the description as long as it doesn’t sound stupid. A stupid way to say it would be “lawn care marketing-who does lawn care marketing?” This is a highly optimized SEO description, but anyone who sees your description will think you are stupid. A better way to describe this piece of content would be “lawn care marketing-how not to sound stupid. “ The first one is highly SEO optimized. The second will actually be read by human beings. This always goes back to the user experience. Search engine optimized content is meaningless if no one wants to read it.

4. Keyword stuff  your body content

Latent semantic indexing means using different words that say the same thing. Here’s a example, if for instance you are trying to rank for Atlanta GA lawn care. Don’t say “Atlanta GA lawn care” three times every hundred words to create a three percent key word density in your article. Not only is that very 1999, but in 2015 it could be viewed by the search engines as spammy. Other phrases you could use to say the same thing would be; lawn care services in Atlanta GA, lawn care maintenance in Atlanta, GA, etc. Be creative. Write for humans. The search engines will understand what you are conveying to your audience.

5. Don’t use all available multimedia channels to distribute your content

Let’s say you wrote an article about lawn care in Atlanta GA and you posted in on your blog or html site. No need to stop there. Create a PDF of the same content and place it on Google Docs (make it public).  Add photos to your content. Make a power point and submit that to SlideShare .com .Take a screen capture video of your power point and submit it to all the video sharing sites. Then strip the mp3 or just read your article into a computer microphone and submit it to all the podcast and RSS feed directories. Submit that to Feedage.com. Now go to Pingler.com  and ping every single piece of content you placed on the web. You have now taken that one piece of content and placed it into 100 plus places on the internet.

Still, if your original contents sucks, all of this effort will be for naught. It still comes down to user experience—no matter how often or how much you post your content. The search engines will always reward the best user experience sites and material. If you provide the best experience for their users, they will recognize your website as a place they want their users to go.
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