Web marketing in the Green Industry
28 Nov, 2011 By: Kevin Dean LM Direct!
It’s no secret that landscape professionals are looking for affordable means of marketing in this challenging economic climate. But to optimize your marketing and advertising efforts, it’s important to evaluate dollars spent compared to leads generated. This type of analysis can yield invaluable information and, in turn, lucrative results.
Take Hayward, CA-based Arborwell for example. The locally owned professional tree and landscape management company enlisted the help of the digital marketing company WSI Net Advantage about six years ago when Arborwell owned a slow, outdated website that was originally built in Flash, making it difficult to update and maintain the website. Arborwell was also looking to increase its presence on the web through search engines.
Arborwell has been recognized on the San Francisco Business Times ‘Fast 100’ list for the past seven years, but less than a decade ago, the small but growing company lacked the state-of-the-art web tools it needed to achieve its potential for growth and success. Besides having a slow, outdated website that required a total content makeover, Arborwell was in serious need of search engine optimization (SEO) work, which is an extremely important aspect of building a solid online presence. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO combines various tactics to improve the visibility of a website when users are searching key words on the web. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding, as well as adding backlinks and inbound links.
Additionally, the company’s online paid advertising (PPC) needed work. PPC, or pay-per-click, is an Internet advertising program used to market websites where advertisers pay the search engines only when their ad is clicked. Advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.
WSI quickly created a comprehensive content analysis of the entire site, which was used to create a comprehensive Internet marketing plan to help increase Arborwell’s effectiveness on the Internet. Starting with the old flash website, they scrapped the original site and started with a fresh slate. The content of the new site included a revised set of keywords designed specifically to be more magnetic to search engines so that Arborwell would come out near the top in most major search sites.
In addition to adding features to the site geared toward attracting new business, a client login feature was also added to make the site more helpful to Arborwell’s clientele. The login feature assigns a username and password to each client, and when the client signs in, they can view photos of the work Arborwell was hired to complete. For example, a client who hired Arborwell on an ongoing basis to maintain the trees surrounding a billboard to prevent them from blocking the sign could log in and see current photos of the site, assuring the client that the work has been completed to their satisfaction.
Most recently, Arborwell and the Internet marketing company focused on increasing the site’s visual appeal with a newly redesigned site launched this year. The background was brightened by replacing the old dark red background with a luminous white space, and smaller text was added, making it cleaner. More images were added to the site, making it more visually attractive to new business prospects and ongoing clients. The company also revamped the site’s navigation to make it better suited to a positive visitor experience and provide easier access to the most important pages.
To step up Arborwell’s Internet presence, the digital marketing experts suggested that the company increase its PPC. In Arborwell’s case, increasing PPC spending would expand the number of people seeing its advertisements and would also move its advertisements up higher on the Google and Yahoo search result pages. Special tracking software was also used to track the return on the advertisements.
For SEO work, the descriptions of the services Arborwell offers were updated to be clearer and more concise to garner a better ranking on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search directories. Also, the digital marketing company sought out all the local directory listings possible to leverage further online visibility and ensure that Arborwell was coming up at the top of all local searches for landscaping services.
The bottom line
Six years after Arborwell first hired the digital marketing company to step up its effectiveness on the Internet, the number of visitors to the company’s website has been increasing steadily, with a 13 percent increase from 2010 to 2011, and a 17 percent increase from 2009 to 2010, following trends over the past several years.
With consumer trends and online technologies always evolving, a marketing plan should be doing the same. The upside of Internet marketing is that the results can easily be tracked so that companies know what works and what doesn’t and can tailor their approach accordingly. Campaigns can be tagged, traffic from various sites can be tracked, and loads of other data can be analyzed from Google Analytics.
Another useful tool is Google’s Website Optimizer. It’s free and essentially allows multiple versions of a page or elements on a page to be tested simultaneously while the results are tracked in analytics. The savviest sites are always testing something to improve conversion rates, bounce rates, form completions, etc. While marketers have a solid feel for what works, testing ultimately will tell you what strategies work best for them.
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