SEO for Tree Companies

First up, what is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves moving your website up search engine ranking positions. You don’t directly pay Google to be there – that’s PPC.

In SEO, you naturally move up the rankings with certain techniques. That’s why it is often referred to as organic or natural search.

Why do tree companies need SEO?

Because if you rank well in Google, you will get more customers.

And like all businesses, companies in the tree service sector can benefit from an increase in traffic to their website.

By ranking at the top of the search engines, like Google or Bing, SEO helps more potential leads find your company online.

Even if you have a stream of referrals, or your customers find out about you via word-of-mouth, SEO helps to add to that. Ensuring you have a steady stream of business each month.

How Google works…

Google takes into account over 200 ranking factors when deciding how high up the rankings your website should appear.

Regardless of your industry, these 200+ ranking factors can be broadly split into 3 areas:

• On-site SEO
• Off-site SEO
• Technical SEO

Your SEO needs to target all 3 of these areas to help improve your ranking positions. Which we will cover in the next section…

8 SEO tips for tree companies

As mentioned above, Google looks at 200 ranking factors when judging your website.

In this next section, we look at some of the most important ones that a tree company may face. If you put these 8 SEO tips into action, your website will improve.

On-Site SEO

This is the first of our 3 areas of SEO (on-site, off-site, technical). And the main goal here is to put keywords in the right place on your website, and to ensure you have relevant content that is useful for potential customers.

1. Create a keyword list (keyword research)

One of the first things you should do is to create a relevant list of keywords relating to your services. You can carry out keyword research without the use of any paid SEO tools.

Are you an arborist or a tree removal company?

Do you work with residential clients, commercial, or both?

Not only this, what services do you want to focus on? If you only want to attract customers searching for tree trimming or stump grinding, then just note these down.

These questions will help you figure out what kind of keywords you’d want to target.

Once you have a list of services relating to your business, you can then use SEO tools to build on this list and find the search volumes.

Keyword Research Tools

Ubersuggest can help you find relevant keywords relating to your business as well as showing you the average monthly search volume. This can help you prioritize your SEO workload as you might want to only focus on high search volume services.

Answer the Public is another great tool if you’re looking for content ideas. Add a keyword and you will see lots of questions people are asking on Google, relating to that service. You can include these as sections on your website or in your FAQs.

And then there are a whole host of paid SEO tools that will give you more in-depth data. Such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and keyword.io.

2. Write unique service pages (content creation)

Once you have a list of keywords and search volumes relating to your business, you can then create new pages for your website.

Nearly every service you sell should have its own page. For example, “tree removal”, “tree trimming”, “stump grinding” and “tree health assessments” would all have their own pages.

You need to make sure the content you add to these pages is unique and explains your process.

As tempting as it is to use another website’s content, Google doesn’t like this.

Google likes to rank a unique page that is dedicated to a user’s search. So if you have a page on “tree trimming” and a user searches for this, then Google would show this as a result.

But be careful with this, don’t go overboard and create too many pages for sub-services. You don’t want to create a page for “residential tree trimming” and “commercial tree trimming”, as well as a “tree trimming” page. Just one page about “tree trimming” would work best.

3. On-page optimizations

Now you’ve created different pages for your services, you will need to optimize elements on those pages to help Google find it.

You may have heard of title tags, meta descriptions, and alt tags. These are all elements that you can optimize to help Google understand what your page is about.

One of the most important is the title tag and you need to make sure it’s descriptive and relates to your service and where you operate. If you provide tree removal in Oakville, your title tag might be “Tree Services Oakville”

You can use a tool like Higher Visibility to see how your page will appear in the results.

Off-Site SEO

Now you have pages for each of your services, you need to start increasing the authority of your website. This is area two of SEO (on-site, off-site, technical).

You can view off-site SEO as building your company’s reputation online …and Google’s the judge!

The main goal is to increase the total number of websites that talk about and link to you.

4. Increase your backlinks (link building)

We’ve all heard of backlinks. Usually from an uninvited email into our inbox asking if we want to buy backlinks to “boost our SEO”! And we suggest avoiding low-quality link building services like this.

It’s true that backlinks can really help a website rank better in Google.

But only if they are from high-quality websites, relevant to your industry.

A lot of these low-quality link building companies will direct links to your website that could have the opposite effect. Or worse, get your site penalized.

Below we outline some easy ways for you to gain links…

Directories

This is the easiest way to get a good foundation of links to your website. Directories will list your website and it can help to show Google that you are a company with a real address.

Just make sure you use the same Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) across all of the directories you submit to. This is so you don’t confuse Google with different addresses.

You have national directories like Yell, Yelp, and Yellow Pages. And then you have industry-relevant directories like ISA Arborist Directory and TreeCareIndustry.org.

Don’t go overboard and only submit your website to relevant directories.

Relationships: suppliers

Do you have relationships with suppliers, such as equipment providers or landscape architects? Then you may be able to use this relationship to get a link to your website.

You can try speaking to people in your industry that you work with regularly.

Do they endorse your work?

Great, they could feature your project on their site showing what you’ve done with their products.

Sit down and have a think, you may be able to gain some links from some existing relationships.

Guest posting

This is a great way to build links back to your website. You write a blog post that goes on an industry publication or website, and then you link to a relevant page on your website within that blog post.

This helps to signal to Google that you’re active in your industry and that you have a good reputation. All of this helps to provide signals that will help your pages rank higher.

5. Local SEO

Because a lot of work in the tree service industry is done locally, it means local SEO plays an important role. Customers want to find a company that’s near to them so Google will often show a “map pack” to customers:

To appear in the map pack, you need to set up a Google My Business (GMB) page. GMB is a free service from Google which allows you to list your company, outlining what you do and what time you’re open.

You can choose what type of company you are from the list (e.g. “tree service”, “arborist”, “tree removal company” and so on…)

This allows you to appear on Google Maps for related searches and it also allows you to take reviews for your business. Which will help to signal to Google you’re a real business.

6. Online reviews

Getting reviews from your customers will help to improve your Google My Business page. This will let you rank higher in the Map Pack and attract new customers.

But not only that, Google looks at reviews on your website, Yelp, and other third-party sites. Reviews help to improve your reputation online and show Google you’re a trusted company.

When you complete a project, ask your customers to leave a review on your GMB page, and email them a link to your profile.

Or you can use services like Trustpilot or Feefo.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the final of our 3 areas of SEO (on-site, off-site, technical). It looks at how easy your website is for Google to crawl, and how quickly it loads.

If you’re not technically minded, you may need a web developer to help out with some of these areas.

7. Mobile-friendly

Google now crawls your website looking at the mobile version first. So you need to ensure it’s “mobile-friendly”. This means your website should look good on smartphones and tablets.

The easiest way to test your website is to load it on your smartphone. Do the images look good? Is the text clear and readable? Can you navigate around easily?

Also, Google offers a free Google Mobile-Friendly Test. If there are any problems, then the test will tell you what needs fixing.

8. Website speed

Google looks at how quickly your website loads. If it’s too slow, customers will hit the back button and return to Google to find another company. So the quicker your website loads, the better.

One of the easiest ways to improve page speed is to optimize images. This means resizing images to a smaller file size so they load quickly on smartphones.

You can use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights to see how quickly your website loads, and for any recommendations.

By following the strategies above, you can help your tree service company climb the rankings and get more customers through your website. Remember, SEO is a long-term strategy, and results may take a few months to appear. Stay patient and consistent with your efforts.