We’ve noticed many New Jersey landscaping businesses don’t have a website. And if they do, it’s outdated. That’s a shame because a website is the best marketing investment that any NJ landscaping company can make.

The best part is that making a website doesn’t have to be hard. Website software like WordPress makes small business owners live easy. And the best part is that it’s free. This blog will show you why a website is essential for any landscaping business looking to land new accounts. Because the truth is, a good website will make it easy for you to land new accounts and keep a steady stream of leads come in.

A Website Will Bring New Customers To You

When people are looking to hire a Landscaping business in New Jersey, what do you think they do? Here’s the answer: They do a Google search for landscapers near them. By having a good website with some blog content on it, your business will be one of the top choices that pop up and this is a massive advantage over other local landscapers around New Jersey.

Basically, you could avoid competing with other landscapers in New Jersey because a potential customer would have clicked on your website first and never seen your competitors. Now, once they are on your website you need a way to turn them into a paying customer. The way you do that is by having forms on your website so new customers can quickly contact you.

Good forms will increase the leads your website generates. When a user fills one out, you will get an email with all of the information they gave you. For a landscaping company in New Jersey, some fields to include would be name, phone number, email, type of job needed, budget and description. From there, you’ve got all the information you need to call up a sales prospect and provide a customized consultation call.

You Can Show Off Past Work to Land New Work

With a website, you can put together a portfolio of your work to show to homeowners when you are trying to sell to them. Explaining why your landscaping business is better than your competitors is hard. People will expect you to say that. Unless you can offer proof that your work is truly great, it is going to be difficult to convince them to hire you over another New Jersey Landscaping company. That’s where a website comes in.

Rather than just explaining to people how you can do a great job, you can show them instead. With a portfolio, you can group all of your past work by categories and show them off. We recommend writing a simple paragraph explaining the job and then provide lots of pictures to promote your past work. Here are some ideas on what categories to include:

Think of your website as a virtual business card. Just a lot more exciting. Next time you are trying to land a new account, you can just send them the link to your website and it will do the rest.

Highlight Reviews to Land More Accounts

Having a website that shows off your landscaping handiwork is a great start. Honestly, it puts you ahead of the majority of New Jersey landscaping businesses right off the bat. But with a website, you can do even more to better your chances of a landing a new account.

With a website, you can highlight testimonials of happy customers right next to the service you're promoting. Testimonials are hugely influential in sales. For one, customers rely heavily on them when it comes to making a purchasing decision.

According to Search Engine Land, 85% of consumers said they read up to 10 reviews before feeling they can trust a business. Just think about it. How many times have you been on Amazon and you think you might buy a product, but you're not sure if it’s quality. You scroll down to the reviews and they’re awesome.

What happens next? We’re guessing you make that purchase. Give potential customers the same experience on your website by highlighting your reviews and the sales will follow.

You Can Use a Blog to Reach New Customers and Keep Current Ones

A landscaping blog could easily become your best sales tool to acquire new business. A blog gives you direct access to potential customers. By creating content that potential customers will find valuable, you can build trust with them and establish your expertise in landscaping. This will make people much more likely to hire you and a blog doesn’t have to be a written article. It could also be a video and with how effective video is as a marketing channel, it may be more effective and easier for New Jersey Landscapers to use video than a traditional blog anyways.

In fact, a majority of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI. For example, Spring is approaching and people are considering hiring a local landscaper to mulch their property. This means that people will likely be going to Google with questions like: what is the difference between different types of mulch? How often do I need to re-mulch my property? How expensive is it per yard? And how do I know how much I need?

As a New Jersey Landscaper, you have the knowledge to answer these questions. The best way to do this is to take out your phone and have an employee film you walking around a job site answering the most common customer questions about mulch. Then, write up a quick description and post the video to your blog.

You can also connect WordPress to your social media accounts to have it auto post your blog on those sites and you can do this all from your phone. Or, you could post directly to social media and leverage that as a blog. If that’s easier for you, do it. Then, when a New Jersey resident Googles one of those questions, your video will pop up. They’ll see you know what you’re talking about and that you’ve proven you can do a great job. They’ll trust you and once you’ve got that, the sales process just became a whole lot easier.

Does Your New Jersey Landscaping Business Have a Great Website?

Don’t think of websites as being complicated. Once you learn a couple of terms, everything is pretty simple to understand and website software like WordPress makes creating a small business website much simpler than it used to be. If your website is already doing the above then that’s great. There is no need for you to redesign your website. Just keep doing what you are doing. But what if your website doesn’t have the capability do what we’ve discussed in this article?

Then, we’d recommend hiring a freelance web developer to create your New Jersey landscaping website. Working with a freelance web developer or designer is a cost-efficient and effective way to get your website live on the internet. And they're often much easier to deal with than a web design agency. Best of all, they can deliver you the same website faster and at a lower cost.

Bailey Canning is an advertising professional from New Jersey currently living in Boulder, Colorado. He started Inbound Web Development to work directly with businesses to create conversion focused websites & innovative digital marketing campaigns.