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This guide will show you how to make sure that your lawn mowing business can be easily found online even without a website.
This may come as a shocker to you, but many lawn care businesses have zero online presence. This guide will show you how to make sure that your lawn mowing business can be easily found online. Here’s the best part, all of the suggestions below are totally FREE!
Why is this important? Well for one, if you are just starting a lawn care business, your potential customers are going to want to research you. Having an online presence will give you legitimacy. Second, your business will start to show up on online searches and can bring in new customers that you would not otherwise have access to.
Let’s face it, it's hard to imagine life without googling. In fact, as I was doing research for this article, I found out that people google some variation of “lawn care near me” over 150,000 times a month in the US. What’s the best way to make sure your business is showing up in these searches? The answer is Google My Business.
Google My Business works by letting you set up a free business profile for your lawn maintenance or landscaping business. Once you’ve added your business information to your profile you will begin to show up in the “lawn care maintenance business near me” searches.
In addition to the generic “near me” searches, it is also very important that someone can search specifically for your grass cutting business and find your contact information through Google. You used to need a website to be found online through a Google search, however with Google My Business, you can ensure that your business is showing up when existing or potential customers are searching for you.
The setup is fairly straightforward. If you haven’t done so already, now is a great time to set up a gmail account. Try and grab ‘yourbusinessname’@gmail.com if it's available. After you have a gmail account, do a search for “google my business” and follow the instructions to set up your profile. Voila! You are now ‘googleable’ (I’m pretty sure that’s not a real word).
One of the best ways to have a web presence without the hassle of having an actual website is to create a Facebook page for your business. A facebook page has all of the essential pieces of a website you need. It’s searchable. It has a place to put your contact information. You can post your hours of operation. Most importantly it has a “call to action” button that you can connect to Facebook Messenger or your phone number. This makes it easy for potential clients to reach out for new work or bids.
The setup is easy. First create a personal Facebook account if you don’t already have one. Second, use that profile to set up a business page and put all of your lawn care business’ information into it, including pictures of those fresh stripes and crisp edges.
In addition, Facebook and Instagram are great places to publish pictures of your amazingly fresh and crisp edging lines. You can connect your Facebook and Instagram so you only have to post your pictures in one place and it will automatically post them on the other platform. Facebook is not calling themselves Meta, so join the Metaverse and get your business up on a Facebook page.
When I first started my lawn care and landscaping business I found probably 90% of my initial clients from Nextdoor. I’m going to write a separate article on how to use Nextdoor to find work. However this is about being found. Here is how you can make sure your business is easily found on Nextdoor. The first step is to create a business account. You can find this by going to https://us.nextdoor.com/create-business. You can sign up with your personal Nextdoor account or create a new one. Now not only can you be found but if a neighbor is recommending your business, Nextdoor will prompt them to add a link to your Nextdoor business page.
To state the obvious, the iPhone is incredibly popular with a market share of somewhere between 50-60% in the US. Consequently many of your potential customers will be looking for a lawn mowing service on Apple Maps with their iPhone. Do you want to show up on their searches? Well you can take the following steps to put your lawn maintenance business, literally, on the map.
Similar to how you need a gmail account to set up Google My Business, you will need an Apple ID account to set up your Apple Places on Maps account. Fortunately you should be able to just reuse the gmail you just created or if you have an iPhone you should already have an Apple ID you can use. You can register your business by going to https://register.apple.com/placesonmaps and following the setup instructions there. Boom! Apple Maps users can find you now.
All jokes aside, people really do use Bing as a search engine. The number is not nearly as high as Google Maps or Apple Maps, but anyone using a machine running windows will be prompted by Microsoft to use Bing as the default search engine. So while you may not gain many lawn maintenance clients from Bing, it literally only costs you a few minutes to set it up so, my logic is, “why not?”.
To set up an account you google, “Bing Places” (or you can bing it) to find Microsoft’s Bing Places homepage. You don’t need a special Microsoft account and as of writing this you can even set up your account with a Facebook account login. Don’t leave your lawn maintenance business invisible on Microsoft products and set your business up on Bing.
Websites can be extremely expensive both to build and maintain, costing anywhere from hundreds to thousands per year. You can, however, get a website for free. Three companies that have built their business around free DIY websites are Wix, Weebly and Squarespace. Each of these companies will give you a few free templates to start with and in a matter of a few hours you could have a fully built website with your business info, pictures of your work and a contact form for potential clients to email you with.
All of the above suggestions for setting up your lawn maintenance or landscaping business can be completed in probably one sitting and are quite easy to maintain as well. Building your own website, while much easier than it used to be, is still quite a bit of work. Some potential clients won’t care that you have a website and some will think it makes your business feel more professional and thereby trustworthy.
Our advice would be to set up the above fine suggested ways for online presence first before building a website, but if you like designing things and fiddling around with computers then go for it! You have nothing to lose.
Check Pro subscribers get a free website included with their subscription. After you sign up for Check Pro, we'll work with you to get your logo, services, social media links, and images of your work built into a beautiful, mobile-friendly website that you can add to your social media profiles or Google My Business page. The website comes with a bid request form so potential clients can submit a request that goes straight to your inbox.
Now that you’ve made sure your business is easy to find online, here are some quick tips on best practices for maintaining these tools.
Wrapping things up here, I hope we left you with some great tools to make sure your lawn maintenance or landscaping business can be found online. As always we’re here to help your business grow. If you have any questions or comments don’t be shy, reach out at checku@hellocheck.co
