Video Transcript:
Hello, I’ve recorded this video to try and explain in a bit more detail how landscaping companies can target keywords and how to pick out the right ones to target for search ranking in this industry. On our website, we’ve got some lists of keywords under the resources section – we have split them into paving and driveways, landscaping and gardening, and fencing and tree surgery. In each list we have the most commonly searched keywords in the UK.
We update these lists every couple of months, and I’m recording this in October 2024, so by the time you look at this it may have changed. For each of the main keywords, we have the word or words and the number of monthly searches currently in the UK.
One thing to say about this is that when we are looking at keywords to target for our clients, we’re trying to find the keywords that are indicating somebody actually wants someone to provide that service. So not just general interest or curiosity, but looking for a company to come along and deliver that service.
Keywords for Paving and Driveways
So looking at paving and driveways, Resin Driveway is quite a general one – it could very well be someone researching what a resin driveway is and trying to find out a bit more about it. If we look at these ones down here, they’re a bit more detailed, for example Resin Bound Driveway and Resin Bound Gravel. If someone is searching for that, they have probably done a bit of research already and are looking for a bit more detail from the point of view of actually hiring someone to do it for them, so those are quite good keywords.
Resin Driveways Near Me is a good one because it indicates somebody looking for someone to do that service that’s relatively local to them, so those are the keywords we tend to target particularly. Also, when someone is looking for a company rather than information, that’s good.
So Driveway Companies, Driveway Contractor, Paving Companies, these are all good intent based searches. The reason it’s important to target intent based searches is that we don’t want our clients’ websites to get lots of visits from people curious about driveways. We want them to get visits from people that are looking for someone to do their driveway and have already decided they want to go ahead with it within a reasonable time frame, so people that are planning to actually use someone for it.
Keywords for Landscaping and Gardening
Mentioning company, contractor, paving contractor, and things like that are all really good keywords. With landscaping, gardening and garden design it is very similar. Garden Design is a good search from the point of view that if someone is looking for garden design, they’re at the higher end budget wise and they are thinking about the whole project rather than just a small part of it.
However, the downside to this keyword is that people might be just researching for their own interests or getting ideas on what could be done with their garden without any plan to do it soon. If we look at some of the other searches here, Landscape Gardeners Near Me indicates someone looking for a company to do something and Garden Designers Near Me is obviously someone looking for a local company to do it for them.
So we want to be targeting those more active intent based searches on the maintenance side of things and the gardening side of things. There’s a lot of overlap between garden design, landscaping and maintenance and often we will have clients that will only do one of those services, so they might do landscaping but not the maintenance. Therefore we’re trying to separate the two out. Keywords like Garden Maintenance, Gardening Maintenance, Grounds Maintenance, Gardening Company, all work very well on the maintenance side of things.
Keywords for Fencing and Tree Surgery
For fencing and tree surgery, they’re a little bit more straightforward in some ways. One of the biggest problems with fencing is you need to avoid people searching for fence panels that want to do it themselves and are just looking for a company to supply the panels. So fencing is a very, very bad search. I’ve not mentioned it on this list, but we avoid that one just because typically it’ll be somebody looking to buy panels, whereas Fence Company, Fencing Contractor, Fence Repair, all indicate they want to hire someone to do it for them.
If the word local comes in that is even better. What a lot of people do across any of these searches is to add their location in, so they’ll have Fencing Company plus their town or city added on to the end. Then you know they are definitely looking for someone to do it for them.
With tree surgery, there’s a wide variety of different things people search for. Tree Surgeon is the biggest and Arborist is a popular one too. One of the good things about tree surgery is that most of the higher volume searches are ones that people would make if they’re looking for someone to do it for them.
Yes, there are things like hedge trimming, which is a popular one that someone might be getting some ideas about how to do it themselves. But a tree surgeon or an arborist – a lot of the time the searches for those are because somebody needs to hire someone external to come along and do it for them.
With tree surgery, a lot of the actual types of tree come in as well so we have Walnut, Oaks, Poplar, Holly et cetera. So people will search for the particular tree they’ve got and add on tree surgery to it. Again, they’ll put in locations when they’re looking for a local company to do it.
Generally, when we’re looking at a website from a search ranking point of view, we start out with what the keywords are that we want to target and rank well for and then we look at how to incorporate them within a page.
Example of how we use Keywords on Client Sites
So let’s just do a quick example using ALS Landscaping. For this company we’re targeting the high volume search and the value search which is Garden Design. But we’ve used it in a number of different ways. We’re using it in the subtitles and we’re using it in the text and we’re using variations on garden design. So we’re using Landscape Design and 3D Garden Design, just to show a variety of different ways that it is used within the page.
Then when Google’s looking at that page, they can see, yes, it’s about garden design, but we’ve also covered a lot of the other facets of the whole service. So it’s not just repeating Garden Design or Paving Company or whatever it may be multiple times in a row. It’s using it in a variety of different ways which in our experience is the most effective way of getting a page to rank well in search results.
So I hope that’s been useful and in other videos I’ve covered how to optimise pages for search ranking and so on. This is just designed to try and give a higher level view of what the main keywords are for the different sectors and the way that you should be targeting them in terms of intent base rather than just general interest.
