Do you ever watch those tree-felling-gone-wrong videos? As a tree-industry professional with years of experience under your belt, you can probably spot most of the mistakes the people in these videos make from a mile away.
Well, we have more than 100 years of collective marketing experience under our belts, so you can probably imagine that we see a lot of companies — including tree-service providers — making mistakes while promoting their services.
So, just like you may help a less-experienced feller by pointing out a back cut that’s placed too low, we’ll share a few of the most common marketing mistakes we see tree companies make. Hopefully, this will help you avoid making these same kinds of missteps and keep your business on the path to success.
1. Marketing Without a Clear Strategy
Many tree service companies take a scattershot approach to marketing. One week, they’ll boost a Facebook post, the next they’ll hang mailbox flyers, and then maybe they’ll roll out a haphazard Google Ads campaign. This kind of disorganized approach rarely achieves great results.
Instead, you’ll want to implement a clear strategy — just like you’d employ for a tree removal job. Start by identifying your business goals. Do you want more emergency removals? Would you prefer more HOA contracts? Then, start working toward these goals by focusing on the marketing channels that are most likely to bear fruit.
And remember that every tactic you employ, from SEO to paid ads, should be set up in a way that you can track your results. That’s the only way to improve your outcomes over time.
2. Ignoring the Power of Local SEO
Tree service work is the epitome of a hyperlocal industry. Your customers aren’t searching for “tree removal services USA,” they’re typing in “tree removal near me” or “emergency tree service [city].” So, you have to target these kinds of location-based searches to have any hope of attracting clients.
There are a number of ways to do this, but one of the most effective is publishing location pages (sometimes called service location pages) for each of the services you provide. In other words, your website won’t only feature pages for “tree removal,” “tree pruning,” and “stump grinding”; it’ll also feature pages for “tree removal Detroit,” “tree pruning Detroit,” and “stump grinding Detroit.” Lather, rinse, and repeat across all of your services and all of your service areas.
3. Neglecting Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is just as important as truck signage when marketing your tree care business.
You’ve surely noticed that Google will often display three businesses when you search for any service followed by “near me.” This group is known as the “Map Pack,” and businesses that appear in it enjoy much better visibility than their competitors. There are a few factors that determine who shows up in the Map Pack, but the most important one is ensuring that your GBP is claimed, verified, and optimized.
So, spend some time making sure that the category associated with your GBP is correct, and that your services (and descriptions of them) are all listed properly. It’s also worth taking the time to upload high-quality photos, videos, and posts regularly. This is not only engaging to potential customers, but it also shows Google that your profile is active.
4. Letting Online Reviews Go Unmanaged
Your reputation is everything when it comes to winning new customers in the tree-care industry. Homeowners and commercial property managers must entrust you with their property and safety (not to mention thousands of dollars), so many will only consider tree services with a proven track record of success. And the best way to show this is with tons of five-star reviews.
But to get customers to leave you this kind of feedback, you have to do one very specific thing: ask for it. By simply requesting that your customers leave ratings or reviews, you’ll start accumulating them quickly and enjoy all of the downstream benefits they provide.
Just be sure to respond to all of your reviews – good and bad. Thank the positive reviews for the kind words and maybe reference something specific about the job you performed so that they feel important (“We loved trimming that giant sycamore for you, Jane!”). On the other hand, address negative reviews professionally and look for opportunities to win them back over.
5. Using Inconsistent Business Information Across the Web
Another important aspect of your local SEO and GBP optimization efforts is incorporating name and address consistently — essentially, making sure that your brand name and address match (and are formatted nearly the same way) everywhere they appear online.
The value of doing so is pretty self-evident in some respects. If you want potential customers to contact you, you’ll want to eliminate any possibility that they’ll call the wrong phone number, show up at an old address, or think you’re serving a different area. Additionally, inconsistency breeds distrust. If you Google a business’s name and get 10 variations and different listed addresses, that would create a pause in most of us.
But name and address consistency is also important to Google. If you have multiple office addresses appearing in various places online without a clear strategy for doing so, it’s possible that your local SEO could be suffering because of it. So, be sure to research all of your business citations (including review platforms like Yelp and Angi) and ensure that all the information provided is correct. I recommend searching your business name and ensuring that you update as many of the top 20 results for your business name as you possibly can to ensure all of the information about your business name and location matches.
6. Targeting the Wrong Keywords
One of the first things you have to do when rolling out just about any kind of digital marketing strategy is to identify effective keywords you’ll be targeting. That includes not only your local SEO efforts, but also paid ad campaigns, YouTube videos, and social media posts, too.
Without identifying and targeting effective keywords, you’ll never get the kind of visibility your business needs to thrive. For example, many tree services will target incredibly broad, highly competitive keywords like “tree removal.” But in doing so, you’ll be competing against national directories and big-budget competitors – businesses you’re unlikely to outrank.
The solution is to build a keyword list around the services you offer and the locations you serve. Terms like “emergency tree removal [your city],” “tree trimming services near me,” or “ISA certified arborist [city]” will all return much better results than the basic keywords everyone in the industry is trying to rank for.
7. Failing to Match Search Intent With Content
Once you’ve assembled a list of effective keywords, you’ll want to be sure you’re creating content that doesn’t just relate to those words but also the information the searcher needs — something marketers call “search intent.” You have to understand the “why” behind a search.
Let’s say you’re targeting the key phrase “oak trees Detroit” because you’re trying to attract Detroit-area clients who need their oak trees pruned. You could probably create an article about the history of oak trees in Detroit that would rank well for that search term. But people interested in that article aren’t likely to book your tree-care services (and the opposite is also true; people who may be interested in your tree-care services probably don’t want to read about the history of Detroit oaks at that moment).
So, try to write content that answers the questions clients commonly ask: “How much does tree removal cost?” “Who’s responsible for fallen trees?” “Do I need a permit to cut down a tree in [city]?” By aligning content with searcher intent, you create trust, keep people on your site longer, and capture more leads.
8. Making Technical SEO Errors That Block Visibility
If you go to the trouble of creating a high-quality website, you certainly want to make sure search engines (and by extension, potential customers) can actually find it. But unfortunately, there are a number of technical mistakes you can make that’ll effectively hide your website from Google.
For example, if you misconfigure your robots.txt file or apply a “noindex” tag, you may as well not exist to Google.
And then there are mistakes that may not eliminate your visibility completely but cause your rankings to fall. This includes a few different types of things, from structure-oriented problems like broken links to user-experience problems like slow site speeds. Failing to make your site display properly on mobile devices will also cause your rankings to plummet.
Fixing these errors starts with a simple audit. Free tools like Google Search Console or paid platforms like Ahrefs and Semrush can flag crawl errors, mobile issues, and speed problems, giving you the chance to address them.
9. Relying Too Much on Paid Ads Alone
Let’s be clear at the outset: Paid ads can be a very effective tool in your overall marketing toolbox. They can generate a bunch of calls in a short amount of time and provide a quick boost to your bottom line.
But they should never be your only marketing tactic. Google PPC Ads, Local Service Ads, and social media ads get more competitive every year. This means that your costs (whether they’re incurred per impression, click, or lead) will rise every year, stretching your budget and reducing your ROI.
Even worse, if you rely solely on paid ads, you will find yourself stuck; you’ll have to keep paying for them, or you’ll lose all of your leads. So, adopt a balanced approach. Build out several long-term strategies, including a robust social media presence, polished website, and optimized GBP, and then supplement this with lucrative, high-performing paid ads targeting things like “emergency tree service in [city].”
Get the Marketing Help Your Tree Service Company Needs
We aren’t sharing these common marketing mistakes to shame anyone — you undoubtedly have your hands full keeping your crews busy and business running. Plus, you got into the tree care industry because of your expertise with trees; marketing is just something you’re having to learn as you go.
And really, you don’t even have to worry about marketing at all if you’d rather focus on your core business operations. You can instead let the ORB Tree Services Marketing team handle your marketing efforts for you. We’ll take over the reins and help you scale your business quickly.
Best of all, it’s easy to get started — just book a call with our CEO now.
Sources & References
Semrush – Common Marketing Problems
Semrush identifies frequent challenges service businesses face, including a lack of strategy, sales and marketing misalignment, and attribution difficulties—mistakes that directly impact growth in competitive industries like tree care.
Source: https://www.semrush.com/blog/marketing-problems/
BrightLocal – Local SEO Mistakes
BrightLocal highlights critical local marketing errors, such as failing to claim or optimize a Google Business Profile, inaccurate NAP data, and poor review management—all of which can drastically reduce visibility for tree service providers.
Source: https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-seo-mistakes/
Ahrefs – SEO Mistakes
Ahrefs outlines technical and content-related SEO pitfalls, including blocking Google from crawling, skipping keyword research, and ignoring search intent. These mistakes prevent tree service companies from ranking when potential clients search for help.
