SEO vs PPC for Tree Service Companies: What’s the Difference, and When Should You Use Them?
Say you want more people to find your tree care business on Google. You basically have two primary options: You
You probably feel like you are doing everything right.
You’ve put in the blood, sweat, and tears necessary to become a legitimate tree expert. You’ve supported your staff, and in turn, their families. You’ve provided the people in your community with unbeatable customer service. You’ve even built a website to provide more exposure for your business.
But the phone is just not ringing enough. You’re not getting enough website visitors. The free quote form on your site isn’t generating leads like it should.
Take a breath. It’s not your fault.
Marketing a 21st-century tree-care service requires a host of skills. Skills you don’t have the chance to learn, because you’re busy dropping 100-foot pines between homes and spraying down ash trees with dinotefuran.
That’s OK. You don’t have to learn these skills. You just have to find the right partner.
And you just did.
ORB Tree Service Marketing is dedicated to being the marketing partner your business needs to achieve your goals.
With more than a century of collective marketing experience, our team is standing by, ready to help you increase your visibility, position yourself as an industry leader, and start generating real leads. We’ll leverage our skills and expertise to allow you to grow your business, increase profitability, and stay busy all year long.
Stop struggling to attract customers. Stop lowering your rates to compete. Stop leaving money on the table.
Start working with ORB Tree Service Marketing, and get ready to enjoy real, sustained success.
As your full-service marketing partner, ORB provides all of the marketing services your tree-care business needs to grow. This includes:
All tree-care services need a high-quality, professionally designed website. A cookie cutter, drag-and-drop website you build using some plug-and-play package just won’t cut it in the modern world – 21st century customers are simply too sophisticated for that. Instead, you need a crisp, clean, responsive website that is easy for your visitors to navigate and works well across all digital devices.
That’s exactly what the professional web designers at ORB can deliver. Whether you have an existing site that you need redesigned or you need a new site built from scratch, we can provide the web design solutions you need.
It doesn’t matter how amazing your website looks if nobody stumbles across it. To ensure that you derive maximum value from your website and generate the leads your business desperately needs, you need to make sure your site shows up at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).
This way, when people search for “Grand Rapids tree service” or “tree service near me,” you not only show up at the top of the organic results, but also in the highly coveted map pack. That’s exactly what the SEO professionals at ORB can help you achieve. We’ll help you implement the strategies that are generating results today – not the techniques that were useful two years and umpteen algorithm updates ago.
While a professional website and SEO strategy are both mandatory for modern tree care services, they’re rarely enough to generate the kinds of leads you need to grow your business. In the modern digital ecosystem, Google Ads must be a part of your overall marketing efforts.
Many tree service providers already understand this, but they unfortunately dive into the world of PPC advertising without the expertise needed to navigate this complex world. This generally results in nothing more than wasted ad spend and a dwindling budget. But the ORB PPC experts can implement an effective Google Ads campaign that generates the kind of results your business needs.
Google Ads are undeniably critical for long-term, sustained growth, but Google isn’t the only channel you need to target with paid ads; Facebook is an equally important (and lucrative) channel for PPC advertising. In fact, because of the way many homeowners search for service-industry professionals, Facebook is arguably a more important channel to target with your advertising efforts.
But as with Google Ads, Facebook Ads are exceedingly complex, and many businesses simply lose money when trying to manage these kinds of campaigns on their own. But the ORB team has the skills, experience, and expertise necessary to roll out an effective Facebook Ads campaign, which generates the kind of productive leads you need.
Tree care companies are some of the only businesses in the world that should still consider investing heavily in printed materials. This is due in part to the nature of tree service work, as well as the fact that printed materials often resonate with the demographic groups who often seek tree services. And most importantly, printed marketing materials tend to linger in the homes of potential customers, providing repeated exposure to your business.
Additionally, it’s important to note that printed marketing materials can take a variety of forms, from informational pamphlets to postcards to door hangers; the possibilities are endless. But no matter which kind of printed materials will work best for your business, the ORB team is ready to design and produce them for you.
Twenty years ago, you may have been able to keep a tree service company afloat without investing much in marketing. A Yellow Pages listing and monthly mailer would probably keep the phone ringing, and if you sprinkled in a few referrals, you may even be able to grow.
That’s simply not the case anymore. In the 21st century, tree service companies must implement a professionally designed marketing plan to survive. A few of the most important reasons you need to invest in marketing include:
Companies that establish a brand identity stick out in the mind of potential customers. And once you’ve done so, you’ll be “living rent free” in the minds of homeowners and property managers in your community.
You can’t be profitable if your crews are traveling around pruning crabapple trees for a couple of hundred bucks at a time. Instead, you need an effective marketing campaign to help you secure the bigger, more profitable jobs.
Your potential customers have more options for tree care services than they ever have. A professionally designed marketing campaign will highlight your unique selling propositions and define your niche in the market.
Because you need homeowners and property managers to entrust your company with the care and maintenance of their trees, it is vital that you roll out a comprehensive marketing plan that lets them get to know your business.
The only way to succeed over the long-term is by continuing to grow every week, month, and year. Marketing your tree services effectively will help you do exactly that, by continuously attracting new customers you’d otherwise miss.
Whether you decide to invest in marketing or not, your competitors certainly are. They understand the importance of marketing their services and reaching new potential clients every day.
Your business is unique, with a collection of advantages, challenges, and goals that differ from every other tree service in your area. This means you need a custom-crafted marketing plan that not only positions you as the leader in your service area by also helps to maximize your return on investment (ROI). And that’s exactly what you get when you partner with ORB.
But that doesn’t mean we start from a blank page, so to speak. We’ve developed a consistent framework over the years that serves as a starting point and helps us to provide the kind of tree-care marketing services that drive results. This process unfolds in the following steps:
We always begin by giving you the chance to outline your current situation, including the good and the bad, with our CEO. This helps ensure that our team is completely aligned in our approach and lets you get to know our team from the top down.
We can’t help you get where you need to be without understanding where you currently are. So, our team will review your current marketing efforts – including everything from your website and SEO performance to social media and ad strategies – and analyze the data we collect.
After taking a deep dive into your current marketing efforts, we’ll develop a comprehensive plan designed to address shortcomings, leverage your advantages, and generate more leads and phone calls. We’ll then present the plan to you and answer any questions you may have.
Once you’ve approved our plan of attack, we will get to work. We’ll start increasing your visibility, improving your search engine performance, and reaching untapped customers in your region, all in an effort to boost sales and earn you a greater market share in your local community.
The ORB approach isn’t a one-and-done strategy; we continually analyze the results our efforts are producing and make adjustments to provide even better results. And we continue to do this for the duration of our partnership.
It’s completely normal to be nervous about partnering with a marketing agency – especially given the number of slick-talking, shady players in the industry. But we’ve found that our commitment to honesty and transparency (which you’ll see firsthand during your initial call with ORB) helps to provide our partners with confidence.
But in the meantime, we’d like to share a few key things about ORB Tree Service Marketing so you can get to know our team better:
ORB was born when our father-and-son founders grew frustrated when seeking marketing support for their home-services business. After dealing with a never-ending legion of unscrupulous marketers, who were only interested in getting them to sign on the dotted line, they set out to create a marketing agency that tree-care pros could trust.
Marketing a 21st century tree-care service requires an array of different skills – that’s why it’s nearly impossible for tree-care companies to handle their own marketing. But you don’t have to worry about that. We’ve assembled a team of professional copywriters, SEO specialists, web developers, and videographers to provide the marketing results you need.
Your customers don’t want that’s still learning the ropes any more than you want a marketing team who’s learning on the job. But you don’t have to worry about that with ORB; with more than a century of combined marketing experience and decades of copywriting, SEO, videography, and web-design experience, we have the expertise you need.
Marketing any home-service industry business requires a different approach than you’d use to market other businesses – that’s a principle we’ve embraced at ORB since day one. We know this firsthand, as many of our team members began in the home-service industry -- one is even an ISA-certified, TRAQ-credentialed arborist like you.
Every business makes mistakes. You probably have. We certainly have. But the important thing is that you get up off the mat and learn from these mistakes. That’s the attitude we bring to work every day, and it’s part of the thing that separates us from our competitors, who’re eager to throw in the towel at the first sign of trouble.
You hear a lot of big talk from some other marketing agencies. They’ll promise you this or guarantee that, all while knowing full well that there are never guarantees in the marketing industry. We handle things differently. We’re always honest and forthcoming with our partners and let our proven track record of success speak for itself.
Still have questions about the ORB approach to tree service marketing? Have a few general questions about modern marketing techniques? We’ll answer a few of the most common questions our clients have below.
Say you want more people to find your tree care business on Google. You basically have two primary options: You
Most business owners know they need better marketing. Fewer know what kind of writing they actually need. One marketing agency
Every year, Whitespark — one of the most respected software and research companies in the local SEO industry — surveys