20 Check Points to Critique Your Lawn & Landscaping Website

When We Critique a Website, Here's What We Look For

Because we are pretty active on different online communities and forums, a topic we see often is members asking for a critique and feedback on their website. In this post, we're going to tell you what we look for, from most important to least important, when critiquing a website for a lawn care and/or landscaping business.

Much of the points below will focus on organic search engine optimization, but will also consider visitor conversion.

Note: Most of these elements could have an entire post dedicated to that one element. In the list below, we'll briefly describe what to look for.

Critically Important Elements

The critical elements in a website review would be what we consider to be detrimental to the success of the website, if not done properly. These are elements that you need to fix before doing anything else.

1. Crawlability

Can Google actually see, crawl and index your pages? This is typically controlled using meta tags or a robots.txt file. To find out if your website is having any crawl issues, register your website with Google Search Console. Once registered, click on the pages under Crawl to determine if there are any problems.

2. Pages

The pages on your website separate topics. We look for the correct structuring of your content across your pages. For example, you should have a separate page dedicated to each service you want to be found online for. If someone searches for "lawn mowing service near me" and you don't have a page that heavily focuses on lawn mowing specifically, you may have a difficult time ranking for that key term.

3. Meta Title

This is the most important piece of text on each page of your website. Your meta title is typically shown as the link to your page on search engines. Your meta title should be around 60 characters, be descriptive and similar to your headline 1 tag (<h1>) for the page.

4. HTML Headlines

Using proper headlines (h1-h6) is critically important for telling search engines what your page is about and what the content immediately following a headline is about. Sub headlines (h2-h6) tell search engines when the topic is changing to a sub topic.

5. Written Text

The written text on your website will be the most time consuming parts. However, this must be done properly because it plays a major role in your ability to rank on search engines. The written text on your pages should be:

• 100% unique
• Utilize your keywords and variations
• Scannable (use headlines, paragraphs, bulleted lists, bolding, etc)
• Full of meat with little fluff (teach your visitor something)
• Decent length, we recommend a minimum of 500 words

"You should have a separate page dedicated to each service you want to be found online for."

High Priority Elements

The high priority elements would not be considered show stoppers, but should be checked during your critique and fixed as soon as your critically important elements above are in good shape.

6. Mobile-Friendliness

Make sure your website looks great on all devices. This is important because the majority of all traffic on the Internet is from a mobile device. Also, having a mobile-friendly website will increase your search engine rankings.

7. Proper HTML Coding

HTML tags are more than just containers, especially when it comes to HTML5. Proper use of HTML tags will describe the different parts of your website to the search engines, as well as what is important in your content.

8. URL Structure

We look for search engine friendly URLs for your pages. The URL itself can tell search engines and visitors what the page is about. An example of a good URL would be yoursite.com/lawn-mowing/.

9. Strong Call-To-Action (CTA)

Once you have a visitor to your website, you need to convert that prospect into a lead. Your website should have a prominent and clickable phone number. You should also strategically place your quote forms.

10. Name-Address-Phone (NAP)

Because you're a local service business, your NAP citations are important for local searches. Make sure you have your name, address and phone number on each page (usually in the footer) and it matches exactly to all of your other NAP citations across the Internet.

"Proper use of HTML tags will describe the different parts of your website to the search engines, as well as what is important in your content."

Medium Level Elements

Once you have your critical and high priority elements taken care of, it's time to take a look at these medium level elements.

11. Home Page Spotlight

Your home page is the most powerful page on your website. This page should be carefully thought out to place emphasis on the most important sub pages and topics. Highlight your top few services using a photo, sub headline, a short description and a link to the dedicated page.

12. Design & User Experience

Your website should represent you as a professional business with a clean and professional design. Besides looking professional, visitors need to find what they're looking for fast.

13. Page Speed

Your website should load fast, within a few seconds. Causes of slow loading pages include server speed, large/uncompressed images, many external requests, no caching, and latency. Test your speed using tools like Pingdom.

14. Images

For each image on your website, check the alt tag, file name and file size. Your image file names should describe the image. Example: home-with-new-landscaping.jpg. Compress your images using TinyPNG.

15. Meta Description

Your meta description is often used as the paragraph under your link on search engines. Each meta description should summarize the content on the page, be unique to that page and be around 160 characters long.

16. SSL Security

When Google blatantly tells you they use SSL security (https) as a ranking signal, why not do it?

"When Google blatantly tells you they use SSL security (https) as a ranking signal, why not do it?"

Low Impact Elements

These low impact elements are things you can work on when you get around to them.

17. Schema.org Markup

This is special code on your website to further describe elements and content to search engines. When appropriate, Google will show schema.org elements alongside your website, such as a photo, breadcrumb trails, sitelinks and more.

18. No Outlet/Dead End

The Internet revolves around linking. You don't want your website to be a dead-end. Good ways to link out include linking to organizations you're affiliated with, places where you have online reviews and social media.

19. Social Media Integration

In today's world, so many people are on social media. It has become the norm for prospects to look at your social media pages, like Facebook, to see how others are interacting with your business.

20. Live Chat

Using live chat on your website is a great way to increase engagement and conversions. If you have someone that can stay online throughout the day AND invite visitors to chat, you'll see an increase in your conversions.

What Do You Struggle With on Your Website?

Building, critiquing and maintaining your online presence is not easy. Each of the 20 elements listed above could have an entire page dedicated to them. Whether you're having trouble getting traffic, need to increase conversion rates, or are struggling to write page text—we're here to help.

Contact Lawnline Marketing today to get a professional website critique and learn how we can help your lawn or landscape business succeed online.