Four seasons, one plan. Winter: fix the Business Profile, build or repair the website, set up the review ask and the email list. Late winter: launch Google Ads and Local Services Ads for spring work. Spring and summer: post real jobs weekly, ask every customer for a review, sell maintenance contracts at the estimate. Autumn: sell cleanups, snow and next year's contracts to your own customers by email and text.
Three rules under all of it: no bought or filtered reviews, a license number in every ad where your state requires one, and no chemical claim that is not on the product label.
The business you are marketing, in public numbers
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median hourly wage for grounds maintenance workers at $19.27 in May 2025, projects employment in the occupation to grow 5 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations, and expects about 162,500 openings a year over the decade. Labor is the constraint in most landscaping companies, not demand, which is why the marketing plan below sells the work that fits the crews you have (maintenance contracts, design and installation, hardscape) in the order that fills the calendar, instead of chasing every lead at any price.
Winter: build the three things that carry the year
The Business Profile, set up as a service-area business. Google's guidance on local ranking says local results rest on relevance, distance and prominence, that a complete and accurate profile is more likely to show, that replying to reviews helps a business stand out, and that there is no way to pay for a better local ranking. Google's guidelines for representing your business say a business that serves customers at their locations should have one profile for its central office with a designated service area, may not list a virtual office unless it is staffed during business hours, and should clear the address from the profile if it is run from a home. Set the service area to the towns you serve, list every service by name (maintenance, cleanups, design and installation, hardscape, irrigation, tree work, snow), add photos of real jobs and the real crew, and link to a page where people can request an estimate.
A website that wins estimates. A page per service, a page per town you serve, a gallery of real work with before-and-after pairs of your own jobs, prices or a pricing approach where you choose to publish them, and an estimate request that works on a phone in a minute. Our guide to landscaping website design covers the pages, and our WordPress service page covers how we build them.
The review habit and the email list. Decide now how every finished job ends: a text or email with a direct review link, sent by the crew lead or the office the same day, with nothing offered. The FTC's rule on fake reviews, announced in August 2024, bans fake, bought and gated reviews with civil penalties; Google's Maps content policy forbids incentives and selective asking; and the FTC's Endorsement Guides require disclosure of any connection. Put every customer, with consent recorded, on the email and text list that sells the autumn. General information, not legal advice; your counsel has the last word.
Late winter: launch paid search before the first warm weekend
Google's help on costs says you set your own budget and pay per click through an auction, with no fixed monthly price. For scale, WordStream's 2026 benchmarks, as reported by ppc.land, put the average cost per click across 13,474 US search campaigns at $5.42 and the average cost per lead at $66.69; landscaping's own numbers differ by market and season, so treat these as scale only. Launch two to four weeks before your first spring weekend: campaigns by service (spring cleanup, design and installation, maintenance contracts) and by town, landing on the matching page, with call and form tracking. Add Local Services Ads, where Google says you pay only for leads related to your services and customers can call, message or book from the ad, with a Google Verified badge in select verticals. Our guides to landscaping Google Ads and to getting landscaping leads cover both in depth.
Spring and summer: fill the calendar with the right jobs
Six habits for the season:
- Post one real job a week on the Business Profile and social: the crew, the before and after, the town, the service. Real photos outrank stock in every way that matters.
- Sell the maintenance contract at the estimate for the one-time job; a cleanup customer on a season contract is the profit of the year.
- Ask every customer for a review the day the job finishes, with nothing offered, and reply to every review within the week.
- Keep the estimate response under a day; in spring, the first company to quote usually wins.
- Yard signs on finished jobs with permission, and a neighbor letter the same week, with your license number where the state requires it.
- Tune the ad campaigns weekly toward the services and towns that booked, and pause what did not.
Autumn: sell next year to this year's customers
Fall cleanups, aeration and overseeding where you offer them, snow and ice contracts, and next season's maintenance contract at this season's price, all sold to the customers you already have, by email and text, are the cheapest revenue in the business. In the USA the FTC's CAN-SPAM guide requires accurate headers, a truthful subject line, identification as an advertisement where the message is one, a postal address and an opt-out honored within 10 business days, with penalties up to $53,088 per email, and the FCC's rules at 47 CFR 64.1200 require prior express consent before autodialed texts to cell numbers, with written consent for marketing texts. In Canada, CASL requires consent before a commercial electronic message. Collect consent at the estimate and keep service messages separate from offers.
Hardscape and design-build: a different sale
Patios, walls, outdoor kitchens and full designs are bought like a renovation, not like a mow: over weeks, from a portfolio, on trust. Give hardscape its own page and gallery with your own projects, show the process (consultation, design, quote, build, warranty), list the materials you work in, and let the paid search and the Business Profile posts for it run through the summer when the maintenance phone is quiet. The buyer reads reviews that mention the crew by name and the cleanup after the job; ask for those.
Two rules landscapers get wrong in ads
License numbers. California's Business and Professions Code section 7030.5 says every person licensed under the contractors' chapter shall include the license number in all forms of advertising, as prescribed by the registrar of contractors; a landscaping contractor there advertises with the number on the website, the truck, the yard sign and the ad. Other states and provinces have their own licensing and advertising rules for landscaping, irrigation and pesticide application, so check yours before the spring push. Chemicals. The EPA's introduction to pesticide labels explains that using a product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling is a violation of federal law, and that the label is the law; a lawn care company's marketing describes the service and the licensed applicator and makes no claim about what a product does beyond its label. State rules on applicator licensing and advertising apply too.
Reviews: the number that decides the estimate
BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults, summarized by PinMeTo, found 41% always read reviews when choosing a local business, 74% look for reviews from the last three months, and 80% are more likely to use a business that replies to all its reviews. A landscaper finishes jobs every week, so recency is easy if the ask is a habit. Ask everyone, offer nothing, reply to all in the owner's words, and show the reviews from the platforms that hold them on the website. Our guide to landscaping SEO covers the rest of being found in your service area, and our guide to tree service marketing ideas applies the same plan to tree work.
How to measure it
Count, each month and by service: estimate requests by source (profile, website, Google Ads, Local Services Ads, referral, yard sign, email), estimates sent and won, booked jobs and contract value, and the cost per booked job for the paid channels. At the end of the season, add contracts renewed for next year. Visits, clicks and followers are context. The construction trades count the same way; our guide to digital marketing for contractors is the indoor version of this plan.
If you want it run with you
PromotEdge International is an international strategy, technology, marketing and design company, and our delivery team is in India. We do this work remotely for landscaping and lawn care companies in the USA and Canada, and we claim no local office, map pin or local crew; the local presence is yours. Our local SEO, WordPress websites and performance marketing pages cover the work, and our landscaping industry page list the sectors we work with. We name no landscaping client here. This guide is general information, not legal advice; the rules of your country, state and province apply, and your counsel has the last word.
Facts we rely on: see our company facts for what we state about ourselves and where each fact comes from.