Creating a Great "About Us" Page for Your Landscaping or Lawn Care Website

The "About Us" page of your landscaperwebsites.com or greenindustrywebsites.com website is a great place to quickly show your customers an informative introduction to your company. It is also a great place to incorporate some things that may help your search optimization. Whether you are using our admin system to update the page yourself, or compiling information for us to enter onto the page for you, these tips will help you maximize the quality and impact of your "About Us" page.  Let's get started!

1. Change the main heading to something more SEO friendly.
   This is something that we would have to update for you, but it literally takes less than 5 minutes and we'll update it for FREE. Unless you ask us to change it, the main heading of the About Us page is simply...About Us. That doesn't tell the search engines much. Search engines like to see some keywords in the main heading of the page (also known as the <h1> tag), so use this opportunity to give your heading more ooomph.
   
   You should incorporate at LEAST the name of your company
   Example: About Imaginary Landscape Company
   
   For even more strength, incorporate your main geographic area
   Example: About Imaginary Landscape Company of Baltimore MD
   
   You can already see that in just a few steps we have told your customers, and the search engines, more about your company.
   
   
2. List your company Mission Statement.
   Here is a great way to QUICKLY explain what your company actually does while squeezing in some instances of those all important keywords you are hoping to shoe up for in search results. Most people don't read every single word of copy on a website or webpage, so an accurate effective mission statement at the top of your About Us page can be really helpful.
   
   A great mission statement:
   Imaginary Landscape Company strives to provide top quality landscape design, installation and maintenance throughout the Baltimore, MD metropolitan area.
   
   
3.  Add a paragraph about your Company History
   This need not be incredibly long, but here you have an opportunity to display how reputable your company is by listing things such as:  1.When the company was formed. 2. How your employee and/or customer base has grown. 3. Any special accomplishments/awards/achievements
   
   An example of Company History:
   Since 1992, Imaginary Landscape Company has delivered professional and beautiful landscaping services throughout Baltimore County. Starting with just a single truck and mower, servicing just the Dundalk area, our exceptional reputation for quality, timely service has helped us grow to include enough equipment and landscaping / lawn care team members to serve the entire metro area, including both residential and commercial properties. Our landscape designers utilize the latest materials and techniques to deliver beautiful results that will stand the test of time. Our attention to detail and precision installation techniques allowed our entries to win the Baltimore Tour of Homes "Best Landscaping" Award for 1997, 1998, and 2002. We bring that same level of excellence to YOU.
   
   
4. List the specific services your company actually performs.
   Here you need not be wordy and creative, a simple list will do just fine.
   
   Example:
   Our Landscaping Services include: Landscape Design, Installation, and Maintenance, Lawn Care, Lawn Mowing, Tree & Shrub Care, Core Aeration, Fertilization, Planting of Seasonal Color, Spring and Fall Leaf Cleanup, Weed & Lawn Insect Control, and Low Voltage Lighting design and Installation.
   
   
5. List the specific areas that you provide service to.
   Be thorough but do not go overboard. A common mistake is to list so many areas that your results get diluted. Remember that you can always use the website admin to create unique pages that are highly optimized for one to three areas, which may be very effective, so the "About Us" page is not your last opportunity to mention all of your service areas.
   
   Example:
   We provide service to the entire Baltimore City and Baltimore County Metro area, including: Owings Mills, Pikesville, Reisterstown, Timonium, Cockeysville, Towson, Overlea, Perry Hall, White Marsh Essex, Middle River,  Dundalk, North Point, Sparrows Point, Highlandtown, Glen Burnie, Catonsville, Woodlawn, Canton, Charles Village, and Hampden. We'll also be glad to travel to Harford County.
   
   
6. Give your customers the info they need to reach you.
   Although you have created great, search friendly, descriptive text, some people are just looking for the easiest way to reach you. List your means of contact, starting with the way you prefer to be reached. You may want to use some formatting here, such as a larger font size, to make this portion of the page more visible and attention grabbing.
   
   Example:
   Call Imaginary Landscape Company at (123) 456-7890.
   
   You may also use our online
   Contact Form or Request a FREE QUOTE.
    
   Email us at: info@imaginarylandscapeco.com
   
   Notice that the words "Contact Form" and "Quote Request" are links. All of our websites can include a preformatted Contact Form and or Request A Quote Form (they both contain exactly the same info fields), and the About us page is a great place to channel customers to those particular features. Customers may use these forms if they have would like to speak with your company, but their question or request is not so urgent that they feel the need to call.
   
   
7. Trade Associations
   If you are a member of any trade associations or the Better Business Bureau, the About us page is a perfect place to bring this to your site visitors attention. Choose whatever level of including this info that you like, from simply listing the organizations, to displaying clickable logos for each organization. If you wish to display clickable logos it is best practice for you to supply them to us. If you cannot supply the logos themselves, you must at least supply the URL to each organizations website that you wish to display. We can take care of it from there.
   
   
8. Extras
   Have a group picture of your staff? How about a picture of one of your trucks with all of your branding? The about Us page is a great place to integrate one or both of these images. If you have images you wish to include, send them to us and MAKE SURE to include the words "aboutus" in the filenames of the pics. It is ALWAYS BEST PRACTICE to rename your picture files with descriptive names rather than leave them the name the camera automatically assigns to them.
   
   If you feel the need to have customers come to your location, this is also a good space to include driving directions to your facility, or a link to a a Google Maps or Bing Maps page pre-populated with your physical address.
   
   

If you have followed these steps, you should now have an excellent plan for your About Us page, which not only conveys a LOT of information to your site visitors quickly, but also adds plenty of pertinent info for the search engines to help determine what your site is actually about.

Remember that on a landscaperwebsites.com or greenindustrywebsites.com based site, the About Us section is a USER EDITABLE section, which means that you can use our website admin to update or edit the TEXT CONTENT at any time. The About Us page does NOT have a control that allows you to add photos via the website admin unless you know how to write HTML code and have stored your photo on a storage site. If you want a photo posted to the About Us page and do not know how, we will be glad to do it for you.

Keep in mind that any TEXT edits you make to the page are permanent, and that we do not keep backups of the previous versions. If you feel questionable about making the updates yourself, we will be glad to help you. Let us know exactly what you want to do to the page and we'll do our best to get the page updated to your specs. Note that we will determine on a job by job basis whether the updates you want will accrue any billable time. Simple text updates usually will not be billable, but working with special formatting, images, etc will necessitate that we log the time and invoice you later.

HAVE FUN!

LandscaperWebsites January 2012 Review 1

Landscapers are not busy with their outdoor work from mid November til about the 2nd week of March, so that is when they take that time to focus on their marketing and promotional efforts. This means finally getting that Landscaping or Lawn Care website up and running, or for some clients refreshing the look and feel of what they already have out there. So from the start of the year til about mid-April, we are SLAMMED with work. Not complaining!

Jeff, our new accounting manager, and Sarah, our newest developer, are integrating into the workflow nicely. One really awesome thing that has happened, is that Jeff has gotten Dreamweaver set up on his machine, and has already done a few simple code level changes to some sites. Sarah has been up in the code since day one, and is learning her way around our standard code set pretty well. She got on board right when we are at the moment where a lot of our existing customers want SEO services, so I have been trying to train her in the fine art of search engine gangsterization (of the white hat variety). She seems to be catching on well, and shoud be able to pass on the knowledge to Jeff.

Bill continues to rock the living crap out of some back end code! We work well as a team because he gravitates towards more complex programming issues, while I tend to concentrate on pixel perfect front end HTML and CSS. So we are constantly helping each other out.

My continuing goal is to improve the product, the search engine visibility of our sites, and the processes we use to generate the product/customer experience.

The addition of the new team members, and the fact that they can all do at least some work at the code level as opposed to just using the website admin tool means that the workload has been split in such a way that Chris can focus more on making changes and upgrades to our CMS, and he has already rolled out some stages of what I am calling WebsiteAdmin 3.0!  Users will have more control of the look of their editable pages, and there will also be a new improved user editable Product Catalog feature, which is something that a lot of our customers have asked for.

We have launched some new sites including Sprinkler Systems of Germantown TN,  Reliable Lawn Care Today of White House TN,  B & K Systems Irrigation, Drainage & Lighting of Brandon MS, and  Koch Landscape Services of Hondo TX.

Locally, we launched Tender Lawn Care of Cumming GA.

An exceptionally fun site for me to construct and launch is Nature Coast Tree Farm of Bell, FL. They opted to NOT have a photo gallery, and instead had us construct customized Flash headers for the various pages of the site, that rotate through pertinent images. It was a lot of work, but the payoff is really nice.

Another challenging site to build and launch was Greenthumb Nursery of Ether NC. This site was actually designed by a third party, and we applied their design to our back end code. There are still a few areas we are going to refine, but we went ahead with the launch so they could start acquiring some search visibility.

Whew, we have been BUSY huh?

As we continue to upgrade the product, something I am hoping we can revamp is our Portfolio/Photo Gallery section. At the moment, it can be somewhat confusing as the main portfolio page has a set of thumbnails, but when you click into the slideshow portion of the gallery , another set of thumbs also appears. This is an unnecessary redundancy that makes the feature come off less smooth than it could.

I am also hoping that we rework our SEO package offerings to include customized geo-specific landing pages. We have added these to a few sites and seem to really get great results.

Future Forward!! >>>>

Brooklyn Plantology by Lapide , Brooklyn NY

Pretty stoked about this Brooklyn NY Garden Center site which we just recently launched, but it is about 95% wrapped up. Lots of challenges creating this particular site.

We have built into the programming, that several times a year the main background and the actual Lapide logo will change to reflect the season/promotion that Brooklyn Plantology is having at their retail store.

I think they will get a lot of visibility with this site, and will also have success with learning to make as full a use as possible of the cms/website admin/user editability system.

The drop down menus turned out really well on this site. Also, the homepage flash slideshow should be able to be updated by way of the CMS/website admin since it is dynamically generated based on what pics are active in a particular gallery. Sort of a challenging build, but it is solid cross browser!

Stop through and take a look if you get a chance, and make sure to sign up for their Brooklyn NY Garden Center Mailing List.

Big Changes Let's Grow!

Some interesting and unexpected staff changes are happening at LandscaperWebsites - Porterware - Pest Control Websites beginning Monday 12.13.2011!

Amber, our Account Manager / Project Manager / Office Manager has accepted a job offer with another company two weeks ago, so Friday was her last day. It's the end of an era.

She leaves some pretty big shoes to fill. Amber began working for the company about a month or two before I did approximately 3 years ago, and has been responsible for developing most of the accounting processes, as well as being the "front end" contact with incoming and established clients. Needless to say, there will be a length of time between her leaving and most of our 300+ clients becoming used to dealing with other people, Amber having been their contact for so long.

On the upside, we have now hired someone who will be focusing on pretty much just the accounting and accounting processes as his main job duties. Amber spent some time with him on Friday trying to get him up to speed. Huge amount of information to try and process in a single afternoon. The transition may be a little rocky, but we'll hope for the best of course.

Yet another suprise is the company also hiring a young lady that we had interviewed around the same time as Bill, who we really liked. We had asked her if we could keep her information on file and give her a call if we had something open up, which we followed through on, and she seemed very anxious to join our team. From what I understand, she will be focusing on being the "front end" of the business, working incoming and outgoing calls. In between calls we will start her out on some help desk tickets so she can get to learn our system, then hopefully she can split duties between being the client liaison and design/development.

My personal role will be changing as well. I will still be doing development, but tentatively I will also move into more of a project manager roll. Very excited about the possibilities that may introduce. It will involve a lot of getting on the phone with customers clarifying how our sites work, and exactly what they should expect, which can be pretty rough depending on the customer, but I am trying to embrace and attack it. I believe that a developer, who KNOWS how the HTML/CSS/VB of our sites work will be able to convey a very accurate picture of what a particular customer will be getting, what type of customization is within reason, and what won't work. A huge them of mine is -setting accurate expectations-

Monday, all of the email communication that came in to Amber will now be forwarded to Myself, Chris, and the new accounting guy. We are all going to get CRUSHED by the weight of it at first.

I'll miss Amber. We all will. I feel like as we worked together we really tried to look out for one another, (which is not to say we did not have our fights), and I can only hope that the next two employees have the same sort of outlook. At the same time though, I am very happy for her to have found a job that seems like a good fit for her, and is moving her life goals in the correct direction.

Technical Update will have to wait til next post.

The New Guy

Pretty stoked that we hired a new developer/designer/SEO person! Double stoked that we were able to hire someone who was referred to us by Deyon, my former instructor for the Website Design program at Lanier Technical College. I think we hired Bill at the exact right moment. We're not completely crushed with builds at the moment, as we will be in about 8 weeks when the landscapers start to examine and update their marketing programs. There is a decent window for him to get up to speed on our CMS/admin system, and file/folder structure before the pressure ratchets up. Half the battle when you are the new employee is finding out where everything is, and knowing what resources are available. So far he is doing excellent, and is also bringing some new ideas to the table.

A few sites have gone live over the past few weeks. One other thing that is happening is that the designs for the site are getting more complex to build out. Right now I am making an extra effort to pay attention to image file sizes, since I had some issues with slow load time on a particular site. Really trying to stay away from transparent PNG's. The designs that are happening sometimes necessitate them though. I have gotten 2 sites recently that were not design3d in house, the clients hired a graphic design company to make the wireframes and screenshots. Interesting challenges!

Crawl Grassperson

We recently launched a site for Grassperson Holiday Lighting-Lawn Care-Landscaping-TX which has been live for a little opver a week, but was last crawled on 10/23/2011, so the search results are now all pointing to dead links. Not knowing when Google will crawl a site after launching is always a source of frustration because the customers want an answer from US. This isn't as big an issue when the customer did not have a previous site.

LandscaperWebsites Week In Review 10/3 - 10/7, 2011

We have finally launched http://easylogokits.com/. It was the last thing that we did at work before leaving on Friday, which was the best possible strategy for launching this site. Unfortunately, EasyLogoKits turned out to be one of the most incredible examples of "scope creep" I have ever encountered. The tough thing about it is that the scope creep really wasn't the fault of the client OR us...it was more the fault of accepting a job that had more variables than either of us thought.

When originally presented, this was supposed to be a site that took a user through a very quick, easy, linear ordering process for one of 5 different "Logo Kits" which contain various apparel and promotional items that would be embroidered or printed with the customers logo. When we were presented with the job, the client made it seem as though they really wanted to just harvest the customer data quickly, and would work out any unresolved issues such as missing form fields, expired or incorrect credit card info, shipping address different than billing address, etc, upon reaching the customer by phone to "confirm" their order. Along the way, however, as the site owner was able to see and go through the ordering process as we built out the site, she continually asked for more and more of these potential issues to be addresses by the site itself. Of course she was not wrong for wanting the site to adhere to certain behaviors, but if she had been clear about exactly how thorough she wanted the site to be from the very beginning, we would have quoted her a much higher price, and would have braced for a much higher amount of development time.


We could not wait any longer to put the site up, and I am hoping that by launching it on Friday, and no major mishaps occuring over the weekend, that the client will start to adjust to the site being launched and shift her focus to marketing the site/business and making it work for her, instead of worrying about potential "mistakes" that a user to the site could make, like leaving the state out of their order etc. Remember, this was supposed to be a conduit leading to a follow up call to their customers...a call that is necessary since although the order entry is all done via the site,  shipping cost has NOT been included in the calculations the site makes, so they HAVE to make phone contact with the customer to completely close the deal.

There really is no easy way to tell a client "Uh, if someone is going to order even your least expensive product, which is $1500, they probably aren't going to enter info into the form fields sloppily" . That being said, I do intend to add form field verification across the site, but we HAD to go ahead and launch, otherwise while waiting for verification to be added, she probably would have asked for several other "last minute" items to be done to the site. Items that to her seem like not such a big deal, but in reality take a considerable amount of time to do. Somebody had to draw the line, so I did. We bent over backwards to make this site, but without making the launch decision, it might have NEVER went live.

On the upside, it IS a pretty cool site, and both me and my boss learned a lot by dong a job that was so far outside of the box for us.

Now we have other problems, which also involve "scope creep". In order to prevent thinking about them on my day off, I will save those issues for another post.

Now get over to EasyLogoKits.com and order some awesome embroidered logo / printed logo promotional items for your company.