Our New and Improved Tree Service SEO Guide: SEO for Arborists

What is Tree Service SEO?

Tree Service SEO or Arborist SEO is the process of optimizing a tree company’s websites to achieve higher rankings in Google’s organic results – including both the pure organic and 3-pack map results. For this industry, its typically trying to show up higher for the main keywords and search intent that drive the most volume, which include “tree services + city” and “tree removal + city”. Obviously there are other search intents and keywords but that boils it down nicely.

What Tree Service SEO isn’t is paying for ads on Google’s PPC network. Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing is often referred to as SEM or search engine marketing. While PPC is an important component for inbound marketing for tree service companies, it differs in that SEO is to capture the organic results.

Tree service SEO involves a variety of website factors – including technical elements, page speed, the amount and type of content on the website, and internal and external links to and from your pages – combined to increase visibility better within the organic results.

In addition to showing up better in the results displayed in the image above, SEO for arborists also includes the local 3-pack map results. This is a critical piece in improving visibility and driving more leads to your business. The 3-pack map is a section of the search results page that displays three Google Business Profiles based on proximity to the searcher and optimizations to your website and Google Business Profile. Here’s an example of what these results look like:

Doing SEO for tree service companies shouldn’t be overly complex. However, it certainly takes an investment of time, and the understanding of how the algorithm works. In order to get a good return on your investment you will want to ensure you understand the correct elements to optimize – when and where – in order to maximize results.

Why is SEO Important for Arborists and Tree Service Companies?

We cite a guide published by BrightLocal on many of our guide pages. The main takeaway is that organic traffic is still the number one traffic source for local business websites. Although most keywords return paid ads, and local service ads, even then 72.7% of searchers still choose to click on an organic or 3-pack map result, and 44% click on the pure organic results.

Let that sit for a moment as it is pretty significant. Here is an image that was taken from a Study by Backlinko.com that shows the click-through rates for each of the organic results:

There are several of these types of studies. The above numbers align with numbers based on the SERPs having paid ads and a 3-pack map results.

Now that we know what performing well means in terms of click-through rates, let’s see what sort of search volume opportunity exists. In the below image, I pull search volumes for mid-markets in the US (population of 500-600k). I use the main search terms including tree services and tree removal.

While the volumes certainly vary depending on the location, what I noticed when doing additional research is that most mid-market locations have at least 1500 searches per month. This means that there are over 1500 people looking for tree removal or tree services in these markets every month by searching Google.

The big question is: are they finding your website?

Based on the search volume and click-through rates, we can now better understand how many actual website visitors you could expect to receive. Let’s assume you are competing in a mid-market location and that you now rank in position #3 in Google for the terms tree services + city and tree removal + city. Based on the numbers above, including an additional conservative modifier for local pack numbers, your website would receive an extra 73 highly targeted visitors every month. Visitors that are looking for the exact service you provide, in the market that you serve.

And this is just for one keyword. This doesn’t include showing up well in the 3-pack maps.

Even a website on the bottom of the first page could expect to see an extra 16 highly targeted visitors.

Are you taking full advantage of your website’s Google rankings?

How to do tree service SEO?

Hopefully by now you are convinced that SEO for your tree service business is an important investment. Now let’s actually look at how to do it. What does it take to actually do good SEO? To make it simple, I’ll break this section down into a few sections:

• Keyword research and keyword mapping
• Core website structure, strategy, and content assets
• Page-specific optimizations
• Technical SEO
• Acquiring backlinks and referring domains
• Creating informational content (blog posts)
• Leveraging and optimizing your Google Business Profile

Tree Service SEO Keywords and Industry Research

The first step with any successful SEO campaign is to go through the keyword research process. (That’s a lie, the first step would be to best understand the business’ priorities and goals but I’m going to assume you know yours). SEO, at the surface, has a lot to do with visibility and rankings. But we need to make sure that those rankings result in increased business – typically by making the phone ring more and more online form submissions. So we can’t just pick any keyword and hope for the best.

Let’s start by better understanding keywords by breaking them down into two main categories.

Keywords with Commercial Intent

Commercial intent keywords include the high-volume keywords that we explored earlier in this guide with the screenshot from Google’s Keyword Planner. They are typically focused around the core services or products within your industry. Some examples from the Tree service industry may include:

• Portland tree removal
• arborist in Portland
• best tree service company Portland

These commercial intent keywords often include specific service-related search intent (also potentially modified with a location) such as:

• emergency tree removal in Portland
• stump grinding services
• Portland tree trimming
• Portland land clearing
• firewood Portland

While most of the search volume will come from one or two core search intents in most industries (such as tree service, tree removal, and arborist), there is still an opportunity at the individual service level.

Informational Search Intent Keywords

These keywords typically include the “what,” “when,” “why,” and “how” style search terms. They are an important part of overall Arborist SEO because by covering informational topics on your website, you are sending Google signals that you are an industry authority and that you are highly relevant to the industry. In Google’s algorithm language, we call this topical relevance and authority.

Some examples of these keywords include:

• when to prune apple trees
• when is the best time to trim trees
• best equipment to clear land
• how to remove stumps

I want to acknowledge that many of you reading this might be thinking: but these aren’t relevant to my business. I don’t want to teach people how to do things, I want to do it for them. Yes. I realize this. And while these keywords might not be transactional in nature (the person searching for them isn’t looking to hire a professional or make a service inquiry / purchase) they are still a great way to get your brand more visibility in your local market.

Remember, even if someone is looking for informational on how to cut down or prune their own trees – who would you rather them get that information from? You or your competitor?

Creating this type of informational content helps give your brand more credibility within the eyes of Google – even if the content never ranks on its own.

Now that we have a good core group of commercial intent keywords and informational keywords, we can start to look at your website specifically and get into what we call keyword mapping. This is where we identify what pages should target what keywords, and what pages will need to be created to best target new keywords.

Best Website Structure to Maximize Results

Now that we are through our keyword research and we understand keywords and the search intent for the industry lets apply it to your current (and future) website. The first thing we want to do is identify the pages that have the potential to be drivers of organic traffic and, from there, break them down into three types of pages:

• Admin or Supporting Pages
• Informational Pages
• Commercial Pages

Let’s review each of these here:

Admin or Supporting Pages

These pages are the pages on your website that you know you should have but won’t drive organic traffic (typically). Obviously there are exceptions here but we can generalize a little. Some examples might include your contact page, about page, request a quote page, any press releases or blog posts that are more company updates. It’s important to note that some blog posts will likely be informational in nature, but most small businesses actually blog with a promotional angle – meaning they simply blog when they have an update about their company (we sponsored an event, we finished this cool project, we hired a new team member, etc.). While these posts are great and certainly add to the overall website and user experience – they don’t drive organic traffic.

While these pages are important to support the potential client’s journey and decision-making process (they want to see your example projects once they land on your website) but the pages themselves don’t rank and drive organic traffic.

I wouldn’t say we ignore these pages completely, but when we get into mapping keywords and optimizing pages – they are likely the last on the list that you should look at.

Informational Pages

Informational pages are pages that satisfy an informational search intent. They are likely not your current service pages but may come in the form of an informational blog post (how to fell a tree), or a supporting service page (How much does commercial tree removal cost in San Francisco).

These pages are important for two specific reasons. Number one, they establish topical relevance and authority by covering industry questions and problems that people are looking to have answered or solved. This is a direct ranking factor. Secondly, they provide the opportunity to drive additional relevant website traffic to your website and have better engagement with your content. This is also a direct ranking factor.

Here are a couple of examples of good informational content that performs well and supports this effort from husqvarna.com

Commercial Pages.

The last type of pages are the commercial pages. For Tree services companies, these usually come in the form of the following:

• The homepage
• The service pages (tree removal, tree pruning, emergency services, stump grinding, etc.)
• The service area pages (one for each smaller market in which you serve clients)

They can also sometimes include pricing pages, comparison pages, or “best’ tool/equipment guides.

In order to perform well organically and have a high ROI for your SEO efforts, you’ll want to make sure you have individual service pages and service area pages so that you can capture this commercial intent traffic. If you are in larger or more competitive markets, you may need to get into creating some sort of informational content to support topical relevance and authority.

Let’s have a closer look at these three page types:

The Homepage

The homepage is usually the page for which you connect to your Google Business Profile. It’s possible that it targets the larger city or location in which you compete (tree services portland or, as an example). Because of this, you should make sure that it has enough supporting content to satisfy the needs of being a GBP landing page, including:

• A list and small snippet of content on each of the main services you provide
• A list and mention of the service areas or local communities that you serve.
• An embedded Google Map with your service area.
• A clear Call to action (quote form, contact form, etc.)
• Your business name, address, and phone number as it appears on your GBP.

Your homepage doesn’t have to have 1000+ words of content in order to perform well, but it should be looked at closely to make sure it has what it needs.

Service Pages

Here is an example of a service page dropdown menu from a top performing website in a mid market.

Here’s a good example of a page itself:

The page continues on, and there is about 1500 words of content. As you can see from the content itself, it is a mix of information – what is tree trimming and why you should trim trees, and brand-focused – about our tree services, what we do, how we help, etc.

In most markets, 1500 words might be a little overkill, but I’d shoot for 1000 if you want to perform very well. Some elements of a good service page include:

• The mix of information and brand-focused content – resulting in 800-1200 words of content.
• A clear call to action (ideally a form), such as a quote form contact box or even a phone number for a call.
• An FAQ section with common questions that should be marked up with FAQ schema.

For most markets, having these elements will really make your page rank well for the specific commercial intent terms.

Service Area Pages

And here is an example of a footer with many service area pages linked:

I’m not a huge fan of how they listed them all within the footer, but it performs well.

Depending on how many service area pages make sense for your situation, you could link them directly from the footer or put them on a dedicated “areas served” page or dropdown menu.

The pages themselves should be very similar to the core service pages but should also include an embedded map of the respective service area from Google Maps.

Here’s a screenshot of a good service area page example:

Content Marketing for Tree Service Companies

Now that you understand the core site structure and can build out your website with good service and service area pages, a common question that comes up is , “What should I actually blog about?”

You understand the importance of informational content for your arborist seo, and no one knows your industry as well as you do. So there are a couple of steps I recommend finding great informational topic ideas.

The first is to listen—listen to the questions your clients have or have had over the years. Use those questions to start creating supporting content that answers questions or solves problems.

At Busted Knuckle, we have done a large volume of topical research on related industries and can show up well prepared with the topics in hand, however, if you’re just starting out, Ahrefs is a great tool to turn to for uncovering additional topics and keyword ideas.

You can use the tools’ keyword explorer to find informational content by start with small seed keywords with question modifiers. Here’s a quick screenshot of what it looks like:

On-Page Optimization for Arborist Websites

One of the easiest, and arguably most low-hanging fruit opportunities for increasing your tree service SEO is to complete page-specific optimizations of core page elements based on your mapped keywords.

While there are many elements that you can optimize on a page, some have more of an impact than others.

Before we jump into optimizing the page itself I want to reiterate that the content needs to be well optimized in general – it needs to cover the topic or satisfy the search intent of the query. If you only have 200 words of fluffy content on your page, you may have a challenge getting it to rank well even with all the best optimizations and tweaks. We leverage tools such as Frase and SurferSEO to make sure page content is well-optimized and that it covers the topic well enough based on competitive data and what Google says is working.

Let’s assume your content is good enough and rock and roll.

Let’s start by identifying the elements of a page we can optimize and what have the most impact. First, here’s a list of the common elements of a page that can be optimized:

• Meta page title
• URL slug
• H1 tag
• Other header tags (h2, h3, h4)
• Adding bold to specific keywords
• Italicizing specific words
• Building internal links from other pages
• Building internal links from the page to other pages
• Building external links from this page to authority websites in your industry.
• The alt tag of one or two images.
• The meta description
• The meta keywords tag
• The body content itself.

When I say “optimize” at the fundamental level I simply mean to include the keyword or variation within each of these areas of the page. I went ahead and took a screenshot of a top-performing tree service company in Knoxville, TN to use as an example:

Here are other elements from the search results:

As you can see, this page checks a lot of the boxes for optimizing a specific page. Some of these elements are visible on the page itself (shown in the first screenshot) while others show up primarily in the search results page when the user types in a query (second screenshot).

How do you optimize these elements?

Great question. If your website is using a popular content management system, such as WordPress, then you can leverage one of a few great plugins. We use many but prefer to use either Rank Math or Yoast. These plugins will let you quite easily edit some of the technical elements of the page. For the other visible elements you may need to use the WYSIWYG editor or page builder of the page to edit specific elements.

Page Speed, Crawl Errors and Other Technical SEO

Technical SEO is an area of SEO that focuses on improving the experience of search engines and ensuring they can crawl and understand your content and website as best as possible. While there are many areas of technical SEO, for tree service SEO, the main focus should be on ensuring your pages load quickly, and that you minimize or remove crawl errors (problems that search engines, and potentially users run into while browsing your website).

Page Speed for Tree Service SEO

For page speed insights we typically use GTMetrix or Google’s Page Speed Insights. Since page speed is an individual experience (it is influenced by the connection and device type of the user) we prefer to use a mix of tools to get a bigger picture. Here’s an example of a fairly well optimized page from GTMetrix:

Like with page-specific optimizations, there are some plugins that support page speed improvements within WordPress. WP Rocket is still one of our favorites. Depending on your platform, optimizing your website for speed may be challenging. Here are a few things you can always keep in mind:

• Always choose a fast hosting provider with the right package for your website. Don’t be afraid to spend a little money on good web hosting.
• Avoid auto-play videos if possible (I understand they have become very popular in recent years).
• Avoid excessively large images. If you upload images, try to resize them properly to fit the web and your specific needs.
• Always update plugins, software, etc.

If you follow the above advice, you should have a pretty quick website. While page speed is important, for tree service SEO, there are diminishing returns after a while – so getting your website “fast enough” may be good enough to start.

Resolving Crawl Issues and Errors

There are many third-party applications that will “crawl” your website similar to how Google would and display the information needed to resolve any potential issues. There are many good tools we recommend including Sitebulb and Screaming Frog for desktop crawling, and Agency Analytics for a more integrated crawl and reporting process.

Here’s an example output of a crawl tool:

As you can guess based on the score, this website is in pretty good shape. Fixing a broken link will likely have it achieve a score of 100.

Local SEO for Arborists (Google Business Profile)

While we have touched on the 3-pack map results in sections prior, it’s important to highlight this as a separate takeaway and to-do as there are potential updates and changes you will need to do to your Google Business Profile itself.

Here’s an example of the results of a local search that returns the 3-pack map results:

I realize I called it a 3-pack map result and this example has 4 results. This is because the top result is a paid placement.

In order to show up in this list, your tree service business needs to have a verified and active Google Business Profile (GBP).

As discussed in the website structure section, the landing page you use on your GBP will likely be your website’s homepage and you will need to make sure it has the correct elements. In addition to optimizing the landing page, you will also need to optimize the profile itself. You’ll want to make sure your profile:

• Has a primary category and secondary categories listed
• Has a verified address (a home address is fine as long as you have signage on vehicles or your property somewhere)
• Is listed as a service area business (unless you want to serve clients from a physical location)
• Has the services you offer listed
• Have images uploaded of your brand (trucks, locations, images on the job, etc.)
• Has as many positive 5-star reviews as possible.
• Proper business name, address, and phone number
• Business hours listed that match your website.

Assuming you have this and a good landing page, you should be ahead of the majority.

Link Building for Arborist and Tree Service Websites

Link building is the final piece of the puzzle to support your Tree Service SEO efforts. For the sake of this guide, we will cover why it is important and give you some low hanging fruit ideas to build new links to your website.

Link building and your website’s link profile is still a big part of the algorithm. Your link profile is made up of links from other websites that link to yours. These links come in many shapes and sizes, such as a link from a Yellow Pages listing, or a link from a vendor’s website, or even a link from a local hockey team you might sponsor. All of these links play a role in improving your visibility.

Sometimes your link profile may be a big gap area compared to top-performing competitors. Here’s a screenshot from ahrefs on link metrics from a top of page 1 website vs a page 2 website for the term “tree removal houston tx”

Page 1:

Page 2:

You don’t need to know anything about link building or what these screenshots are to understand that there seems to be a gap between the first website and the second website.

The big takeaway is that the more (and better) links your website can get, the better it is likely to perform for tree service SEO queries.

But how do we build more links?

Great question. Here are some of my general recommendations if you’re interested in improving your link profile:

• Get local citations. Make sure you are submitting your website to directory websites that are relevant to your location and industry.
• Ask other industry professionals. Maybe you work closely with someone who runs a Mill, or perhaps you work with an excavation company. Ask them to link to your website (you may have to link to theirs in return) but it will help.
• Sponsor teams and events. Even small local donations can go a long way in having your brand and website featured on third-party websites in your community.

Why Choose Busted Knuckle for your Tree Service SEO?

Busted Knuckle works exclusively with the home service industries and knows the ins and outs of the specific needs and search behavior for this industry. This allows us to not only deliver amazing results but also provide world-class SEO solutions for arborists and tree service professionals for a fraction of the price of many providers.

Are you interested in seeing what it is like to work with Busted Knuckle? Feel free to learn more about what we do, or fill out the audit form to the right, and we can get the process started.