Marketing for tree care companies
You’re losing removals to crews you wouldn’t hire.
It isn’t because they do better work. It’s because when a homeowner with a dead ash starts looking, they turn up and you don’t: on Google, on the map, in the reviews, and in the answer her phone gives her before she has finished typing.
What we are actually hired to change Who gets the call
Your certifications, your insurance, the years of awards, the fact that a certified arborist goes out on every crew. All of it is real, and almost none of it is sitting anywhere Google or an assistant can actually use, which is most of why the wrong name comes up.
We only work with tree care companies, because the seasonality, the weather dependence and the safety questions are specific enough that a general agency ends up learning them on your money.
The work is skilled, dangerous and expensive. Almost none of that reaches the page.
Why owners call us
Most tree companies have been burned by an agency already.
It tends to happen the same way, and usually with someone who has never been on a job site. Here is what we hear on first calls, and how we do it differently.
What went wrong last time
- Leads from ninety miles awayThe service area was drawn to look impressive rather than to match what a crew will actually drive to.
- Page one in thirty daysIt gets promised when you sign, and by month three nobody brings it up again.
- A good-looking site that books nothingIt loads slowly, there is no tap to call, and the estimate form arrives with a name and nothing else in it.
- No idea what workedYou get a monthly report full of impressions and rankings, but nobody can tell you how many jobs came out of it.
- Locked out of your own accountsThe domain, the Google profile and the analytics are all registered to the agency, so leaving means starting over.
How we run it
- Coverage built on drive timeWe map the towns your crews can reach and still make money on, then write that boundary into the site.
- Honest timelinesProfile and site work moves in a few weeks, ranking a competitive town takes months, and we tell you which is which before you sign.
- Booked assessments, countedCalls and forms are tracked back to where they came from, so the monthly conversation is about jobs rather than charts.
- Written for the tradeSpecies, disease, permits, pruning windows and safety, written so an arborist reading it would not wince.
- Everything in your nameDomain, hosting, Google profile, analytics and call tracking are all set up under your account, so you keep them if you leave.
What we do · Search Everywhere Optimization
Twelve parts, run together, for one trade.
Search Everywhere Optimization is the shorthand for it: every place a homeowner or a facilities manager might look for tree work, earned and paid, rather than one channel and a monthly report.
Google Business Profile
We set up the categories, service list, service area, hours and Q and A properly, then put a photo and posting routine in place that a foreman can actually keep up with. If the profile gets suspended, we handle getting it back.
Service page system
Removal, pruning, stump grinding, cabling, plant health, storm response and commercial grounds each get their own page, written around what people actually type rather than around a keyword list.
Town and county expansion
The towns you serve get real pages that are different enough to be worth reading, linked so they support each other instead of competing. We can cover border towns without tripping Google's filters.
Review cue
Review requests go out once the chips are cleared and the customer is happiest. We give the crew QR cards for the truck and a script they will actually use, and we deal with the fake ones when they turn up.
Authority and helpful content
We write about emerald ash borer, oak wilt, pruning windows and what a removal costs, checked against regional guidance and credited to a certified arborist. Google and the AI assistants both weigh who said something, not just what was said.
Site speed and conversion
Tap to call sits above the fold, photo estimates take two taps, and the storm page is built to hold up when everyone hits it at once. Underneath it all is structured data so the machines can read the whole thing.
Estimate follow-up
Most tree companies quote several times what they book and then never follow up, because the day runs out. We set up sequences that run on their own, and reminders that go to past customers in the dormant season.
Social and video
The crane lift and the big removal are the best marketing you own, and they are already sitting on a foreman's phone. We cut them for the platforms homeowners actually use and caption them so they feed search as well.
AI answer readiness
We publish your capability, coverage, insurance and certifications in a form the AI assistants can quote instead of guessing at. It is new, it is growing, and almost nobody in this trade has touched it yet. There is a free scan below.
Google Ads and Local Services
We weight the search campaigns toward removal and commercial work rather than cheap trims, and build negative keyword lists that keep the tyre-kickers out. Where Local Services Ads are available in your area, those usually deserve a budget of their own.
Storm and seasonal campaigns
The budget moves with the weather. We turn it up when a system comes through and the emergency line matters, and back down again afterwards, rather than letting it sit flat all year burning money.
Retargeting and lead recovery
Most people who get a quote go quiet rather than actually say no. A small, tightly capped retargeting budget keeps you in front of the ones who already asked, which is usually the least wasteful ad money you can spend.
The best marketing you own is already sitting on a foreman’s phone.
Search everywhere
A homeowner with a dead ash checks several places before they call.
Ranking on Google still pays the bills, and it is no longer the whole job. Each of these is a place you either turn up properly or you do not, and a few of them can be bought while the rest are being earned.
Free · no email required
Start with the newest gap, because it is the easiest to check.
The scanner covers one part of what we do. It is free, it takes twenty seconds, and it is the fastest way to see whether the machines can read what you have already earned.
Agent Readiness Scanner
We fetch your pages with no JavaScript, a hard timeout, and nothing but what is in the HTML, which is what ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity get. Then we run seventy-one checks and say in plain words what an assistant could and could not tell somebody who asked about you.
Run the free scanWhat comes back
- A score, and the level you are held at, with the specific reason.
- The first question that breaks when someone asks about your company.
- A fix list ordered by what releases the next level.
- The files themselves, written from your own details.
One page of an audit, on a real site
What a scan finds on a company doing good work.
Weiss Tree Service in Nevada, Iowa has won Best of Story County eleven years running and holds TCIA accreditation, which is rare. Everything below was read off their live site. None of it is about the quality of the work. Each item is something the company has plainly earned, sitting on the page in a form software cannot use.
weisstreeservice.com
Read in full, homepage and FAQ
Weiss Tree Service
How it runs
Built in the quiet weeks, not during storm season.
The first month is mostly us reading. Nobody wants a marketing project landing in the middle of a week when three crews are out on emergency calls.
Audit and sit down
We go through the Google profile, site health, reviews, coverage grid, competitors and last year's numbers, then sit down and talk about which towns and which work you want more of.
The plan, in order
You get a written plan covering what to fix, what to build and what to leave alone, with the reasoning included so you can see why something is third rather than first.
Foundation live
The profile, the priority pages, the conversion work, call tracking and the machine-readable layer all go in. None of it is glamorous and everything else stands on it.
Feed it
From there we roll out the towns, write for the questions people are asking, collect reviews properly, get photos and video off the crew's phones, and keep the follow-up running on its own.
What we build pages for
The work is not one service, so the site should not read like it is.
Each one is a different job with a different customer searching for it. Putting them all on a single services page is the commonest reason a tree company ends up ranking for nothing in particular.
Experience, expertise, authority, trust
Photographs of your own crews are a ranking signal, not decoration.
Google weighs first-hand experience, and so does every assistant reading your site. Real photographs of real jobs, captioned and dated properly, prove you did the work. Most companies have hundreds on a foreman's phone and none on the website. Getting them off the phone is usually the first thing we do.
What good looks like
Six months in, on a normal week.
You are in the three
You show up in the map pack for tree removal in your town and the two next to it, rather than across a fifty-mile blur that brings drives you would turn down.
The profile looks alive
There are recent photos from real jobs, posts worth reading, and reviews coming in steadily rather than a burst of them from three years ago.
Estimates arrive complete
They come in with the address, the service, photos of the tree and a phone number, so the first call is about scheduling instead of working out what the job even is.
Commercial finds you
Facilities managers and property companies looking for grounds contracts land on a page written for them instead of one aimed at homeowners.
Quiet weeks are shorter
Pruning and plant health work starts filling the gaps between storm seasons, which is usually the difference between keeping a crew together and losing one.
You know what worked
You can see calls, estimates and booked jobs by source. If something is not paying we tell you and move the money, rather than dressing it up.
Terms
You own everything. Including if you leave.
Reasonable questions
Things owners ask us on the first call.
Do you only do websites, or actual SEO?
Both, and the site is usually the smaller half. Most of the work is the Google profile, the town and service page system, reviews, content and the tracking underneath. A new site with nothing feeding it is the most common thing we inherit.
We get most of our work from referrals.
Good, and that is worth more than anything we can build for you. Referrals still look you up before they call, though, and what they find decides whether the referral turns into a job. Most of what we do makes that check go well. The rest is about the weeks when the phone is quiet.
How long before it does anything?
Profile and conversion work can move things inside a few weeks. Ranking for a competitive town is months, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. We would rather say that now than explain it in month four.
Will we own our website and Google profile?
Yes, in your name from the start, and that is not negotiable on our side either. Agency lock-in is the single most common thing owners come to us to escape, and we are not going to become the next version of it.
Do you use stock photos?
Only as a stopgap, and never for job photos. Real photographs of your crews and your work carry weight with Google and with anyone reading the page. Part of what we set up is a routine for getting them off the foreman's phone and onto the site without it becoming somebody's second job.
Can you prioritise the work we actually want?
That is most of the strategy. Large removals, crane work, commercial grounds and plant health pay very differently from a small trim, and the pages, the coverage and the follow-up all get weighted toward what you want more of.
What if our Google profile gets suspended?
We handle reinstatement, and more usefully we try to prevent it. Service area businesses in this trade get caught by profile rules fairly often, and most suspensions trace back to something avoidable in how the listing was set up.
Do you work with more than one company per area?
No. We are not going to optimise two crews against each other in the same towns and pretend both are getting our best. Ask about your market before you get attached to the idea.
Should we be running Google Ads?
Often yes, and rarely as the first thing. Ads buy coverage the day you switch them on, which is genuinely useful while the earned work is still compounding or when you are opening a town you do not rank in. But paying to send people to a site that does not convert is the most expensive way to find that out, so we usually fix the landing side first. Local Services Ads with the Google Guarantee are worth checking separately, because in this trade they often outperform standard search.
What do you charge to manage ad spend?
A flat fee rather than a percentage. Percentage-of-spend quietly rewards us for talking you into a bigger budget, which is the opposite of what you are hiring us for. You also own the ad account, same as everything else, so the history stays with you.
We already pay someone for SEO.
Then run the free scan and send them the report. If they have handled it you have lost twenty seconds and gained a second opinion. If they have not, you have a specific list instead of a vague worry, which is a better conversation to have with them than the one you are having now.
Forty-eight weeks of the year, somebody has to go looking for you.
Start here