A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework for Landscaping Websites You Can Run This Week

An SEO audit for a find the SEO problems costing your [landscaping business](/resources/landscaper/what-is-seo-for-landscaper) leads isn't the same as a generic website audit. The ranking factors that matter most for landscapers are local — and the technical issues that hurt landscaping sites most are specific to the industry's content patterns: heavy image use, service-area sprawl, and seasonal page updates.

A useful audit covers five layers:

• Local citation consistency — Is your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) identical across your Google Business Profile, website, and directory listings?
• Google Business Profile health — Are your categories, services, photos, and posts current and complete?
• Service-area page structure — Do you have individual, optimized pages for each city or neighborhood you serve, or is all your traffic funneled through one generic homepage?
• Technical site performance — Are your before-and-after project images compressed? Does your site pass Core Web Vitals on mobile?
• On-page content gaps — Do your service pages target specific search terms, or are they full of vague copy that doesn't match what homeowners actually type into Google?

Each layer affects a different part of how Google evaluates your site. Citation issues affect local trust signals. GBP gaps affect Map Pack eligibility. Missing service-area pages mean you simply don't exist for searchers outside your immediate zip code. Technical problems affect whether Google can efficiently crawl and rank your pages at all.

Run through each layer in order. Document findings as you go. The goal isn't to find everything — it's to find the highest-impact problems first so you can prioritize fixes that move the needle on leads, not just rankings.

Local citations are how Google triangulates whether your business is real, established, and located where you say it is. For landscaping companies, citation problems are more common than most owners expect — especially if the business has moved, rebranded, or been listed on directories by third parties without your knowledge.

Citation Audit Steps

1. Search your business name and city in Google and note every directory listing that appears on the first two pages.
2. Check that your name, address, and phone number are exactly identical on every listing — same abbreviations, same suite format, same phone number format.
3. Flag any listing where the address, phone, or website URL differs. These are suppression risks.
4. Look for duplicate listings — two entries for the same business on Yelp, Angi, or Google itself. Duplicates split authority and confuse Google's local algorithm.

Google Business Profile Audit Steps

• Primary category: Should be "Landscaper" or "Landscape Designer" — not a generic category like "Home Services."
• Secondary categories: Add relevant options like "Lawn Care Service," "Tree Service," or "Irrigation System Store" where applicable.
• Services section: Every core service should be listed with a description. Blank service sections are a missed keyword opportunity.
• Photos: Google's own guidance recommends regular photo uploads. A profile with no new photos in 90+ days signals inactivity.
• Q&A section: Review any existing questions and answers. Unanswered questions — or questions answered incorrectly by the public — create trust problems.

In our experience working with local service businesses, GBP optimization alone — without any changes to the website — is often the fastest path to improved Map Pack visibility for landscapers in mid-sized markets.

If your landscaping business serves ten towns but your website has one generic "service area" page listing those towns as bullet points, you're invisible in nine of them on Google search. Service-area pages (sometimes called geo pages or location pages) are how landscaping companies claim organic visibility in cities and neighborhoods beyond their physical address.

What to Look For

• Does a dedicated page exist for each city you serve? Check by searching site:yourdomain.com [city name] in Google. If nothing returns, the page either doesn't exist or isn't indexed.
• Does each page have unique content? Pages that swap only the city name and share identical copy are thin-content pages. Google typically won't rank them, and in competitive markets they can drag down your overall site quality signals.
• Does each page target a real search query? "Landscaping in Naperville" is a query people type. "We proudly serve the Naperville area" is not a page optimized for any query.
• Are internal links pointing to these pages? Service-area pages with no internal links are orphaned — Google crawls them rarely and ranks them weakly.

What Good Looks Like

A well-structured service-area page for a landscaping company includes: the city name in the title tag and H1, a paragraph describing the types of landscapes and properties common in that area, at least one specific service offered there (not just a generic list), a local phone number or address reference if applicable, and a clear call to action. It doesn't need to be a 2,000-word essay — 400 to 600 words of genuinely useful content typically outperforms thin pages in local search.

Document which cities have pages, which have thin pages, and which have no page at all. That list becomes your content priority queue.

Landscaping websites are image-heavy by nature. Before-and-after project photos are among the most powerful conversion assets a landscaper can publish — homeowners want to see the work before they call. But those same images are the most common source of technical performance problems on landscaping sites.

Image Performance Checks

• Run your homepage and a project gallery page through Google PageSpeed Insights (free tool). Note the mobile score — mobile is where most local searches happen.
• Look for "Serve images in next-gen formats" and "Properly size images" in the recommendations. These are direct indicators of uncompressed or oversized image files.
• Check whether images have descriptive alt text. An image file named "IMG_4832.jpg" with no alt text contributes nothing to SEO. The same image with alt text like "brick paver patio installation in Naperville IL" tells Google exactly what it's looking at.
• Verify that your gallery pages are indexed. Run a site: search for your gallery URL. If it doesn't appear, check for noindex tags or crawl blocks in your robots.txt.

Additional Technical Checks

• Mobile usability: Use Google Search Console's Mobile Usability report if you have access, or test key pages manually on a phone. Tap targets, font sizes, and layout shifts are common mobile issues on landscaping sites built on older themes.
• HTTPS: Confirm your site loads on https:// and that the http:// version redirects correctly rather than serving a separate version of the site.
• Broken links: Use a free crawler like Screaming Frog's free tier (up to 500 URLs) to identify broken internal links, especially on seasonal pages that may have been deleted or moved.

Technical issues rarely cause dramatic ranking drops on their own — but slow pages and crawl errors compound over time and prevent otherwise well-optimized content from performing at its ceiling.

After local signals and technical health, the third major audit layer is content — specifically, whether your service pages are written for the way homeowners actually search, or for the way landscapers think about their own services.

Common On-Page Gaps in Landscaping Sites

• No target keyword in the title tag or H1: A page titled "Our Services" does not rank for "landscape design [city]." Every service page needs a specific, search-term-aligned title.
• Vague service descriptions: "We offer a full range of landscaping services" is not useful to a homeowner or to Google. A page about paver patios should describe: what a paver patio is, what the installation process looks like, average project scope, and why a homeowner in your area might want one.
• No local context on service pages: Service pages that mention the city name only in the footer or address block miss a content signal opportunity. Weaving in local context — local soil conditions, common yard challenges in the region, neighborhoods served — adds relevance without stuffing keywords.
• Missing schema markup: LocalBusiness and Service schema help Google understand your business structure. Many landscaping sites have no structured data at all, which means they're missing an eligibility signal for rich results.

A Simple Content Gap Check

Search Google for your primary services plus your city (e.g., "lawn care [your city]"). Look at the pages ranking in positions 1-5. Do they have more specific content than yours? More photos? FAQs? Reviews embedded on the page? The gap between what's ranking and what you have is your content audit finding.

You don't need to outwrite every competitor. You need to match the intent of the searcher more precisely than the next result. For most landscaping searches, that means clear service descriptions, local specificity, and visible proof of work.

An audit that produces a list of 40 problems without telling you which three to fix first is not useful. Prioritization is what separates a diagnostic exercise from a plan that actually improves your rankings and lead flow.

Score Each Finding By Two Factors

• Ranking impact: How directly does fixing this affect your position in local search? Citation inconsistencies and GBP category errors tend to have high impact. Fixing a broken link to an old seasonal promo page has low impact.
• Implementation effort: Can this be fixed in 30 minutes, or does it require a developer and new content? A miscategorized GBP takes two minutes to fix. Building out 12 service-area pages takes weeks.

Plot your findings on a simple 2x2: high impact / low effort fixes go first. High impact / high effort fixes get scheduled. Low impact items go to a backlog.

Typical Priority Order for Landscaping Sites

1. Fix NAP inconsistencies across citations (high impact, usually low effort once identified)
2. Correct GBP categories and fill in blank service descriptions
3. Add alt text to gallery images (quick win on a page that already exists)
4. Create missing service-area pages for top revenue cities
5. Compress and convert gallery images to WebP format
6. Rewrite thin service pages with specific, query-aligned content
7. Add LocalBusiness schema if not present

Most landscaping businesses can implement the first three items without any outside help. Items four through seven typically require either time investment or outside expertise — and that's where the question of whether to handle SEO in-house or bring in a specialist becomes a real decision worth making deliberately.

If your audit surfaces more than a handful of significant issues, or if the competitive landscape in your market is strong, a professional SEO audit can provide a more complete picture — including backlink gaps, competitor keyword mapping, and a prioritized roadmap tied to your specific revenue goals.