The widest price range in the trades
Landscaping has a problem the other trades do not. A two hundred dollar mow and an eighty thousand dollar hardscape are both landscaping. Somebody arriving on your website could be looking for either, and until they tell you, you have no idea which.
Every other trade has a narrower band. A plumbing call is a repair or a replacement, and both are in the hundreds or low thousands. A roof is a roof. Landscaping stretches across two orders of magnitude, and the customers at each end want completely different things from a website.
We opened four landscaping company websites in July 2026 and checked each one for how they handle that. Exactly one tells you, on the site, what it takes to work with them.
Gibbs Landscape Company outside Atlanta states that design and installation projects start at twelve thousand dollars, and weekly residential maintenance starts at twelve thousand a year. No negotiation, no call required to find out. The other three offer a free estimate and leave the range entirely open.
| Site | Price guidance | How work is shown | Qualifies leads by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gibbs Landscape | Minimums published, $12,000 | Split residential and commercial | Price |
| Seattle Urban Farm Co | Consultation based | Portfolio plus products | Niche, edible gardens only |
| Highlands Landscaping | Free estimate | Before and after, filed by customer and location | Service area |
| Brookscapes | Free estimate | Portfolio by project type | Nothing in particular |
That last column is the one to think about. Every landscaping company is quietly filtering its enquiries somehow. The question is whether the website does it, or whether you do it later on the phone, one conversation at a time, for the enquiries that were never going to convert.
Gibbs Landscape: the twelve thousand dollar sentence
Gibbs Landscape Company has been operating around Atlanta long enough to collect over three hundred awards, and the most useful thing on the site is none of them. It is the minimum.
Publishing a floor price feels like it should cost you work. It does, and that is the point. The enquiries it turns away are the ones that would have taken a site visit, a drawing and two follow-up calls before somebody discovered the budget was two thousand dollars. Every hour spent on those is an hour not spent on a job you would have won.
It also does something for the customer who is above the line. Seeing a number that high and not flinching tells them they are in the right place, and it quietly positions the company as the one you hire when the project is serious. A free estimate offer says nothing about who you are for. A minimum says it in one line.
The rest of the site is built the same way. Project galleries are split into residential and commercial rather than mixed, which matters because an office park facilities manager and a homeowner are not browsing for the same thing and should not have to scroll past each other's work.
The mechanism: publish a minimum, or a starting range. It costs you the enquiries you did not want and it qualifies the ones you did.
Seattle Urban Farm Company: qualifying by niche instead
Seattle Urban Farm Company solves the same problem from the opposite direction. They do not publish prices. They publish a boundary.
The company does edible gardens. Vegetable garden coaching, edible garden maintenance, trellises and growing products. The headline is grow a garden you love. Nothing about mowing, nothing about hardscape, nothing about snow.
That narrowness does the same job a minimum does. Somebody who wants a lawn cut and a hedge trimmed reads two lines and leaves, which is the correct outcome for both parties. Somebody who wants to grow vegetables in a small Seattle yard has just found the only company in the city that appears to do nothing else.
Most landscaping companies are terrified of this. The instinct is to list every service in case someone needs one, which produces a site that reads as a general contractor with a mower. Specialising costs you the long tail and wins you the work you actually want, and it is much easier to rank for than a list of thirty services nobody believes.
The mechanism: if you will not publish a price, publish a boundary. Say what you do not do. It filters just as effectively.
Highlands Landscaping: before and after, filed by street
Highlands Landscaping and Fencing in Denver runs before and after transformations, which most landscapers do, and then does the thing most of them do not. The gallery is organised by project type and by customer name and location.
Filing work by location turns a portfolio into something a neighbour can search. Somebody in Arvada looking at a company that has done four gardens in Arvada is looking at a different proposition from somebody browsing a general gallery, even if the photographs are identical. It is the online version of the sign you leave in the front yard.
They also list fifteen towns individually across the Denver metro, Arvada, Aurora, Broomfield, Centennial, Commerce City, Englewood, Golden, Lafayette, Lakewood, Littleton, Northglenn, Superior, Thornton and Westminster, rather than saying greater Denver. Those are the words people type.
One more small thing worth stealing. They publish their business hours, Monday to Friday, eight to four. Almost no trades website does this, and it silently answers a question every visitor has, which is whether anybody will pick up if they call now.
The mechanism: file your before and afters by town, not by date. And publish your hours.
Brookscapes: two businesses on one website
Brookscapes near Raleigh runs both halves of the trade. Landscape design and installation on one side, ongoing lawn care and maintenance on the other. The headline leads with award-winning landscape design and installation.
Running both is common and the websites almost never acknowledge how different those customers are. A design-build client is making a considered purchase over weeks, comparing portfolios and worrying about whether the finished garden will look like the drawing. A maintenance client wants to know the price per visit and whether you turn up. Same company, opposite decisions.
Brookscapes splits the portfolio by project type, landscape services, pools and water features, decks and porches, which serves the design-build visitor well. The maintenance side is thinner, which is the usual pattern: the photogenic half of the business gets the attention and the recurring half, which is the one paying the bills every month, gets a paragraph.
If you run both, the fix is not a bigger homepage. It is two clear routes off the homepage within the first screen, so each visitor stops seeing the other one's content immediately.
The mechanism: if you sell design-build and maintenance, give each its own path from the top of the homepage. They are different businesses pretending to be one.
Why before and after is the whole game here
Every trade benefits from showing its work. In landscaping it is close to the entire argument, for a reason worth spelling out.
Nobody can picture it. A homeowner looking at a patchy side yard cannot see the patio, and the gap between what is there and what you are proposing is exactly the gap that stops them spending. A pair of photographs closes it faster than any amount of description, because the second photograph is the thing they are actually buying.
It is also the one asset a competitor cannot copy. Anybody can claim twenty years of experience. Nobody else has your photographs of a garden three streets over.
A few things that make them work harder. Shoot the before, always, even when the job is small and nobody asked, because you cannot go back for it later. Shoot from the same position at the same time of day, since a bright after and a grey before is a comparison people discount. Caption them with the town. And show the boring middle ones too, the drainage and the grading, because that is where the money went and the customer who understands that is the customer who will not haggle.
The four-line version. If you change nothing else on your landscaping site this month: a minimum project size or a starting range, the towns you cover by name, before and after pairs captioned by town, and your business hours. All four are typing, not design, and together they qualify leads better than any form on the page.
The question nobody answers: is the design free?
Here is a gap that runs through all four sites and most of the trade. If you do design-build work, somebody has to draw the garden before anybody can price it. None of the four says whether that drawing costs money.
This matters more than it sounds, because the customer and the contractor usually have different assumptions and neither finds out until the conversation is already awkward. The homeowner has read free estimate on the website and reasonably concluded that everything up to the quote is free. The landscaper knows a proper design is a day of work and expects to be paid for it, or expects to fold the cost into a job they are confident of winning.
Three ways companies handle it, all defensible, and any of them beats silence.
- Free design, and you own it if you hire us. Common on smaller jobs. Fast to agree, and it quietly bakes the cost into the installation price.
- Paid design, credited against the build. The homeowner pays for the drawing, and the fee comes off the job if they go ahead. This filters seriously and is the most common approach on larger projects.
- Paid design, yours to keep. The drawing is a product. The customer can take it elsewhere, which sounds alarming and mostly is not, because a homeowner who has paid you for a design rarely hands it to a stranger.
Whichever you use, put it on the site next to the estimate button. A sentence like "the initial consultation is free, a full design is six hundred dollars and comes off the price if you go ahead" removes an entire uncomfortable conversation and does it before the site visit rather than after.
It also protects you from a specific and common waste of time, which is the homeowner collecting three free designs with no intention of paying for any of them. Companies that charge for design get fewer of those, which is the same logic as publishing a minimum.
The season problem, and what most sites do about it
Landscaping shares something with HVAC that plumbing and roofing do not have, which is a calendar that changes what the visitor wants.
In March somebody is planning a garden they want finished by June. In July they want the lawn kept alive. In October it is cleanup, and in much of the country November is when the snow contracts get signed. Four different visitors, one homepage, and most sites are built for whichever season they happened to be written in.
None of the four we looked at handles this especially well, which makes it an opening rather than a criticism. The version that works is not a seasonal redesign. It is a homepage that carries the design-build path, the recurring maintenance path and the seasonal work in the same view, with the recurring and seasonal ones prominent enough that a visitor in the wrong month still finds the thing they came for.
Snow deserves a specific mention if you are anywhere it falls. In much of the northeast the snow contracts signed in October and November are what carries a landscaping company through the months when nothing grows, and they are routinely buried at the bottom of a services page. A homeowner searching for a plow contract in autumn is a high intent customer with a deadline, and they are looking for a page about snow, not a bullet on a list about mowing.
The tell that a site was written once and abandoned is a homepage still selling spring planting in November. We wrote more about how seasonal programmes should sit on a trades site on our landscaping website design page.
What to copy this week
Four sites, and a list any landscaping company can work through without hiring anybody.
- Publish a minimum or a starting range. One of four does. It is the strongest lead filter available and it costs one sentence.
- Or publish a boundary instead. Saying what you do not do works nearly as well, as Seattle Urban Farm shows.
- File before and afters by town. A neighbour searching for local work should find it.
- Split design-build from maintenance in the first screen if you sell both.
- List the towns individually. Highlands names fifteen. "Greater Denver" would rank for none of them.
- Publish your hours. Nearly nobody does and everybody wonders.
- Separate residential and commercial galleries if you serve both, the way Gibbs does.
None of it is a redesign. It is a handful of sentences, a gallery setting and some captions. We ran the same exercise across the other trades in plumbing website examples, HVAC website examples and roofing website examples, and the pattern held every time. The sites that win are not better looking. They answer more questions before anybody has to ask.
Two technical notes. Google indexes the mobile version of your site rather than the desktop one, which its mobile-first indexing documentation states plainly, and a garden photograph that looks superb on a laptop can be unreadable on a phone. And if you are building town pages to go with those galleries, Google's spam policies are worth reading first, because the same paragraph with the town name swapped is the exact thing they describe.