You run two businesses. Here they are next to each other.
| Recurring maintenance | Design and build | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical job | $123 per mow ($49–$203) | $3,516 average ($200–$14,800) |
| Annual value | $2,000–$4,000 | One-off |
| Example work | Weekly mowing, cleanups | Patios $2,000–$5,800 · retaining walls $3,250–$9,000 |
| Cost per lead | ~$84 lawn care | ~$104 landscaping · ~$153 hardscaping |
| First-job economics | $84 lead vs $123 mow — underwater | $153 lead vs $9,000 wall — profitable immediately |
| Who ranks organically | Marketplaces | Actual local firms |
| Buyer behavior | Price-shopped, low loyalty | Portfolio-driven, long consideration |
The maintenance lead only becomes profitable across a full season. The hardscaping lead pays for itself on day one.
Same budget, same account, and one half subsidizes the other without anyone tracking it — because almost nobody splits the reporting.
The organic results, side by side
We ran both searches in August 2026.
lawn care service near me | landscaping company near me design install patio |
|---|---|
| Lawn Love | Actual local firms |
| GreenPal | Design-build franchise brands |
| LawnStarter | Regional operators |
| LawnGuru | |
| Yelp |
The left column is venture-backed software marketplaces running programmatic city pages. Several of them will also sell you leads — so you're competing for your own search results against companies whose business model is renting them back to you.
The right column is winnable.
That observation alone should decide where the budget goes.
The calendar, side by side
| Cost per lead | Demand | |
|---|---|---|
| December–February | Cheapest of the year — one benchmark set puts February at about $68 | Trough |
| March–May | Highest | Peak — April runs roughly 3.4× the December floor |
| June–November | Middling | Steady |
Leads are cheapest exactly when nobody is buying them, and most expensive when everybody is.
Landscapers cut spending in Q4 and Q1 because the bank account is empty. That's understandable and it's also when the ground is cheapest. The practical version isn't "spend big in February" — it's don't go dark, because restarting in April means restarting at peak prices.
Off-season work has its own economics worth knowing: snow removal leads have been measured around $38 and holiday lighting around $130, both cheaper than year-round lawn care, because seasonal demand spikes against thin competition.
Two findings on the map box
From a study of 8,186 businesses across 200 cities that used lawn care as one of its test industries:
Hiding your business address correlated negatively with local pack rankings — which cuts against Google's own guidance to service-area businesses. Worth testing rather than assuming, but if you've hidden yours because you work from a yard, it may be costing you.
Monthly review velocity mattered more than total count. One business dominating with 60+ reviews a month dropped significantly after an eighteen-day pause. Reviews are a rate you maintain, not a number you accumulate.
$500 to start, then no monthly fee until we hit the agreed page-one target.
of pages we build rank on Google's first page
location pages built for a single client across 7 states
page-one placements for one client across 5 cities
growth in monthly search impressions for a Nashville client
Limitless Doors
Commercial automatic doors, five Alberta metros
- 63+ page-one placements across 5 cities
- 85%+ of 74 pages on page one
- 4,483 clicks in 12 months
PM2
MRO inventory and storeroom optimization, Orlando and Tampa
- 589 to 1,300 monthly organic visitors
- 85%+ of pages on page one within 90 days
- First inbound leads in the company's history
Haus of Sovereign
Somatic and spiritual wellness, Nashville
- 132 to 2,900 monthly impressions
- 1,903 organic clicks in 6 months
- 15.6% average click-through rate
We also built and ranked a 208-page location program for a security and surveillance company across 15 metros in 7 states, with 85%+ of pages reaching page one. That client has asked not to be named.
Common questions
Should we chase mowing keywords at all?
Selectively. The head terms belong to marketplaces with more authority than you'll build soon. Specific and local — a named neighborhood plus a service — is still open and converts better anyway.
We want more commercial contracts. Can you help?
Partly, and we'll be precise about which part. Commercial grounds work is won on bids and relationships and we can't rank you into a contract. We can make sure the site holds up when a property manager checks you after your bid. That's credibility work, not lead generation.
Is it worth advertising in the winter?
Worth not stopping. Going dark and restarting in April means paying peak prices to rebuild a position you already had.
Where we work.
We build for local service businesses across the US and Canada, with dedicated pages in every market you cover.
Other trades we work in.
$500 to start. No monthly fees until we hit the page-one target we agree on.
The $500 one-time setup fee covers page research, page development and the website build. Monthly billing only starts once we hit the page-one target we agree on before any work begins. If we never hit it, you never pay a monthly fee.