Lawn Care Marketing: How to Get Customers, in the Order to Do It

Lawn care marketing works best in a set order. Get your Google Business Profile and reviews right, then turn on Local Services Ads in the lawn care category. Add a website that gets calls, then SEO and Google Ads once you pass about $500K a year. Around all of it, work your routes and sell programs that renew.

We work with lawn care companies as well as pest control. My partner in Pest Control Millionaires, Jonas Olson, grew a lawn care company to about $3M before he built Pest Badger, and some of his lessons are below.

Lawn care marketing, in the order I’d do it

You can’t run every channel at once, and which lawn care marketing strategies make sense depends on the size of your company.

Where you are	Online	On your routes and in town
Still on the truck	Google Business Profile, a review from every customer	Neighbors of every customer, door hangers, yard signs
Under about $500K a year	Business Profile, Local Services Ads, a simple website, call tracking	A referral program, a partner or two, early renewals
Past about $500K a year	Google Ads, a real website and SEO	Partners in every town, seasonal mailers, wrapped trucks

Under about $500K a year, I’d put most of your marketing effort into your Google Business Profile and Local Services Ads. Both run on the same reviews, and an owner who isn’t technical can manage them. Past that, start Google Ads and put real money into your website and SEO.

Nearly everything in my pest control marketing guide works for a lawn company too, if you want more on any one channel.

Your Google Business Profile and reviews come first

A lot of lawn care calls start on the map. Someone searches “lawn care near me,” looks at the three companies Google shows, reads a few reviews and calls one of them.

Set it up under your real business name, with Lawn care service as the primary category if recurring treatments are your main work. List every service you sell, add real photos of your trucks, crews and lawns, and post once a week. My guide to lawn care SEO covers categories, service areas and the rest of what moves a profile up the map.

Reviews matter more than anything else on the profile. Ask every customer, and aim for about one new review a week per profile. Ask in person after a visit, then text your review link the same day. A program brings you back to the same yard several times a season, so you’ll get more than one good moment to ask.

Google’s review policy bans offering a discount, a free application or anything else for a review, asking only the customers you think are happy and pressuring people while you’re on site.

Local Services Ads have a lawn care category

Local Services Ads sit at the top of many local searches, and you pay for valid leads instead of clicks. Lawn care has its own category, which Google describes as lawn installation and maintenance, such as weed control, mowing and seeding. Its screening requirements match pest control’s, with background checks for select users, general and professional liability insurance, and state licenses where local law requires them.

Companies that pass get the Google Verified badge, which replaced Google Guaranteed and Google Screened starting in October 2025, so retire any old Google Guaranteed claims.

Turn on only the services you sell, in the towns your trucks reach. Check the budget often in spring, because once it runs out for the day, your ads stop showing.

In August 2026, Google started moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns that still charge per valid lead. Your name, address and hours sync from your Business Profile after the move, so think twice before changing them. My Local Services Ads guide is written for pest control, but verification, lead disputes and ranking work the same way for lawn care.

Your website, SEO and Google Ads

A website that gets the call

People who find you on the map or through a neighbor often check your website before they call, so put your phone number and a short quote form at the top of every page.

Make it easy to get a price, too. Kendall Hines, who grew his family’s Lawn Doctor franchise to seven figures, told me Monday mornings there started with hundreds of leads, and he wondered why more of those people couldn’t just sign up online. So he built Lawnbot, where a homeowner gets measured, quoted and signed up on the company’s website.

We’ve built sites for lawn care companies like Cory’s Lawn Service in Reno and NuGreen Lawn & Pest in Rochester, Michigan. I go through every page a lawn care site needs in lawn care website design.

SEO

SEO brings calls without a charge for every click, but it’s the slowest channel to pay off, so I’d wait until you’re past about $500K to put serious money into it. My lawn care SEO guide covers how long it takes and what to ask an agency.

Google Ads

Google Ads charge per click and let you choose exactly which searches you pay for. I’d split lawn care campaigns by service, like fertilization and weed control, aeration and overseeding, grub control and mosquito, so you can turn each one up in its season. Add negative keywords for work you don’t do (mowing, if you don’t mow), job seekers and do-it-yourselfers, and keep the ads inside the towns your trucks reach.

Send every ad to a page about that service. When I open an account where all the ads land on one page, it converts worse than ads that each have a page built for the search. My guide to Google Ads for pest control walks through the setup, and it’s the same for lawn care.

Lawn care marketing ideas that work on your routes

Some of the best lawn care marketing costs almost nothing, because your crews are on those streets every week and the house next to a customer is the cheapest one you’ll ever win.

Jonas started on his grandma’s street. He mowed her backyard, knocked on her neighbors’ doors and cut grass Thursday through Sunday after getting home from an out-of-town job, he told me on Pest Control Legends. His first real client was still a client 12 years later.

Hang a door hanger on the houses on both sides of every stop, with the season’s service on it and its own tracking number.
Put out a small yard sign after each visit, where the customer and the HOA allow it.
Tell neighbors plainly that you already service their street. A good-looking lawn next door is better proof than any ad.
Wrap your trucks. When owners ask Jonas whether they should, he says 100% yes, and the earlier the better.

Other lawn care advertising, like mailers around your best routes, Facebook ads or local radio, can work too. Give each piece its own tracking number and judge it by the customers it brings in.

Referrals and partners

A referral program gives your happiest customers a reason to send their neighbors on purpose. Kendall told me he treats $50 as the entry-level bonus now, and $50 to $200 is common. Pay it on time. At his own lawn care company, a customer once called to say they’d referred 5 people and never been paid, and Kendall doubts that customer ever referred anyone again.

Then find the businesses that serve the same homeowners.

Realtors, whose sellers want the lawn looking good for listing photos and whose buyers need someone to take it over.
HOAs, which often keep a list of approved vendors.
Property managers, who can put a group of rental homes or a townhome community on one program.
Pest control companies, which want you more than you might think.

Partnerships are the first thing my partner Jake Sheldon sets up in any service business he gets into, starting with a lawn care company, because it already serves the customers he wants. With a written agreement in place, the lawn care company texts its customers that it now works with his pest control company, and he told me 5% to 15% of people commonly reply.

So go to the best pest control company in town, put the deal in writing and ask for the same text to go to their customers about your lawn program. Spread the texts over a week or two. Jake learned that when a lawn care partner with over 4,000 customers texted the whole list in one day, and hundreds of people wanted service from a company with 3 techs.

Plan the year around the lawn season

In much of the country, lawn care calls come hardest in spring, when lawns green up, and again in late summer and fall for aeration and seeding. Plan your marketing around those waves.

Book the year ahead in winter

Before the first round, send every current customer a renewal that lays out what you’ll do this year, so they’re on the schedule before the phones start ringing.

Run your offer early

Get your early-season offer out before competitors do. Jonas isn’t a fan of discounts, because a customer you win with one will always want another. He’d rather throw in something that doesn’t take much time, like a mosquito or flea and tick treatment with the first service. One offer I like is a free mosquito service that leads into the recurring mosquito plan.

Sell aeration and seeding in the fall

University of Illinois Extension calls late summer to early fall critical for cool-season lawns. Sell aeration and overseeding to current customers before that window opens, then use it to bring in new customers you can sign up for next year. Warm-season lawns in the South run on a different calendar, so time it to your grass.

Sell programs and add-ons, then renew them

A one-time weed spray has to be sold all over again next year. A program sells once and then renews, so present the full-season program as the normal way to buy and single visits as the exception.

When a mosquito company fell into Jonas’s lap, its customers more or less picked when they wanted service. Pest Badger put every customer on a schedule, with service every 21 to 30 days, and raised prices. Without adding a single client, that branch went from about $340,000 to $650,000 almost overnight.

Mosquito, tick and grub control fit a customer who already pays you to look after the yard, so offer one when it fits the property. Jonas would still tell you to get really good at one service and reach good market penetration before you add the next.

Jonas thinks most churn gets fixed at onboarding, by being honest. It takes a few applications, and mosquito control might cut mosquitoes by 80% without getting rid of every one, so say that up front. He follows a new customer’s first service with a welcome package at the door 2 days later, a check-in call and texts.

Raise prices every year, and explain the increase before the invoice does. The first time Jonas raised prices, by about 20%, two people canceled, and he’s done it every year since.

What I see when the phone isn’t ringing

When an owner tells me marketing isn’t working, I check whether anybody answers the phone before I look at a single ad. It’s the simplest miss I find. Invoca found that home services companies miss 27% of their inbound calls. For a lawn care office, the spring rush is when that hurts most.

Owners who say Local Services Ads bring them nothing are often the ones not picking up. Google says missed calls can hurt your responsiveness, which is one of the things those ads rank on, so a missed call costs you more than one job.

The other thing I find is no tracking. Every source should have its own CallRail number, including the website, each Business Profile, Local Services Ads, Google Ads, door hangers and each partner. Make lead source a required field in Real Green, Jobber or whatever software you run. Once a month, divide what each source cost by the customers it brought in.

Cost per customer tells you more than cost per lead, because a program customer who stays for years is worth far more than a one-time aeration. My guide to call tracking is written for pest control, and the setup is the same for lawn care. If you’d like me to look at what you’re running now, book a call.

Questions lawn care owners ask

What’s the best way to market a new lawn care company?

Spend your time before your money. Knock on your customers’ neighbors, hang door hangers, put out yard signs and ask every customer for a Google review. Set up your Business Profile on day one, and add Local Services Ads once you can afford to pay per lead.

How much should a lawn care company spend on marketing?

Work backward from what a program customer is worth over the years they stay. Decide what you can afford to pay to land one, then track what each channel costs per customer and move money toward the cheapest.

Should I hire a lawn care marketing agency?

Do the relationship work with realtors, HOAs and partners yourself. The website, SEO and Google Ads are usually worth handing off, as long as you own the website, the Business Profile and the ad accounts. Our monthly plans have no contract, our clients own all of it, and our services page lays out what we do.