Search Engine Optimization (SEO): A How-To Guide for Horticulturist, Landscaping & Plant Professionals
- Karin Cederskoog
- May 8
- 9 min read
In a season-dependent industry, with unpredictable forces of nature (oh, those pesky pest outbreaks…), you can’t leave anything to chance. Fortunately, there are certain aspects of your business you can control - planning, budgeting, pricing strategy and customer acquisition (by way of marketing campaigns).
Search engine optimization (SEO) ensures that your company is at the top of Google for strategic keywords, such as “wholesale nursery plant supplier near me” or “B2B horticulture distribution services.”
...because not everyone is searching industry publications or social media to discover new suppliers.
Table of Contents
The Commercial Plant & Horticulture Industry: How to Increase Website Traffic
Say you’re a hydroponic & greenhouse manufacturer / distributor, providing high-quality equipment at scale. You serve both retail and commercial markets but want to bring in more commercial customers due to the higher margins.
Your ideal customers are commercial production growers, wholesale nurseries & specialty growers, retail garden centers, public gardens & conservatories, research & educational institutes and controlled-environment agriculture operators.
Your mission is to identify your customer’s main problems or challenges. In most cases, you’ll need to break different verticals and industries into separate marketing campaign strategies.
Many of your potential customers face similar challenges - the difficulty of reliable growing due to droughts, cold snaps, pests and so on.
This is great news for you because it’s even easier to reach more prospective customers with a single piece of content.
Example: Greenhouse Manufacturer - How to Use SEO to Build Trust
Most landscaping and irrigation companies already have suppliers, so your goal is to convert horticulture clients to switch service providers.
No easy task.
But then again, it may not even occur to your ideal customer to evaluate another provider…until they search Google and find your SEO-optimized content 🙂.
Pretend you are the client whose trust you’re looking to build. Every commercial landscaping supply company has ensured quality plants but fell short.
How can you build trust with a customer who has been burned by companies similar to yours - landscape management and commercial planting companies who promise quality but instead, have product quality inconsistencies, unpredictable lead times, supply-chain disruptions, poor communication and mismatched technical specifications?
The answer lies in the very problems your customers have to begin with. They have all of these problems they’re trying to solve and don’t know who to turn to.
The answer is to develop a deep and genuine level of trust. This starts with meeting prospective customers where they’re at - a place of loss, distrust and confusion.
Consider the questions a company in this situation might look up:
“How do I ensure on-time delivery of wholesale plant nursery supplies?”
“How do I find a reliable supplier of commercial plants?”
“Do local commercial plant suppliers or large nationwide companies have higher quality control?”
“Do wholesale plant nurseries have higher quality standards than commercial distributors?”
As you start to develop questions around these topics, you uncover the types of products and services your customers are looking for.
These may not be the exact products and services you offer but remember, the goal is to use these insights to drive new content creation (i.e. blog posts and landing pages) on your website, thereby bringing your ideal customer directly to you.
Content Creation: How to Attract Your Target Market
Analyze the main themes of these questions:
Quality control
Reliability
Evaluating types of service providers
Remember - in this example, you aren’t providing the exact goods or services your target market is looking for. You provide high-quality greenhouse equipment to growers, not plants or supply chain services for commercial vendors.
Another key component of your digital marketing strategy is that you are focusing your efforts on the horticulture market in the Pacific Northwest. This is a critical component of your strategy - this local angle serves as a differentiator and specifies a unique type of traffic. You weave local keywords into your blog posts, as well as industry standard terms (more on this in the next section).
Blog post titles and keywords might include:
“How to Improve Quality in the Horticulture Supply Chain”
Quality control, horticulture supply chain, reliable, delivery services
“Top Plant Suppliers in Seattle”
Commercial plant supplier in Seattle, quality commercial plants, wholesale plant nurseries PnW
“Local, PnW Commercial Plant Suppliers vs. Nationwide Companies”
Quality control, horticulture supply chain, commercial plant shipping, PnW commercial plant supplier, nationwide plant suppliers
“The Top 5 Ways Reputable Suppliers Grow Plants Predictably, All Year Long”
Plant quality control, reliable commercial plant suppliers, best plant suppliers Seattle, quality plant suppliers for landscapers
The specific keywords vary depending on your particular strategy.
Industry Terminology: The Power of Strategic Keywords
Let’s use “The Top 5 Ways to Grow Plants Predictably, All Year Long” as an example. In outlining the main ways to achieve predictable plant growth, you target not only the industry-specific search terms your target markets are looking for but also the specific questions, such as “what is the best weather-resistant infrastructure?” or “what are the best windbreak trees and shrubs?”
Just as you tailor language to match the Google search terms commercial growers are likely to use - “horticulture” or “landscaping” (as opposed to “gardening” for retail consumers) - the keywords you use to describe your own company may differ from the keywords your target customers use. Within your company, you might use terminology such as “design controlled-environment horticulture systems” but your ideal customer is likely searching for keywords along the lines of “commercial greenhouse equipment.”
The key here is to focus on the keywords that bring your customers to you.
We are designing this blog post to capture your ideal traffic.
The Google Search Funnel: How to Bring Horticulture Customers to You
Something I love about search engine optimization is that you can strategically - and creatively - bring your ideal customers directly to you, simply by optimizing keywords and writing content tailored to their needs.
The SEO Funnel: A Problem -> An Answer -> A Solution
To recap:
Your target market has a problem - unpredictable growing conditions. (This could include commercial production growers, wholesale nurseries and specialty growers, retail garden centers, public gardens & conservatories, research & educational institutes, controlled-environment agriculture operators, etc.)
Your target market searches Google for an answer - “How to combat unpredictable weather in the commercial plant supply chain?” or “What are the best windbreak trees and shrubs to protect plants?”
Because you are at the top of Google for these search terms, you provide the solution to their problem in your blog post, “The Top 5 Ways to Grow Plants Predictably, All Year Long.”
In this post, you outline potential solutions, likely including a service or product of your own.
Strategic Content Creation: Keywords that Convert Customers
The content in your blog post (“The Top 5 Ways to Grow Plants Predictably, All Year Long”) could be broad and include:
Windbreak trees and shrubs: To modify wind flow, preventing plant damage.
Business management & POS software: To manage growth cycle and optimize space / resources.
Seed quality control: To ensure crop success and economic viability.
Seed & plant diversification: To improve resilience against pests.
You might just barely cover your products or services in this blog post, or not at all. The main purpose of this content is so that your target market sees value in your advice and sees you as a source of trustworthy information.
The result: Your key customer base will…
Associate your brand with high-quality industry information pertaining to their current problems (such as the unpredictability of commercial plant growing).
Sign up for your e-newsletter for more of your advice (and products).
Learn how your products are a superior substitute to landscaped windbreaks and other ideas you included (i.e. cost effective, faster, more reliable).
Example: Wholesale Landscaping Supplier - How to Use SEO to Drive Sales
You are a wholesale supplier, selling bulk landscaping materials. Your differentiating factor is that you developed a locally-curated and diversified supply chain. You did this intentionally, to avoid the issues commonly associated with broken supply chains. You set out to reduce transportation costs and associated issues (broken stones, dehydrated plants).
You want to capture your target clientele during the research and consideration phases, when they’re researching a problem or evaluating specific options.
You develop ideas for the following blog posts:
A Comparison of Business Management & POS Software for Landscaping Companies
The Top 10 Horticulture Quality Control Companies - Seed Quality & Beyond
What is a Good Profit Margin for a Landscaping Business?
In each piece of content, you can find a way to mention how your landscaping supply business is superior to others.
#1-2. Business Management Software / Horticulture Quality Control
In “Business Management & POS Software” and “Top 10 Horticulture Quality Control,” you might have a section where you:
Acknowledge the challenges of landscaping and gardening businesses.
Discuss how business management software or quality control solutions aid in those challenges.
Share how you take some of these challenges out of the equation through your carefully-curated selection of premium quality landscaping equipment.
#3. Good Profit Margin for a Landscaping Business
In this article, you can talk about industry standards as a whole and how to retain good profit margins without compromising on quality.
You could include a section with a mini-case study where you show how a client improved their margins by ditching the nationwide vendor and choosing your carefully-curated materials.
The True Magic of SEO
You likely found this post when searching for something along the lines of “how to market my horticulture management software online” or “SEO for horticulturists" or "SEO for greenhouse manufacturer supplies” or “how to improve website traffic landscaping business.”
This wasn’t by accident.
I could have used the generic term “customer” more throughout this article but instead, I sprinkled in terms like “commercial landscaping company” and “B2B horticulture distribution channels.” I designed my content to bring in a specific audience - you. I find your industry fascinating, and being a plant-lover myself (home gardener & DIY landscaper), I want to work with horticulture-related companies.
That is the power of SEO - you can bring your dream customers directly to you. No ads. No sales pitch. None of it.
Just words on a screen that cause Google to deem my content valuable to you.
You can (and should!) still go to tradeshows and give presentations and demos and sales pitches but you can supplement these activities with a digital marketing strategy that works for you 24/7.
In this world, this alternative dream world in which your target customers seek you out…now that’s a good position to be in.
In this fantastical world, you hardly need to explain what a landscape management platform is…because by the time customers find your website, they already know what you do and the value you bring.
They already scoured Google, jumping from introductory questions like “how to increase the profitability of my landscape architecture services” to specific questions like “best landscaping industry software for budget monitoring and project estimates” or “horticulture consultation software to manage expenses.”
Our goal with SEO is to rank your landing pages specifically for this type of clientele - those who are actively evaluating products or services like yours to find the best fit.
Of course, if we open up your strategy to capture that initial, informational traffic (“how to increase profitability…”), by the time that customer gets to your software landing page, they recognize your brand and see you as a trusted provider, making that sale a whole lot easier.
SEO Strategy for Horticulturists: Driven by Value Proposition
There are many strategies you can use to fuel a search engine optimization plan. I personally enjoy adapting keyword strategies to the situation - if you need clients ASAP, we’ll target less competitive keywords with less traffic to speed up conversions (I’ve personally seen conversions in as little as a few weeks with this strategy).
If you’re looking for a mix of short-term and long-term optimization (highly recommended!), we carefully evaluate those higher traffic keywords to ensure we select the best ones for our needs.
At KC SEO Consulting, I don’t specifically target keywords like “best SEO agency.” Instead, I target lower competition, highly targeted words that align with my business strategy, such as “small business marketing Seattle” or “digital marketing strategy PnW.”
The same is true for your organization. Even if you are a wholesale nursery supplier with nationwide reach, you don’t want to focus your efforts solely on keywords like “best wholesale nursery supplier.”
You want to target the differentiating factors that make you stand out - the unique aspects of your business that drive customers to your site and make them say, “Now that’s what we need!”
You want to bring your value proposition into your keyword strategy. Your customers don’t want just another “wholesale nursery supplier.” They want someone who will provide them with:
“Rare and unique plant varieties”
“Native plant species from local providers”
“Healthy plants for wholesale distributors”
You are the answer they’re looking for and, done right, you are just one search away, waiting on page 1 of Google.
