Tree company owners have ever wondered how your company’s web efforts compare to the competition. You should do so because their efforts reflect the effort and cost needed to compete in Colorado’s tree service markets, including Denver. The benchmark graphic of all 126 companies is at the bottom of the page of this article.
Why is Web Presence Helpful?
Sometimes, word of mouth or referrals do not generate enough business to meet organizational goals. There are three reasons why having a dominant organic ranking matters.
- The more people who find your company using Google search, the better because these clicks can convert into potential jobs.
- Organic search traffic, in the long run, is the most cost-effective way to find new customers.
- The cost of building a web presence usually has a strong ROI.
Why Is Organic Search Cost Effective?
Organic traffic is people using Google, Bing, and other browsers to search for services and products for their homes and businesses. Organic search is cost-effective. It leverages the internet to attract customers to its website. Twenty-five years ago, professional service companies would place a listing and ads in the Yellow Pages and wait for the phone to ring. Those days are long gone once the web replaced the Yellow Pages, how consumers find services and products for their homes. Do you have a Yellow Page Directory in your home now? Print media buys are expensive and do not have the scale and reach to find new customers. The downside of web marketing is that it takes time and money to build a web presence that will attract organic search traffic to a company’s website in competitive markets.
Downs Digital cannot share actual reports, but as the table below shows, costs are high in the first two years, and then the leverage of the internet starts to kick in, driving down the cost per organic search click to find new customers. The cost per click is higher than Facebook and Google ads, but the volume of clicks to the client’s website and online sales is magnitudes greater.
Activity December Search Traffic Cost Per Search Click
SEO 2019 116 $1,149
SEO 2020 171 $1,965
SEO 2021 1100 $450
SEO 2022 1300 $440
SEO 2023 1300 $177
SEO 2024 1400 $128
Denver Market
The Denver tree service web market is highly competitive. Arborscape dominated the market between 2010 to 2019. That year, Fielding Tree unseated them and became the leading tree company on the web in Denver for about two years. Ross Tree overtook Fielding two years ago and still obtains more organic traffic than other locally owned and operated competitors. We added Natural Way and DLC Arbor per request, so the analysis focuses on the twelve tree companies ranked by organic search traffic. All twelve have modern websites. Eight websites use WordPress with a Yoast SEO plugin. Ross Tree, Splintered, Bear Creek, Donavon, and Schulhoff are active bloggers. All companies are active on Google My Business. Four companies have added Instagram to their marketing mix. Few tree service companies use Wix or Squarespace because it puts them at a competitive disadvantage.
Below are some of our findings:
- Seven of nine companies are active bloggers, generating almost 70,000 words of content since the beginning of the year. (For context, a typical novel is 90,000 words.)
- The companies posted an average of 16 blogs in 2024, a little more than one per month.
- The top bloggers wrote about ten thousand words; the average blog length is 790 words.
- All Denver tree companies, except one, are active on Facebook, with an average of 436 followers and 24 posts in 2024.
- All companies but one compete on Google My Business with an average of 137 reviews.
Colorado Springs and Mountain Markets
Both these markets are dominated by one company. Front Range Arborist in Colorado Springs can expect 1100 in search engine traffic in the next 30 days, while Lam Tree in Evergreen will get 1400. Tall Timbers in the Springs is doing everything right and should give Front Range a run for their money in time. Tall Timber’s use of Squarespace might hold them down.
How do companies compete? Ensure your off-page efforts are above average in the ten marketing activities listed above.
Surprises
Fielding has dropped its top position and is now mid-ranked, which must be frustrating since they blog and post more on social media than their competitors. The Fielding website does have Yoast scripts in its HTML, but it looks like it is legacy scripts, not a full implementation of the plugin. They no longer date their blogs, so we cannot tell if their blogging effort is continuous or has stagnated. Their efforts have backfired since they are now mid-market in organic search. However, their organic traffic may come back as Google adjusts to Fielding new off-page marketing mix. Gabe, the owner, is SEO-savvy, but we will see. These findings are conjecture since we cannot access Fielding’s Google and Facebook analytics.
Colorado locally owned and operated tree companies if you do not see your companies URL in the list below, Downs Digital is glad to add it. Please email us at jdowns@downsdigitalmarketing.com and we will add it to the analysis.
