We don’t have to tell you that lawn care is a competitive business. You probably also know that most of the competition is done before the customer even contacts you; it’s online, in flyers and doorhangers, on signs, truck wraps, EDDM and a million other places.

But most of all online. Nearly 80% of consumers will hit the web when researching a service purchase like lawn care, so your site really has to get the message across in a way your potential clients will connect with.

We’ve chosen five different sites to show you different, yet equally effective approaches to winning the web.

Tinelli Lawn and Gardens

tinellilawnandgardens.com

The selling points here are the calm, color-coordinated visuals, images and text that articulate an old-fashioned family firm where traditional values and aesthetics are prized. You can tell at a glance that if you’re looking for a posh stretch of lawn with some beautiful stonework and walkways to set off your upscale family home, you’ve come to the right place. And that they’ve been doing this for 50 years. You’d probably be pretty comfortable thinking they could do this for you, too.

Lucky Lawn Care

luckylawncareaz.com

Down in Arizona we have found a more contemporary-looking site with plenty of white space and a flashy Flash header with sound effects. Normally we don’t like those, but these are nicely done and not noisy. Small, pretty leaves pop up as you audibly click on the various links. It is attention-getting without being irritating. Features like Flash need to be carefully deployed within a site, as they can be bad for SEO, but they are also often visually breathtaking. Modern plugins have made Flash, Javascript, and Iframe slideshows easier to use than ever, so experiment on a private page of your site if you’re interested in bringing some literal Flash to your online presence.

Heartland Harvest

hharvest.com

This Chicago site has a great example of navigation: both a header and a footer with navigation links. More of a classic static website than the previous ones, this one makes it particularly easy for customers to click around the site and find their way back. Customers become irritated when they cannot easily find their way to the portfolio page, say, or the home page. Too many websites make it difficult for them. By including the tabbed links in both header and footer, they ensure that wherever the customer is on the web page, they can easily get to wherever they need to be with a single click.

Stanley’s Lawn Service

stanleyslawnservice.net

Okay, this one’s a bit of a controversial choice. There’s an ad in the footer for their web design company which really shouldn’t be there; just pay the guy. But what we like about it we like way more than we dislike what we dislike about it. Know what we mean?

This site is very, very clean and has the most important element of any website on every single page, in the same exact spot: the contact info. Your contact info should always be in the same spot no matter what page you’re on, and there it is, right in the sidebar. and there in the footer are the links to social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Keep it clean, keep the contact info in front of their eyes, and don’t waste anyone’s time with acres of prose. It gets the job done.

Mark Wiens Communitiy Lawn Care

communitylawncare.ca

Don’t get cute with us. Unless you’re as cute and appealing as this literally tiny website. It stands in contrast with the current fad for headers wider than any civilized monitor and vast swathes of cold white space. Besides an adorable Leave-It-To-Beaver woodsy design for a community-minded company, the site also incorporates a crowd-sourced map of beetle infestations, the kind of resource that any neighbor would find compelling and return to regularly. By supplying an actual and interactive service right on the site, the company guarantees that locals will return again and again, getting their marketing message every time.