We score 812 landscaping companies across 25 Florida cities from their public Google data. The star ratings barely separate them. Reviews, photos, replies and a working website do. Here is what the leaders look like, what a landscaping website needs, and how an owner-run company closes the gap.
Scholarship-eligible · Up to 50% off for owner-run crews · No contracts
Medians for each group, so one company with a thousand reviews cannot skew the picture. Look at the last row first.
| On their Google profile | Ranked 21+ | Ranked 11–20 | Top ten |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reviews | 14 | 25 | 60 |
| New reviews, last 90 days | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| Photos | 14 | 31 | 86 |
| Reviews the owner replied to | 0% | 20% | 70% |
| Has a website | 55% | 65% | 93% |
| Star rating | 4.5 | 4.8 | 4.9 |
These figures come from The Yard Index, a monthly ranking of Florida landscapers that we publish from public Google Business Profile data. Its score is built from these same factors, so the top ten have more of them partly by design. The table shows what the strongest profiles look like. It is not Google’s ranking formula, which nobody outside Google knows.
More than half of the companies we scored sit at 4.8 or above, and the top ten’s median (4.9) is barely different from the next ten’s (4.8). When a homeowner compares three companies at 4.9, the stars stop deciding anything. They look at how many reviews there are, and how recent.
Nearly half got no new Google reviews at all in the last three months. The top ten’s median is four. One or two a month says “still busy, still good” in a way a pile of reviews from three summers ago cannot.
The fix is unglamorous: ask every customer, the day the job is done, by text, with the link in the message.
Landscaping sells on how it looks. The top ten carry nearly three times the photos of the next ten. Before-and-afters from your own phone beat anything polished, and every finished job is another one to add.
The top ten reply to most of their reviews. Most of the companies ranked 21st or lower reply to none at all. Two lines costs nothing, shows a homeowner someone is paying attention, and gives the next customer something to read besides stars.
Nearly a third of the companies we scored have no website, and some of those point their Google profile at a Facebook page instead. Of the ones that do have a site, nearly one in five fails a basic mobile check — which is where the homeowner is, phone in hand, deciding who to call.
Same published prices as every other trade. Owner-run crews of ten or fewer may qualify for up to half off the two ranking plans.
Designed, written and hosted, built around the estimate request, with edits live within 48 hours. Or $2,000 once if you would rather own it outright.
A full Google Business Profile build-out, your job photos added as you send them, weekly optimization, call tracking and a monthly ranking report.
Everything in Top 3, the website, and a text to every customer after every job asking for a review — aimed squarely at the recency gap in the table above.
Pick a time below. We will look at your Google Business Profile and your current site together, live, and tell you exactly what is holding the calls back.
Grab a time that works for you.
Open the calendarOpen the calendarIf you want work from Google, yes. A Facebook page is fine for keeping in touch with past customers, but 93% of the top-ten companies in our data have a real website, against 55% of those ranked 21st and below. Search engines and AI assistants can read a website far more reliably than a Facebook page, and a homeowner comparing quotes expects one.
Enough to look busy and recent next to the companies you actually compete with. In our Florida data the top-ten median is 60 reviews, with about four new ones every three months. If you have 20, the goal is not 60 by Christmas. It is one or two new ones every month, starting this month.
No. Pages that only swap one town name for another are a known spam pattern and can drag the whole site down. List your service area clearly on one page, set it on your Google profile, and earn reviews from customers in those towns. That does the job properly.
Usually you do, and that is a good thing. Phone photos of your own finished jobs beat anything staged. Text them to us as you finish the work and we take care of the rest — where they go, how they are labeled, and keeping the profile fresh.
Yes. We are based in Lubbock, Texas, and work with landscaping companies anywhere in the US. Our benchmark data comes from Florida because that is where The Yard Index runs.
Yes. D’Amico Digital publishes it and says so on every page there. Every company is scored by the same published formula from public Google data, and being a client has no effect on anyone’s position.
Fifteen minutes, no obligation, and you will leave knowing exactly what to fix first.