Tree surgeons and arborists in the UK are in consistently high demand. It’s a career that suffers from a shortage of qualified arboricultural professionals whilst demand continues to increase year over year as more Britons understand the importance of proper tree care.
While this is quite a boon if you’re a tree surgeon or arborist, it doesn’t mean that customers will automatically find your business amongst the competition. Marketing, and especially nowadays digital marketing, is essential for capturing a wider audience of leads and converting them into satisfied customers.
The blog post below will aim to give you five digital marketing tips that can be used to help grow your business, attract new leads, and stand out amongst competitors.
1. Build a professional website
Every tree care company in the UK should have a user-friendly website. This could entail building a simple landing page with one of the many free or freemium website builders, hiring a freelancer or digital marketing agency, or doing it yourself, or you may wish to build a fully fleshed out website with generous amounts of content.
Either way, simply having a website early on is incredibly helpful for actually being found on search engines like Google.
Try to make sure that your website is appealing, features plenty of helpful calls to action and prominently displays your main contact form or telephone number encouraging customers to contact you, and is optimised for mobile phones. It should also load quickly and have strong on-page and off-page SEO.
Real photos, such as portfolios of past jobs completed or simply your own “stock” photos of you or your employees pruning or caring for trees are a lot better and more personalised.
Your tree care website is important to have, but it can get drowned out by many bigger competitors if you aren’t leveraging other digital marketing strategies or if your content is unhelpful or out of date, so it’s always a good idea to combine the website with other techniques as we’ll discuss below.
One of the best ways to complement an existing website and build a strong online presence is to partner with a tree surgeon and arborist platform such as TreeMend. Our team excels at digital marketing, SEO, and keeping our website content fresh and informative. Joining TreeMend is also one of the easiest ways to boost digital marketing for your tree care business with the least amount of effort required, although it’s always a good idea to make some efforts yourself through social media and other methods.
2. Claim a Google Business Profile
One of the most important ways to boost your online visibility as a tree surgeon or arborist in the UK is to claim a Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business or GMB).
Creating a profile is free and the process is straightforward, so there’s no reason to not claim one. Having a business profile helps your business pop out more on Google Search and in Google Maps, two extremely common ways that potential customers will be looking for tree care services.
When you claim a profile, be sure to populate as much data as possible so that any prospective customer viewing your business gets a complete picture and will likely carry on with calling you rather than a competitor. Some things you should always add to your business profile include:
- Telephone number
- Email address
- Link to website
- Hours of operation
- Description of services
- Up-to-date photos
- Reviews and responses to reviews
Having more reviews and higher ratings often makes it so that Google prefers to show your business in the local pack. When customers search for your tree surgery business located in Manchester, for example, and they type in “tree surgeon near me,” “tree surgeon in Manchester,” or “tree surgeon” (from a device in or around Manchester), the chances are much higher that your business will pop out in the top listings as well as on a map at the top of the Google Search listings.
In other words, claiming a Google Business Profile and making it stand out can be one of the single most effective ways of boosting online visibility.
3. Get familiar with keywords & SEO
A huge part of standing out online and showing up more reliably amongst the top results in Google Search is to understand and leverage the power of keywords and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). You hopefully know what your business does, where it operates, and what kind of clients you want to attract, e.g. private homeowners, landscape architects, or facilities management.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO involves many simple and complex strategies used to increase digital presence and visibility to Google Search and other popular search engines. Generally, Google wants you to make sure that your content is relevant and useful, and naturally your Google business profile should be as complete as possible. This can greatly boost your tree care business results in Google Search and Google Maps.
Let’s start off with a simple example. Without having researched any keywords and without proper SEO, what does Google Search think your business is? Assume you have a website and a couple of social media profiles with your business name. Google won’t know where your business is located or where you operate, what your operating hours are, which services you provide, how customers can contact you, and many other essential elements.
Okay, so you’re a tree surgeon… in the UK, or in Zimbabwe? Assuming you operate in the UK, where do you operate? Birmingham, Bristol, or Belfast? All across Northumbria, only in County Durham, or within a 50-mile radius? Narrowing down a location or region is ideal. Google won’t know these things automatically and neither will your customers without proper context.
Keyword planning
It’s also important to use free tools like Google Keyword Planner to gauge what people are actually looking for, then target content that meets the demand.
For example, a few simple queries on Google Keyword Planner, filtered for search results in the UK by monthly search requests, filtered for the last two years of data ending in 2025, yielded the following amounts of monthly searches for various keywords:
- Tree surgeon near me: 50,000
- Tree surgeon: 50,000
- Arborist: 50,000
- Tree service near me: 5,000
- Arborist near me: 5,000
There are hundreds of other possible keywords you can (and probably should) target when producing content for social media and your website. Simple ones like “tree pruning” or “stump grinding near me” are highly competitive – meaning lots of people look for these – but they’re also fairly broad. Specific keywords like “tree trimming in London” or “tree crown reduction in Manchester” are great for capturing local traffic, which is probably going to include many potential customers looking to call… hopefully you!
Social media is practically a must these days for business owners, and tree surgeons and arborists are no exception. Consider that a huge amount of the population in the UK uses social media for multiple hours every day, whether that be scrolling TikTok or Instagram feeds and stories to searching for products and services.
While advertising on popular social media platforms can be highly lucrative if done right (and especially if done with keyword planning), simply having your business listed on various platforms can be good enough if you lack the time or expertise to make the most of content creation.
Moreover, consider changing demographics. If you’re around 40 or older, I want you to do a little experiment. Imagine in your head typing an email to someone and the gestures you make when doing so. Now, if your first thought was to pick up your phone and use your thumbs, you’re probably in the younger demographic and are so accustomed to using your mobile phone for practically everything – including emails. If your first thought was fingers clacking away at a keyboard, you’re probably the older generation that is used to using a laptop of PC (or heck, maybe a typewriter).
What’s happening nowadays is that many people who need tree care services tend to be working-age adults and some elderly customers. Those who are 40 or older will probably want to call you over the telephone; you know, the old-fashioned thing we used to do?
Those who are 40 or younger, generally, will often prefer sending a DM through WhatsApp, social media, or SMS rather than calling.
Simply having a social media profile and a telephone number for people to call and to send WhatsApp messages captures any enquiries from people from the younger generations and the older ones.
You should also try to use social media profiles to communicate with customers, even if it only takes a brief moment to do so. Responding to customers shows others that you’re actually present and available. Responding to publicly viewable comments and posts can be even more powerful, but always try to remain diplomatic and tempered in your responses since everyone can see the exchange.
We’re adding another point about social media due to just how ubiquitous and powerful it is for businesses, including tree surgeons and arborists in the UK. Social media is, as mentioned above, great for communicating and receiving DMs and enquiries from all sorts of people, especially the younger generations.
It’s also a great way to create and share content for all to see. This can be time-consuming, but it can be extremely rewarding. Photo (e.g. Instagram) or video (e.g. TikTok) posts can give viewers an incredible look into specific parts of your business or processes that you handle on a daily basis.
Felling a large tree with your employees? Capture it on video and make a post about it. Pruning a tall and beautiful English Oak? Snap a few before and after photos to show just how valuable tree pruning can be and how great it can look.
Yes, content creation can be laborious and you may lack the time or effort to do so, which is why many hire interns or freelancers to do these sorts of tasks for them. You don’t need to write long blog posts (although this can help a lot, too), but even a few photos of jobs you’ve done helps to build up your social media presence and your digital marketing footprint.
Here are just a handful of social media and blog content ideas you could explore and share with followers and viewers:
- Tree care tips: helpful tips on how to care for your tree yourself (with a natural call to action for tree surgery services for jobs that aren’t safe to DIY);
- Showcase tree species: build a collection of photos/videos of various tree species here in the UK, making a few fun “top five facts” posts about some or all of them;
- Tree safety tips: give helpful tips to other tree surgeons on how to use a chainsaw effectively, notch cuts, or to climb a tree safely;
- Cool job showcases: showcase some of your best work with before and after photos/clips, drone video footage, and anything else you found interesting about the job;
Answer FAQs: try to use keyword planning to find out what people are asking, then build content based off that. This could include answering questions like “is it safe to cut down a tree on my property?” or “when is the best time to prune [species] tree?”
Summary of Digital Marketing Tips for Tree Surgeons & Arborists
Standing out from the competition, growing your business, and expanding your digital footprint are all important and digital marketing is often the key to reaching new prospective customers as a tree surgeon or arborist.
In summary, some of our top digital marketing tips for tree surgeons and arborists in the UK:
- Build a website or landing page for your business
- Claim a Google Business Profile and manage it well
- Learn at least a little about keyword planning and SEO
- Improve customer engagement via social media platforms
- Create compelling content through social media
Digital marketing is often easier said than done, however. As a tree surgeon or arborist in the UK, you’ve probably already got your hands full providing quality services to your valued customers all day and you may have precious little time to dedicate to understanding the latest changes to Google’s algorithm or content guidelines. Joining a network like TreeMend is one of the most reliable ways to grow your tree care business in the UK and we welcome you to apply to become a member.
Join the TreeMend network today
If you are a tree surgeon or arborist operating in the UK, becoming a TreeMend partner offers a valuable opportunity to significantly enhance your online visibility and expand your digital marketing efforts. By joining TreeMend, you gain access to a steady stream of qualified leads within your local area, which are delivered directly to your inbox, saving you time and effort in finding potential clients. This targeted lead generation allows you to focus more on your core services while ensuring your business connects with customers actively seeking professional tree care solutions.
