Everyone tells you that your business needs to have a blog. It doesn’t matter if you’re a restaurant, dentist, or a Tree care company: all you’ll ever hear is that you need content, content, and more content.

But if your business is in a less glamorus industry, it can be hard to figure out what to blog about. So what should you write about on your tree care company’s blog?

Well, it turns out you have a lot more options than you realize. In fact, it’s not hard to generate enough ideas to least you for years.

In this post we’ll run through a few different types of blog posts, how to put them together, and why they’ll help your business.

The Obvious Option: Blog About Trees and Tree Care

Once you’ve been in the tree care industry for long enough, it can be easy to forget just how much of your knowledge isn’t common knowledge. If you’ve ever been asked a tree care question by a customer that took more than 30 seconds to answer, congratulations, you just found a blog post topic.

If you’re drawing a blank, here are just a few ideas to get you started:

1. How do I know when a tree is sick?
2. How to know when it’s time to take a tree down
3. Signs that your tree is dead
4. How do you cut down a big tree?
5. Stump removal vs. stump grinding: the pros and cons
6. What’s the best time of year to trim a pine tree?
7. What’s the best time of year to trim an oak tree?
8. What’s the best time of year to pull a birch tree?
9. Why you need to trim your trees at the right time of year
10. Which trees require the most water?
11. Which trees require the least water?
12. What’s the best time to plant a tree?
13. The 5 fastest growing trees you might have in your yard
14. The 5 slowest growing trees you might have in your yard
15. How do they trim really tall trees?
16. What happens to a tree after you remove it?
17. Why you shouldn’t plant trees too close to your house
18. 9 fruit trees you should never plant in your yard
19. 13 trees that are more trouble than they’re worth
20. 7 trees that require next to no maintenance
21. 11 trees that require too much care
22. What soil is right for my new tree?
23. How much do I have to water my new tree?
24. What is the best time of day to trim a tree?
25. Is there a wrong way to trim a tree?
26. Is there a right way to trim a tree?
27. The 6 biggest mistakes homeowners make when trimming their own trees
28. How often should I trim my trees?
29. How much does tree care cost?
30. Why should I hire a professional tree trimmer?

Even if it’s easy to Google many of these topics, it’s all about demonstrating your expertise. Just make sure you promote these posts to your local market on Facebook if you want them to be seen.

Of course, if you decided to answer a real client’s question as a blog post, you should send it to them when you’re done. They’ll be shocked that you took the time to give them such a long, thoughtful answer, and more often than not they’ll share it was a dozen more people.

Of course, there’s another way to find readers for your blog posts…

Blog About Tree Care With a Local Twist

You’re probably not going to get much traffic from Google for any of those other topics, since they’ve already been covered by bigger sites with more SEO behind them. But try adding a local component to come up with more specific, and more useful, topics:

31. The best time to water your trees in Syracuse, New York
32. 5 fruit trees that thrive in Alameda County
33. The 3 worst pests in Little Rock that can damage your trees
34. 4 Trees that you won’t believe aren’t native to Omaha
35. How tall do the redwoods grow in Santa Cruz?
36. How much does tree care cost in Santa Barbara?
37. What’s the best time of year to trim your trees in Fall River?
38. The 6 messiest types of trees in Waukegan, IL
39. 3 types of trees that realtors in Duluth love
40. What’s the tallest tree in Lynchburg?
41. Our 4 favorite evergreen trees in Hammond, Indiana
42. 6 types of trees in Flower Mound that can survive pretty much anything
43. What’s the best time of day to trim your trees in Mount Vernon?
44. What do you call these 5 common trees in Gaithersburg?
45. 5 trees that thrive in Tucson’s heat
46. 9 non-native trees that thrive in Madison
47. The best month for planting new trees in Beaverton
48. The 7 trees that grow like weeds in Hawthorne
49. 11 trees you should NEVER plant in Kirkland
50. 3 trees that can increase your property value in St. Cloud

Will all of these topics automatically generate traffic from Google? No way. If you want to get Google traffic for all of your local tree care posts you’ll need good SEO on your site, plus some good keyword research to find topics that your can rank for. An SEO company—and espeically an SEO company that specializes in tree care SEO—can help with that.

But even without the help of an SEO company, these topics are so specific that most of them will generate at least a little bit of traffic from Google. Even if only one person each month searches for “drought tolerant trees” in San Ramon, your post on “5 trees in San Ramon that don’t need much water to thrive” could bag you a new client. Leave that blog post up for 5 years, and you could be looking at 60 new clients.

Not too shabby, right?

While we’re on that local kick…

Blog About Local Topics that Don’t Involve Tree Care

Now why would you want to do a thing like that?

Well, once you start looking at which topics have and haven’t been covered on other websites, you’ll start seeing gaps everywhere. Search for “best ice cream in Mansfield, Texas” and you’ll see a bunch of Yelp reviews—but nothing from someone who’s visited them all. Search for “the safest parks for kids in Battle Creek” and the results are pretty underwhelming.

So what makes you an expert?

The fact is, it doesn’t take much to be an expert. If you’ve visited every pizza parlor in Tulsa, congratulations. You’re now qualified to write about the best pizza parlors in Tulsa. If no one else has stepped up to create that list, that makes you the expert by default.

So why should you post that on your tree care company’s blog?

For a few reasons, actually:

• People on Facebook are 10x more likely to share local content than tree care content. Your posts will go farther, and more people will be exposed to your brand.
• If you mention businesses in your content, you can tag them when you post it to Facebook for even more sharing and good will.
• If you create a useful resource for someone who might need your services later, they’ll generaly remember it.
• It shows your interests and values outside of work, which can help you connect with clients.
• If Google sees that people are spending time on your site, clicking thorugh to other pages, and generally engaging with it, that will help your SEO for other searches, too.
• It’s easy for other local businesses and websites to link to. Local real estate bloggers love stuff like this.
• If you get more people on your blog, you’ll expose them to your tree care posts, as well as your other calls to action:

Here are just a few more ideas to get you started:

51. The best walking trails in Bedford, Texas.
52. The best pizza parlors in Stillwater
53. The 3 best places to fly a kite in Aliso Viejo
54. Where to find the freshest fish in Apopka, Florida
55. The 5 best parks for a BBQ in Stillwater, OK
56. Where to watch 4^th of July fireworks in Collin County
57. 5 kid friendly Halloween destinations near Broken Arrow
58. 9 things we love about Fresno
59. The 5 best restaurants for large families in Baltimore
60. 4 charities we love in Aurora
61. 6 quirky stores you’d be crazy to miss in Fremont
62. The best dog parks in Madison, WI
63. 11 things you didn’t know about Colorado Springs
64. The 8 most famous people from Raleigh
65. The best free events for familes in Sacramento

Really, there are only a couple of rules to this kind of blogging:

• Don’t trash talk anyone. Karma works both ways, and “the 5 worst restaurants in Dallas” doesn’t make you look like the good guy.
• Try to post content that appeals to your target market. Tree care customers are generally middle to upper class homeowners, over 30, with kids. So content like “the 6 coolest punk music venues in Alameda County” might send the wrong message, and “the 5 best hotels in Oamaha” won’t be much use for people who already live in Omaha.
• If it’s been done already, either do it better or find another topic.
• Don’t worry about writing something too specific. There’s always an audience that will appreciate “the 5 best restaurants in Tigard for people with gluten allergies,” and they will show that appreciation.
• If you build it, they won’t just come. At the absolute least, post it to Facebook and spend $10 to promote it to people who live in your market.

Blog About Your Tree Care Company

Some SEO experts will tell you not to blog about your own company, but I think that’s a huge mistake.

If you just hired a new employee, bought a new truck, are celebrating your company’s 5^th year, or just took down a huge tree, you should absolutely post that on your blog. It might not bring in new clients, but it helps show potential clients who are shopping around what kind of company you are, that you take your company seriously, and that there are also real people behind the scenes. If your customers can connect to you, your values, and your sense of humor, you’re going to have an easier time doing business with them.

Here are just a few topics that are always fair game:

66. Meet our new office dog!
67. Congrations to Krissa on her 5 year anniversary
68. Check out this huge tree we just trimmed in Miami
69. Our fleet has grown!
70. We’re proud to sponsor the 3^rd annual Honolulu Invitational Golf Tournament
71. Mark Ferris, longtime friend of our company, needs your help
72. We just trimmed our 5,000^th tree
73. Refer a new customer and get $200 off your next trimming

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