A skilled climber, like SEO, takes time to develop. Photo of a JM Arbor Care job courtesy of Charlie Crawford of Peachy Shots.

We’ve all seen the company with the fancy iron that still can’t seem to dial things in. The new bucket truck with a fresh dent in the hood, the chipper with the chute mangled or the crane that sits in the shop more than the boom swings. These examples all point back to the same thing; the equipment lays the foundation, but it’s only as good as the crew that operates it.

In the last article, “Build Your Marketing Like a Tree Crew: The Equipment” (published in the August/September 2026 issue), we walked through the marketing equipment you assemble: your website, social media, the CRM and your branding. These provide the foundation that gives a company the capacity to generate and manage opportunity. But here’s the part marketing companies conveniently leave out. Equipment doesn’t run itself. A crane doesn’t set its own picks. A bucket truck doesn’t trim the tree. The right iron in the wrong hands, or with no hands at all, is just a payment sitting in the lot.

Marketing works the exact same way. You can have the cleanest website in your market and the nicest logo on every truck, but if nobody is driving traffic to it, working the local searches and bringing the right opportunities through the door, you’ve built a yard full of equipment with nobody to run it.

Owners hear words like SEO, PPC, impressions and conversion rates, and their eyes glaze over the same way a homeowner’s do when you start talking about cambium layers and vascular decline. So let’s cut the marketing speak and talk “tree guy.” In this case, the “crew” in your marketing operation is the group of channels and activities that actually operate the equipment and drive inbound work to the company. Every member has a role.

The climber: Search engine optimization

Every crew has one. The person who took years to get where they are and who gets to places on the tree no piece of equipment can reach. They weren’t hired at that level. It took time to develop the skills, and now they’re critical to the crew.

That’s SEO. You’re earning the position instead of paying for it.

SEO catches the homeowner who isn’t calling anyone yet. He searches “why are my beech leaves striped” in May, finds your dedicated beech leaf disease (BLD) page and calls you in June after doing a little more research. The leads coming off a mature site don’t cost you anything per call, and your competitor can’t outspend you to make them stop.

SEO by itself isn’t hard, but it’s long. The industry makes it sound complicated and marketing companies make it sound easy. Neither is true.

Most owners expect it to work like an 80-ton crane, ripping down a half-dozen trees by noon. SEO takes six months to a year before it starts getting substantial traction, and too often companies quit around month four because the phone didn’t ring the way they wanted. The position takes time to develop, and everyone wants the shortcut.

What you actually do about it is less complicated than it sounds. Build pages that address real problems and target keywords that match your customers’ pain points. Create a page for each service and write genuinely local service-area pages, not the same paragraph with the town name swapped. Answer the questions homeowners already ask you in the field; those are the words they type into a search bar. An FAQ built around those questions also can help you surface in AI search results. Make sure your site is fast and optimized for mobile users.

The hardest part of filling the climber position is patience. It’s the one position on your crew that pays you back for years, but the one nobody wants to wait for. Same with SEO.

Like a bucket operator, paid ads get you quickly into position for the work you want. Photo courtesy of ungvar/AdobeStock.

The bucket operator: Paid advertising

Paid ads are the opposite of the climber. You’re in position in 10 minutes and productive the same morning, with a fraction of the training the climber required. But the machine burns fuel the whole time it’s running, and the day you shut it down, you’re back on the ground.

Google Ads, Meta, local services ads – anything where you pay to be seen. You’re buying traffic for the exact services you bid on, in front of people searching for them right now. You get to choose the work. If you’d rather build a Plant Health Care program than chase stump-grinding calls, this is where you get to say so.

Paid advertising complements a well-organized website and SEO strategy, generating leads while the climber – your organic search presence – develops. Its role is to support the climber, not replace it.

Where most owners get it wrong is treating paid ads as a switch instead of a faucet. Every campaign has a learning period. Stopping and starting means you pay for that period over and over.

Set a budget and let it run for 30 days. At first, think of it as being in the data-collection business. Create separate ad groups for services such as pruning and removals, Plant Health Care and storm work, and send them to specific landing pages instead of your homepage. Make it easy for clients to book, and create unique call-tracking numbers for every ad.

When the schedule fills up, turn the dial down instead of shutting it off. The campaign keeps its history, and you’re not paying to relearn it every spring.

The crew leader, shown talking to a client, keeps the crew accountable – analytics does the same for your marketing. Photo of a JM Arbor Care job courtesy of Charlie Crawford of Peachy Shots.

The crew leader: Analytics and lead tracking

Every other position on this crew brings you work. The crew leader doesn’t bring you a single job. But he or she is the reason you know which of the others actually did

You’d never run a season on a feeling. You know what you bid, what it cost and what was left when the chips settled. But ask most owners which marketing brought in last month’s work, and you get a shrug or a guess.

What does a lead cost, and what revenue did it produce? Cost per click tells you what you paid for a visitor. Cost per lead tells you what you paid for a phone call. Neither means anything until you follow it to the invoice. A channel producing 40 leads can look like your best performer until you discover only six became jobs, while 12 website leads produced nine. Lead count is a vanity number. Booked revenue by source is the scoreboard that matters.

Where are people leaving? Your analytics show which pages people land on and how many leave without doing anything. If a service page sends most of its traffic back out the door, the traffic isn’t the problem; the page is. Same with a form nobody finishes or a phone number buried below the fold.

How many calls book, and how many estimates close? Booking rate lives in the office, and most companies have never calculated it. Run close ratio by source, too. Two channels can send the same number of leads and close at completely different rates. Fix the phone before you spend another dollar driving calls to it.

Track where every lead came from. Tag the source on every lead in the CRM so it follows the customer from first click to closed invoice.

Check it monthly. Daily numbers are noise. Yearly is too late; you’ve already spent the money.

Remember the companies that quit SEO at month four. They killed a position before it produced, because nobody was reading the numbers. The crew leader makes sure the day was worth running.

Local listings are the ground support that keeps your business visible and moving. Photo of a JM Arbor Care job courtesy of Charlie Crawford of Peachy Shots.

The ground worker: Your local listings

The climber always gets the glory, but the ground worker is the reason the job finishes to the standards of the company. He or she keeps the landing zone clear, the ropes untangled and material moving. Nobody outside the crew notices them. Every crew that’s ever run without one knows exactly what they’re worth.

That’s your local listings. Almost every company already has one. The question is whether anybody’s touched it since the day it was claimed.

Your listings catch the customer who isn’t sure who to call, has seen your trucks and wants to check you out, or has worked with you before and needs your number. It’s the highest-ROI, lowest-hanging fruit on the crew, and it costs nothing but attention.

Reply to every review, and say what you did. “Thank you for trusting us with the ash removal and stump grinding at your home in West Chester” shows a new client how you’ve helped other customers in their shoes. Reply to the bad ones, too; the next homeowner will read how you handled it.

Ask for reviews on a schedule, not in a panic. Count matters. Recency matters more. Build the ask into the close of every job so it happens whether you remember it or not.

Post about the work you want to be found for. Posts are free and indexed, and you control the words. Write them around what you want to be found for: cabling and bracing, beech-leaf disease treatment, storm-damage cleanup. Not “We love trees.”

Upload branded photos, not stock. Before and after, crew working, equipment on site. List every service you offer; a profile showing only tree removal won’t help you surface for Plant Health Care. Include accurate service areas, hours and contact information.

None of this requires a big budget. It’s the position most companies leave empty and the fastest one to fill.

Conclusion

The mistake most owners make is thinking marketing is something you buy. You can buy the equipment. The crew costs you something different.

The climber costs a year before he’s worth anything, then pays you back for the next five. The bucket operator costs money every day he runs, and he’s worth it because you get to choose the work. The crew leader costs discipline, an hour a month with numbers most owners would rather not look at. The ground worker costs nothing but attention, which is exactly why the position sits empty at most companies.

Not one of them works alone. A crew that runs well isn’t four people doing four jobs; it’s four people covering each other’s gaps. Your marketing is no different.

John Rogalsky is the owner of Rick’s Certified Arborists, an eight-year TCIA member company based in Southeastern, Pennsylvania.