Groundworks and landscaping websites — showing the work properly

Trade7 September 202612 min read

Short answer: groundworks and landscaping are two businesses with two buyers, and the mistake is putting them on one page. A contractor is buying capability, sequence, plant and the confidence that you will not hold up the programme. A homeowner is buying a finished garden and worrying about three weeks of mud. Split the site so each reaches its own path in one click, and accept the hard part: in groundworks the finished job is buried, so the sequence photographs are the portfolio, not the tidy shot at the end.

Two trades wearing one name

Plenty of firms genuinely do both. The digger that strips a site for a housing plot on Monday is levelling a back garden on Thursday, and the same three people are on both jobs. Commercially, though, these are separate businesses with almost nothing in common except the machine.

Groundworks sells to contractors and developers. The buyer is a contracts manager, a site manager or a buyer pricing a package, and they are not being inspired. They are reducing risk. Every question your site leaves unanswered is a phone call they were not planning to make, and there are four other firms on the list.

Landscaping sells to homeowners. The buyer is imagining sitting outside next summer, and simultaneously dreading what their drive will look like in week two. They are buying an outcome and a period of disruption, in that order.

Put both on one home page and you get the standard result: a hero photograph of a patio, a paragraph mentioning “domestic and commercial”, and a service list running from drainage and muck-away to planting schemes. The contracts manager sees a gardening firm. The homeowner sees a plant hire outfit. Neither rings.

What the contractor is checking

This reader has a short, consistent list, and it is worth writing your site against it directly.

• Are you real and solvent? Company name, company number, trading address, how long you have been going. Its absence is noticed.
• Are you covered, and for enough? Public and employers’ liability with the amounts stated, because a minimum is frequently specified and a firm that does not publish its cover creates an email that need not have existed.
• What can you actually do? Not “groundworks”. Reduced dig, muck-away, foundations, drainage and connections, service ducting, sub-base and formation levels, kerbing, slab preparation, external works and hard landscaping to finish. The specific words matter, because they are the words the enquiry is written in.
• What plant do you have? Owned and hired, by size. A contracts manager reads a plant list as a statement about what you can self-deliver and what you will be waiting on somebody else for.
• How do you handle sequence and access? This is the differentiator nobody writes about. Groundworks is the trade most likely to be blamed for a late programme. A paragraph on how you plan around other trades, restricted access, working next to a live site, and what you do when the ground turns out to be different from the survey is worth more than any gallery.
• Cards and paperwork. Whether your operatives hold CSCS cards, whether you produce risk assessments and method statements as standard, and who your point of contact is. Say it plainly and it stops being a question.
• Have you done this size before? Not client names — type, value band, duration, complexity. “Eleven-plot residential site, foundations and drainage, nine weeks” tells that reader more than a logo wall does.

That list will look familiar to anyone who has read what wins scaffolding firms a place on a tender list, because the mechanism is identical: the commercial buyer is not being sold to, they are eliminating firms, and you win by being the one that survives elimination.

What the homeowner is checking

Almost none of the above. The domestic list is shorter and much more emotional, and it runs roughly like this.

What will it look like? Before-and-after photographs, taken from the same spot, of gardens that look like theirs. Not a Chelsea show garden. A rectangle behind a semi.

How long will I be living in a building site? The single question most landscaping sites refuse to answer, and answering it honestly is a genuine advantage. Say what week one looks like, when the machines leave, and at what point it starts to resemble a garden.

What happens to my drive? They have seen a neighbour’s block paving after a digger tracked over it for a fortnight. Say how you protect access, where the skip or grab goes, and who reinstates what.

What is planted, and what happens after you leave? Aftercare is the cheapest trust you will ever buy. What needs watering, when the turf can be walked on, what you come back to check, and what is covered if something fails.

How is this priced? Not a number — you cannot publish one honestly for a garden any more than for a foundation. What you can publish is the mechanics: what is fixed, what is provisional, what happens if you find concrete two feet down, whether materials are at cost or included, and what a deposit is for.

Splitting the site so nobody has to guess

The fix is structural and it is not complicated: two clearly labelled routes visible from the first screen, each leading to a section written for one reader only.

The home page can carry both — it has to, because both audiences arrive there — but it should do so as a fork rather than a blend. Two headings, two short paragraphs, two links. “Groundworks for contractors and developers” and “Garden design and landscaping for homeowners” beat any amount of clever wording that tries to cover both, because the reader self-selects in about a second and stops evaluating whether you are for them.

Underneath, each route needs its own pages: separate service pages, separate project examples, separate language. That is more pages than a single-audience trade needs, which is exactly why this trade sits awkwardly in the cheapest website bands — the arithmetic is worked through in how many pages a trade website actually needs and priced in what a tradesman’s website should cost.

Areas matter on the domestic side and matter less on the commercial one. A homeowner searches with a town in the query; a contracts manager usually does not. So write the towns out on the landscaping route, and state a working radius on the groundworks one. How local search actually decides who gets shown is covered in how local search decides who gets the call.

The photograph problem: the finished job is invisible

Landscaping is easy to photograph and groundworks is nearly impossible, because everything you were paid for is under something else. The slab is poured over your drainage. The tarmac is laid over your sub-base. The only thing left to photograph is somebody else’s finished building.

Which is why, for groundworks, the sequence is the portfolio. Four or five frames per job, captioned, telling the story of what you did before it disappeared:

• The site as you found it — the strip, the levels, the mess.
• The dig, with the machine in frame for scale. This is the capability photograph.
• The part that will never be seen again: the drainage runs laid out, the ducting, the formation level, the compacted sub-base. Photograph it before it goes.
• The handover state — a clean, level, accurate platform ready for the next trade. That, not the finished building, is your product.

Caption them with what the reader cannot see: the depth, the fall, the material, how long it took. A photograph of a trench means nothing. A photograph of a trench captioned “110mm foul run to invert, eleven plots, laid and tested in four days” means a great deal to the one person you are trying to reach.

On the landscaping side the rules are the ordinary ones and most firms still get them wrong: shoot the after from the same spot as the before, include the ugly middle stage, and stop uploading everything. Ten complete jobs shot properly beat two hundred patios. The same argument, in the trade where it does the most work, is in how tree surgery firms turn photographs of the work into enquiries, and the domestic version of the tidy-up shot is argued in what turns a look at a roofing website into a phone call.

Front gardens, drainage and the question homeowners now ask

Domestic paving and driveway enquiries increasingly arrive with a drainage question attached, and most contractors answer it badly or not at all. It is worth a page, because it is checkable, it is genuinely useful, and the customer was going to look it up anyway.

The position in England, as set out by the Planning Portal, is more specific than most people realise. You will not need planning permission for a new or replacement driveway of any size if it uses permeable or porous surfacing — gravel, permeable block paving, porous asphalt — or if the rainwater is directed to a lawn or border to drain naturally. If the area is more than five square metres and you lay a traditional impermeable surface that does not drain to a permeable area, planning permission is needed. There is fuller government guidance on the permeable surfacing of front gardens behind it. Worth adding, because customers do not know it: a dropped kerb needs a separate application to the local authority, and driving over the pavement without one is not allowed.

Two caveats to write into the page honestly. Those permitted development allowances apply to houses, not flats or maisonettes, and can be removed locally by an article 4 direction or a planning condition — so the page should tell the reader to check with their own local authority rather than take your word for it. And the policy in Wales may differ. A page that is careful about its own limits reads as more authoritative, not less.

Where the muck goes

On both sides of this business, someone is quietly wondering what happens to the material leaving their property — the spoil, the broken-out concrete, the old slabs, the arisings. Saying so plainly is a small paragraph that does a lot of work.

There is a real duty behind it. A business that transports waste must be registered as a waste carrier, broker or dealer, and you can get an unlimited fine if you do not register. Registration is usually free if you only transport waste you produce yourself, and costs £191.02 otherwise. Anyone can check a firm on the Environment Agency’s public register of waste carriers and brokers. If you are registered, put the number on the site — it is checkable, almost nobody publishes it, and for a housing association or a letting agent it removes a question entirely.

Why “no job too small” costs work at both ends

It is on half the sites in this trade and it is doing damage in both directions.

The contracts manager reads it as evidence that you are a one-van outfit who will be busy repointing a wall when the programme needs a digger on site Monday. The homeowner reads it as a firm with no particular expertise in anything, which makes price the only remaining basis for choosing.

The braver and more profitable move is to say what you are for. “We take on external works packages from ten to two hundred thousand pounds” is a sentence that loses you the enquiries you did not want and wins you the ones you did. Same on the domestic side: “full garden rebuilds, typically four to six weeks on site” filters harder and better than any qualifying phone call. Being specific costs you volume and improves the mix, and the mix is what pays.

What we would build, and what it costs

We build the site first, from what is already public about your firm, and show it to you finished — so you are looking at the actual thing rather than a proposal for it. For a firm doing both trades, that usually means a home page that forks cleanly, a short set of pages for the contractor route written in the words a contracts manager uses, a longer set for the domestic route with the before-and-afters and the aftercare page, the towns you cover, and a permissions page on front gardens and drainage that your competitors have not written.

The prices are published in full on the pricing section: £700 to build then £65 a month for a sole trader up to five pages, £1,500 then £145 for ten, £3,000 then £295 for twenty, all excluding VAT. The build fee is up front, the monthly starts by Direct Debit at go-live, and the domain is registered in your name. If you are in the South East, the Kent page covers the local side, and if you would rather establish whether a website is even your problem first, the Growth Diagnostic asks five questions and is quite willing to tell you it is not.

The honest limit: a website will not win you a package. Groundworks is bought on relationships, on being known to a contracts manager, and on the last job going well — and no page we write changes any of that. What a properly split site does is make sure that when somebody who has heard your name goes to check you, they find a firm that looks capable of the work they were about to offer you. That is a real thing, and it is also all it is.

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