Tree surgery websites — turning photographs of the work into enquiries

Trade7 September 202612 min read

Short answer: a tree surgery website sells by removing fear, in order — that you are insured, that whoever goes up the tree is trained, that the price is a price, and that the garden will be left clean. Photographs do most of that work, and the shot that closes the job is not the felling, it is the cleared site afterwards. Publish what you cover, what you charge for, and what the customer needs permission for. Everything else on the page is decoration.

What the customer is actually deciding

Not “which tree surgeon is best”. They are deciding whether this is going to go wrong. Almost every domestic tree enquiry carries the same unspoken list:

• If it comes down on the conservatory, who pays?
• Is the person climbing actually trained, or is it a lad with a saw?
• Is that number a price, or the start of a conversation?
• What happens to the mountain of branches?
• Am I allowed to do this at all?

Every one of those is answerable in a sentence on a web page, and most tree surgery sites answer none of them. They lead with a photograph of a man in a harness, a list of services — crown reduction, deadwooding, stump grinding — and a phone number. The list is fine. It just answers a question nobody was asking.

The order the fear comes off

There is a sequence, and getting it wrong wastes the page. Insurance first, because it is the fear underneath all the others. Then competence — evidence that whoever does the climbing and cutting is qualified to. Then the tidy-up, which is the thing customers complain about afterwards more than any other. Then price mechanics. Then, last, the actual list of services, which is really just there so the right search finds the right page.

On insurance: state the cover you hold and the amount. Do not write “fully insured” — it is the phrase used by everyone including the firms that are not, so it has stopped carrying information. A figure carries information.

On competence: name what you actually hold, and nothing you do not. The Arboricultural Association runs an ARB Approved Contractor scheme for tree surgery contractors and a Registered Consultant scheme for people giving specialist opinion on tree health, safety and planning. If you are on one of those registers, say so and link to your entry, because it is checkable. If you are not, do not imply membership — a customer who checks and finds nothing has learned something worse about you than that you are unaccredited.

The photographs are doing most of the selling

This is true of every trade website and it is more true here than anywhere. A homeowner cannot assess your rigging. They can assess a photograph of a garden that looks better than it did.

What a useful job photograph actually is

Three frames per job, and the third is the one that matters:

• Before. The problem, obviously visible. An overhanging limb, a leaning trunk, a hedge swallowing a drive. Without this the after shot means nothing — the viewer has no idea what changed.
• During. Someone in the tree, roped, kitted, with the chipper and the cones and the van in shot. This is the competence photograph. It does more for you than any certificate logo, because it shows a proper operation rather than claiming one.
• After, cleared. Not the stump surrounded by brash. The finished job with the arisings gone, the drive swept and the lawn intact. This is the photograph that closes work, because the customer’s real anxiety is not felling — it is what their garden looks like at five o’clock when you have driven away.

Ten jobs shot like that beat two hundred pictures of trees. The instinct is to upload everything; resist it. A gallery of unlabelled canopies is a screensaver. Three captioned frames of one job is evidence, which is the same argument made for commercial buyers in what wins scaffolding firms a place on a tender list — different trade, identical mechanism.

Phone photographs are fine. Bad light is not

You do not need a photographer. A recent phone in daylight is genuinely sufficient, and it has an advantage commissioned photography does not: it is there on every job, so you build a library rather than a one-off shoot that ages.

What actually ruins the shots is mundane:

• Shooting into the sun, so the tree is a silhouette and the detail is gone.
• Standing too far back, so the job is a green blur in a garden.
• Photographing the after shot from a different angle to the before, which breaks the comparison the viewer is trying to make.
• Forgetting the after shot entirely, which is what happens when everyone is tired and loading the van.

The fix for the last one is a habit, not a policy: the site is not cleared until somebody has taken the photograph. Same as the tools going back on the van.

Whose garden is it

Ask before you publish. A photograph containing a recognisable house is identifiable, and people are considerably more sensitive about their home than about their sycamore. Two practical rules cover it: frame on the tree and the work rather than the property where you can, and put one line on the job sheet asking whether photographs may be used. A text message saying yes is a record. Nobody has ever objected to being asked.

The paperwork question — and why hiding it wins work

Most tree surgery sites say nothing about permissions, presumably on the theory that raising an obstacle loses the job. It does the opposite. The customer who searches “can I cut down my tree” and finds a straight answer on your site has just been helped by you rather than by a council PDF, and they were going to find out anyway.

The three regimes worth a paragraph each, all verifiable and none of them complicated to summarise:

• Tree Preservation Orders. A TPO prohibits cutting down, topping, lopping, uprooting, and wilful damage or destruction of a protected tree without written consent from the local planning authority. Consent is applied for on a standard form, and the authority can grant it, grant it with conditions, or refuse it (gov.uk guidance).
• Conservation areas. A tree in a conservation area that is not already under a TPO still needs a section 211 notice giving the authority six weeks’ notice before the work. During those six weeks the authority can decide to make a TPO. There are exceptions, and the notice period is not the same one people assume: a dead tree in a conservation area needs 5 days’ notice, while a dead tree under a TPO needs 5 working days’ prior written notice. Trees presenting an immediate risk of serious harm are treated differently again. Getting that distinction right on your own website is the sort of detail that tells a customer you actually do this for a living.
• Felling licences. In England, felling growing trees needs a licence from the Forestry Commission above a threshold: more than 5 cubic metres in any calendar quarter, of which no more than 2 cubic metres may be sold, measured on trees of 8cm over-bark diameter or more at 1.3m above ground (gov.uk guidance). Licences are free in England and issued by the Forestry Commission. Felling without one when one is required is an offence.

And the one that catches people mid-season: all wild birds, their eggs and their nests are protected, and it is an offence to intentionally take, damage or destroy a nest while it is in use or being built (gov.uk guidance). The guidance does not set statutory dates — the test is whether the nest is actually in use — so a page that says “we check for nesting birds before we start” is both accurate and reassuring, where a page confidently naming a legal season is neither.

Write these up in your own words on their own page. It is one of the few subjects where a tree firm can be genuinely more useful than every competitor in the town, and it is exactly the kind of question-shaped content that gets a business quoted by AI search.

Two businesses, one phone number

Storm work and planned work behave nothing alike, and a site that treats them as one thing under-serves both.

Emergency work is won in the first hour. Somebody has a limb on the garage roof, they search, they ring the first firm that answers. The website’s entire job is to be findable, to make the number tappable, and to say honestly whether you turn out at night and at weekends and whether there is a call-out charge. Do not advertise a response time you cannot meet — the one job you fail to reach at 2am is the one that gets written up.

Planned work — a crown reduction booked for the autumn, a garden cleared before a sale — is a considered purchase with three quotes in it. Here the customer reads. Here the photographs, the insurance figure, the tidy-up policy and the permissions page do their work. This is the traffic worth building pages for, because it arrives days before the decision rather than seconds before it.

The practical consequence is a page each rather than one page mentioning both, which is the arithmetic set out in how many pages a trade website actually needs.

This urgent-versus-planned split is not peculiar to tree work. It is the same fault line that runs through roofing, where a leak at nine at night and a re-roof booked for spring are effectively two different businesses, and through groundworks and landscaping, where the split is between a contractor pricing a package and a homeowner pricing a garden. If you recognise your own diary in any of those, the structural answer is the same one.

The enquiry worth ten domestic jobs

The domestic customer is one buyer. The other is a letting agent with forty properties, an estate or grounds manager, a facilities contractor, a housing association, a school. They have recurring work, they pay on terms, and they are not choosing on price alone — they are choosing somebody they will not have to think about again.

What that buyer wants on the page is different, and none of it is photographs:

• Company name, company number and trading address, so you can be checked.
• Public and employers’ liability cover, with the amounts stated.
• Whether you carry out risk assessments and method statements as a matter of course, because they will be asking for them.
• Who to ring, and who covers when that person is up a tree.
• Whether you can handle a schedule of properties rather than one address.

Almost no tree surgery website says any of this, which is precisely why saying it works. The same asymmetry drives how scaffolders win direct work instead of subcontracting: the commercial buyer is not being sold to, they are eliminating firms, and you win by being the one that survives elimination.

The honest limit

A website will not beat proximity. When somebody searches for a tree surgeon after a storm, Google’s local results weigh how near you are, and no amount of good writing moves your yard closer to their postcode — which is worked through properly in how to show up on Google Maps as a trade business. If most of your work is emergency call-outs within five miles, a verified Business Profile and a phone that gets answered will do more for you this month than any website will.

What the website changes is the work that is decided slowly, and the buyer who checks before they call. That is a real part of the trade, and it is the part with the better margins in it — but it is a part, not the whole, and anyone telling you a new site will fill the diary is guessing.

What we would build, and what it costs

We build the site first, from what is already public about your firm, and then show it to you. For a tree surgery business that usually means a home page, a page for the work that actually gets searched separately, a properly captioned job gallery, and a permissions page — because that last one is the page nobody else has bothered to write.

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. What we build for the trades generally is set out on the trade web design page, and if you are in the South East, the Kent page covers the local side. If you would rather find out whether a website is even your problem, the Growth Diagnostic asks five questions and will happily tell you it is not.

What we will not tell you is that this brings in work. We cannot promise you rankings, traffic or a single enquiry, and any firm that does is selling you something they do not control. What a good site does is stop you losing the jobs you were already in the running for.

Questions people also ask