Five businesses, one family name.
Here is where Google sends your customers today.

The five businesses

• Over the next few years, which ones do you want to grow, hold steady, or step back from?
• Any plans to sell off or hand off any part of it?
• Is Schmalz Acres and the Adventure Zone part of this picture?

Appleton: landscaping or garden center?

• If you could only push one harder next spring, which would it be?
• Which brings in more profit for the time it takes?
• Who are your best landscaping customers, and what job do you want more of?

How it is run today

• Are all five under the same management and the same marketing person?
• One budget or separate ones?
• Who has the logins for each Google listing and website, and who approves changes?

Capacity and leads

• Which businesses could take more work next season, and which are booked out?
• Where do new customers come from today, and how do you track it?
• Which towns do you want more work in, and where do you not want to drive?

Waterford and LawnGuard

• Does Waterford run as its own team and office?
• Does LawnGuard serve southeastern Wisconsin from Waterford today?

What you have tried

• Google shows you ran ads before. What worked and what did not?
• Who else should be part of this decision, and when would you want to start?

searches

Landscaping and garden center for the main location, landscaping for Waterford, lawn care for LawnGuard, pool builder for The Pool Team, apple orchard and pumpkin patch for Sprangers.

spots each

A 7 by 7 square about 10 miles across, centered on each shop. At every spot we recorded where you showed up in the top 20.

is what counts

Google shows three businesses on the map before anyone scrolls. Those three get most of the calls and direction requests.

You already do this once

LawnGuard has its own Google listing at the same address (Suite 100), its own name and its own category. It is your best-ranked business outside the orchard. Google allows a department to have its own listing when it serves customers as its own business with its own category.

What we would do

• Keep one listing as Schmalz Custom Landscaping, first category Landscaper
• Add Schmalz Garden Center, first category Garden center, pointing to schmalzgardencenter.com
• Give each its own phone line and its own hours
• Split the categories so each one is about one thing

One decision for you

The 120 reviews stay with the listing that keeps them. We will read them with you and keep them where most of them belong. Expect a few weeks of movement while Google sorts out the new listing; that is why we want to do it this winter, not in April.

The plan costs $30,000 a year. Even the low case covers it twice.

Revenue, not profit. One extra pool a year pays for the whole plan for two years.

Searches

Google Ads monthly search counts, October 2025 to September 2026, for Outagamie and Calumet counties (we count 75%, the people inside your map) and one sixth of Racine and Waukesha counties for Waterford. Searches that include a town name are not counted, so the real number is higher.

Clicks

A top 3 listing gets about 7% to 10% of clicks; spots 4 to 10 about 2%; spots 11 to 20 under 1% (BrightLocal and Near Media click studies). We worked it out at each of the 49 spots, from where you rank today.

Customers

10% to 15% of clicks become a call, form or direction request. 20% to 30% of project calls become a job, 35% to 42% for lawn care, about half to 70% for garden center visits.

Dollars

Landscaping: NerdWallet 2026 average about $3,650, LawnLove 2026 about $8,700. Pools: Homegrail about $40,000, 2026 cost guides about $66,000. Lawn care: Angi 2026 about $2,100 a season. Garden centers: Minnesota Grown 2018 survey of 2,505 shoppers, $251 a year at their main garden center ($84.50 a visit, 5 visits).

1. Split the main listing

Landscaping and the garden center each get their own listing, categories, phone and hours. This is the change with the biggest effect.

2. New websites

Fast on a phone, a quote form on every page, a page for each service and town, and business details Google and AI tools can read. Landscaping (with Waterford) and The Pool Team first, ready before spring.

3. Every Google listing, every week

Weekly posts, photos of real work, replies to every review within a day, review requests after each job, and the main directories filled in with matching details.

4. Measure it

We rerun these 7 searches at the same 49 spots each month and show you the before and after.