A letter for Star Paddock · Star Tree Service · Gig Harbor, Washington
That gap has nothing to do with the quality of your work — and everything to do with wiring. I measured all of it. This page is the read-out.
Read the letterHello Star,
You’ve been looking for marketing help. Before you hire anyone — including me — I thought you should see what I found when I looked at Star Tree Service the way Google sees it.
So I did the homework first, on my own time. I crawled your website page by page, pulled every review you’ve ever received, checked all the major directories for your listing, mapped who ranks for tree work across your whole service area — Gig Harbor, Tacoma, Lakewood, University Place, Bremerton, Port Orchard, Fox Island, Purdy — and measured how much of that search traffic reaches you today.
The short version: your business is in better shape than almost anyone competing against you. Your digital footprint is what’s misconfigured — and that is a much easier problem to have.
You read stumps for a living, so I drew your Google reviews the way you’d read a tree: one ring for every year, starting from your first review at the center. The more reviews a year brought, the wider its ring — good growth years, just like good rain years.
This is the exact profile Google’s map results are built to reward. It can’t be bought, rushed, or faked — it only comes from answering the phone and doing the job right for eight straight years. Every competitor of yours would trade for it.
One thing to keep straight: Google shows two scoreboards — the map results, where your 165 reviews already win you real ground close to home (the grid scan in Part Three proves it), and the regular web results, where your website plays alone. Everything below is about the second one — and it’s why the map strength hasn’t carried past Gig Harbor yet, and why the web results haven’t started sending you traffic yet.
Your website ranks for six searches in total — and three of those are other companies’ names: a namesake in Erie, Pennsylvania, "Saars Tree Service," and "Starwood Tree." Searchers looking for those companies see you; neighbors looking for tree work don’t find you yet. Give Google pages that name the work you actually do, and that starts to change.
MEASURED · ranked-keyword index, July 22 · 6 keywords · ≈2 visits/moFor "gig harbor tree removal" — a search happening about 50 times a month in your own backyard — you appear at position 15. Almost no one scrolls to page two — but it’s a short climb, and today those calls go past you instead of to you.
MEASURED · best organic position #15 · "gig harbor tree removal" · vol. 50/moThe main headline on all four pages of your site is identical: "STAR TREE SERVICE LLC." No page tells Google it’s about tree removal, pruning, or stump removal — so Google has to guess. Name the service in each page’s headline and it won’t have to.
MEASURED · identical H1 on 4 of 4 pagesYour Wix template draws its navigation with a technique search crawlers can’t follow. To Google, your site reads as four pages that each stand on their own, with no paths between them. Wire the navigation so Google can follow it, and the pages start lifting each other.
MEASURED · 0 crawlable internal links found on any page253-853-TREE appears only on the homepage. The tree-removal, pruning, and stump pages — the pages someone lands on when they need you — have no phone number in the text Google reads. Add 253-853-TREE to each and the call is one tap away wherever someone lands.
MEASURED · phone present on 1 of 5 pagesBoth startreeservice.net and startreeservice.com are live, separate sites — same name, same 253-853-TREE — and each one tells Google it is the real Star Tree Service. And here’s the opening: they’re not even the same site. The .com is the one with your gallery, your pricing page, your about page, even online booking. The .net — the one your Google listing sends everyone to — has none of that. The full picture is just below.
MEASURED LIVE · both domains 200 OK, each declaring itself canonical · .com carries /gallery /pricing /about-us /book-online · GBP links .netOf the twenty places a home-services business should be listed — Bing, Apple Maps, Angi, Thumbtack, Houzz, and so on — you’re already present in seven. The other thirteen have an open seat waiting, and your BuildZoom profile, with its 94 score, is one claim away.
MEASURED · 7 of 20 core citations present · BuildZoom unclaimedPhotographed live, the same evening. Two different sites, one company. The right-hand one — with the gallery, pricing, and online booking — is the one Google is never told about.
What this costs you: every link, mention, and ounce of brand credit your name earns gets split between two half-sites — in a search-results page already crowded with namesakes from Erie, Pennsylvania and Wyoming trying to claim “Star Tree Service.” And the customers who do reach the .net never see the proof — the job photos, the pricing, the booking button — because it all lives on the other one. The fix is a day-one move: pick one home, point the other at it permanently, and merge the best of both. Nothing is lost; the signal doubles.
Every page that exists on startreeservice.net — the site your Google listing sends people to. All five. A tree-service site competing across eight cities is carrying 1,467 words in total, less than this letter.
| Page | Words | What I found |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage | 432 | 4 of 7 images unlabeled for Google · ~8-second full load |
| /tree-pruning/ | 517 | the only page with real depth — still no phone number, 4 of 5 images unlabeled |
| /tree-removal/ | 264 | thin · no phone number · 4 of 5 images unlabeled |
| /stump-removal/ | 215 | thin · no phone number · slowest page measured |
| /under-construvtion/ | 39 | a live, half-finished stub — with a typo in its address — visible to Google right now |
MEASURED · 5 pages · 15 of 23 images with no description Google can read · structured data on 0 pages · not one page names a city in its headline
The gaps matter more than the pages. Things a customer — or Google — cannot find anywhere on your website:
The website isn’t bad. It’s silent. Those are different problems — and silence is fixable.
Three pieces of work are already in motion for Star Tree Service — prepared on spec, before any conversation. All three are finished and live. Here’s each one.
Ten searches, measured at 781 points across the peninsula and both sides of the Narrows — showing exactly where you appear on the map today, and who’s winning every block you don’t. The scan is done. Here are three of the ten keywords.
“TREE SERVICE” — № 4 of 611 businesses ↗
“TREE REMOVAL” — № 2 of 600. Second on the whole map. ↗
“ARBORIST” — № 6 of 326 ↗
GREEN = TOP THREE AT THAT POINT · TAP ANY MAP TO OPEN THE LIVE SCOREBOARD
Open the live grid — all ten keywordsA fast, correctly-wired site — a page for every service and every city you serve, your reviews doing the talking, your phone number everywhere it should be, and everything the old sites are missing. Designed for you, not from a template. It’s built and live right now.
THE NEW STARTREESERVICE SITE — HOMEPAGE ↗ TAP TO OPEN IT LIVE
Visit the live site
Google profile posts, Facebook, seasonal storm-work pieces, review responses — a steady cadence produced for you, so the channels stay alive without you touching a keyboard. The first set is written and ready to see.
ONE OF EIGHT READY-TO-PUBLISH POSTS ↗ TAP TO SEE THE WHOLE SET
See the content set
Rankings can be rebuilt in a season. Roots can’t. You already have the hard part.
Fifteen years of referral work and eight years of monthly five-star reviews are a moat no competitor’s ad budget can cross. Once the wiring matches the reputation, the search results tilt your way — and keep tilting, month after month. I know being the biggest isn’t the goal. This is simpler than that: when a neighbor searches for tree work, they should find the person they’d have called anyway.
Star — you built the reputation. All that’s left is to point it at the search results.
If you’d like the full walk-through — the grid maps, the site design, the numbers behind every finding on this page — reply and I’ll set up a call. Thirty minutes, no obligation, and you keep the diagnosis either way.