How Senior Care Organic Searches Changed due to Covid-19

senior care organic search

If you could describe 2020 in one word, what would it be? If I could choose one, it would be “adapt.” Certainly the impact of COVID-19 will be remembered as the year when the world turned upside down. It changed the way we view our lives and how we live them. The senior care industry, like many others, has been affected in major ways because of the pandemic. The need for senior care services skyrocketed seemingly overnight. 

 

Best-selling author, Louis L’Amour once said, “One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.” Fortunately, experienced digital marketers tend to be pretty adaptable. That’s a good characteristic to have during rapidly changing times such as we’ve been dealing with over the last year. 

 

Let’s take stock of how consumer behavior in the senior care space has changed over the course of the last year:

 

  • Large numbers of workers are working remotely.
  • They’re using desktops more often and relying less on mobile phones.
  • Google has caught on that the searches for COVID-19 terms are popular and they’ve changed their algorithms accordingly.
  • Consumers are concerned about safety in senior care facilities.
  • Consumers are concerned about in-home caregiver safety. 
  • Hospitals are changing their referral processes for post-hospital care in the interest of safety and hygiene. 

 

These are significant societal and technical changes that affect your digital marketing strategies. To be successful, you have to adapt your marketing practices to account for these changes. 

 

Something that hasn’t changed as much is that certain states are highly attractive places for retirees to settle down in their final season of life. Here’s the top 10 states for senior living according to the  U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2019) ranked in order from most popular to least popular:

 

  1. Maine 
  2. Florida
  3. West Virginia
  4. Vermont 
  5. Montana 
  6. Delaware 
  7. Hawaii 
  8. Pennsylvania
  9. New Hampshire 
  10. South Carolina

 

You probably thought Florida was in the lead, right? Data is one of your best friends when it comes to digital marketing strategies. Data is always changing, so be sure to do your homework. 

 

How Has COVID-19 Impacted Organic Search?

 

Hopefully, you took note of the societal changes that affect organic search in the senior care industry, and now you know which states have lots of searchers for senior care-related keywords. Let’s combine that knowledge with how Google views queries.

 

First, let’s look at how Google prioritizes content. 

 

Google prioritizes content that falls into the following three categories:

 

  • The searcher’s purpose
  • Your Money Your Life, also known as YMYL-relates to happiness, safety, health, financial security, etc. 
  • E-A-T, also commonly known as expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness

 

Can you see how Google could connect all three parameters to COVID-19? With that in mind, it makes sense to create COVID-19-related topics for SEO purposes. 

 

Let’s add one more ingredient to the recipe. Recently, Semrush collected data about organic searches for senior care. This is what they found in Maine, the leading state for senior residents with data from May 2019 to January 2020 and February through October in 2020:

 

  • Online searches for ‘in home care agencies near me’ +250.00%
  • Online searches for ‘nursing home deaths’ +225.00%
  • Online searches for ‘medicare approved home health care agencies’ +33%

 

That’s pretty eye-opening, right!

 

Here’s another surprising and sad fact. The Kaiser Foundation reports that over 100,000 long-term care residents and staff perished because of COVID-19. 

What Semrush Discovered About Recent Senior Care Queries 

I was very interested in this data because my clients have been telling me about how overwhelmed they’ve been since the onset of the pandemic. 

 

They’re dealing with a rash of new issues including:

 

  • Lack of caregivers
  • New health and safety risks
  • An inundation of need for home care
  • Fewer referrals from hospitals to nursing homes
  • Steep decrease in nursing home residents
  • Lack of access to non-essential surgeries

 

Those challenges bring the need for adapting to a whole new level.  

 

Semrush reports the most popular keywords in senior care between May 2019 and October 2020:

 

Keyword Average monthly searches
nursing homes near me 155,667
nursing homes 120,111
home health care 46,500
nursing home compare 18,911
home care 18,000
home care assistance 15,933
home care agencies 15,806
nursing home jobs 14,383

 

Take a look at the growth in search terms for senior care from Feb – Oct 2020 to May 2019 – Jan 2020:

 

  • ‘Nursing home deaths’ up by 1190.31% 
  • ‘Nursing home abuse lawyer’ rose by 262.88% 
  • ‘Care home’ increased by 66.67% 
  • ‘Caregiver support services’ up 60.48% 
  • ‘Home caregiver services’ spiked 52.78% 
  • ‘In home hospice care’ rose 45.60%

 

The data is clear that people are concerned about health and safety. 

 

The need to adapt also shows up in Semrush data related to FAQs like these:

 

  1. Does Medicare cover home health care
  2. Does medicare pay for nursing home
  3. What is home health care
  4. What is a nursing home
  5. Does Medicare cover nursing homes
  6. What is palliative care at home
  7. How much does a nursing home cost
  8. Does medicare pay for home health care
  9. What is hospice care at home
  10.  Does medicare pay for home health care
  11.  What is hospice care at home
  12.  Does medicare cover in-home care

 

Still another area of search engines that’s changed is the “People Also Ask” phrases. The most common ones I’ve seen are:

 

  • What is the average cost of senior care?
  • What is the average cost of a caregiver?
  • What are the different levels of senior care?

 

These questions highlight the concerns over the costs of senior care. The other concerns that people have are having to care for an elderly person while working remotely or homeschooling their children. According to Upwork, 1 in 4 Americans will be working remotely in 2021. That’s an 87% increase since the pandemic began. Hundreds of millions of parents chose or were forced to start homeschooling their children or switch to distance learning. 

 

The Twitter Sentiment Analysis by Semrush also shows some interesting facts about the tone related to senior care. Just under 80% of people referenced senior care using positive language. Just under 12% of people use a neutral tone, and just under 10% of people used negative language when referring to seniors as the chart below shows. 

 

Unfortunately, we’re not out of the woods with COVID-19 just yet. The concerns over senior care will continue to be with us for some time. Until things get better again, digital marketers will need to continue to adapt, adapt, and adapt some more. 

 

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How to Get Home Care Leads With Google Ads

Home care Leads with Google ads

With every search inquiry, you’re bound to get pages and pages of search results. As a business owner, your goal is to rank as high as possible so your target audience will find your home care agency and click on your website. 

 

Making your home care agency visible on the search engines is a proactive approach to acquiring home care clients, which is so important in a competitive industry like home care. The higher you can get your ads to appear in the search rankings, the more likely customers will be to choose your home care agency over a competitor, and the more home care leads you will get. 

 

Pay-per-click ads, commonly known as PPC ads, are the quickest path to building senior care leads. 

What Is Google Ads?

Google is more than a popular search engine. The platform has an advertising arm called Google Ads that also offers paid online advertising for businesses.

 

Keywords are a key ingredient in ranking high in search engine results pages (SERP). Keywords are the words or phrases that a potential client may type into the search box that would lead them to your website or one of your paid advertisements.

 

To see keywords for “home care services”  in action, let’s look at the following example:  

How to Get Home Care Leads With Google Ads

 

 

Note all the ads are right at the top of the SERP, and they look very similar to the organic search results except for those that are labeled “Ad” in bold type. The top of the search page is a great place for advertisers to be because most of the traffic will click on your ad rather than scroll down the page, much less check out the subsequent search pages.

 

While setting up Google Ads is fairly easy, getting on or near the top spot takes a bit more work because your competitors are trying to beat you to the punch to get their share of senior care leads.

 

How Google Ads Can Generate Leads for a Senior Care Business

 

Home care ads are a valuable part of your marketing plan for getting senior care leads and advertising for job seekers for caregiver positions. On either account, your goal is to promote your home care agency as the best option. Facebook Ads are also an excellent platform for recruiting caregivers. 

How to Run a Successful Google Ads Campaign for Home Care

It takes time and experience to run successful Google Ads campaigns. PPC ads and search engine optimization (SEO) work hand in hand to bring you senior leads that convert.  

 

The experts at Senior Care Clicks have years of experience marketing in the home care industry, and they know all the tips and tricks for optimizing ad campaigns that get results. 

 

Successful Google Ads strategies include:

 

  • Identifying the keywords and phrases that draw traffic volume for home care services or caregiver jobs. 
  • Using long-tail keywords and targeting terms that focus on your service area (for example, “home care in Chicago”)
  • Researching your competition’s marketing efforts
  • Maximizing ROI with weekly campaign optimization and monthly analysis and reports on progress
  • Using negative keywords to ensure your agency doesn’t appear for irrelevant keywords
  • Designing ads that correlate to the search terms that will be effective for your agency
  • Setting up campaigns that connect with your target audience
  • Creating new audiences to retarget

 

For the best results, arrange for one marketing agency to manage PPC and SEO so that the knowledge gained can be used to maximize your results. 

Types of Campaigns That Should Be Set Up to Get the Most from Google Ads 

Not all Google Ads platforms work well for the home care industry, and by relying on our expertise, you can take the guesswork out of setting up successful campaigns.

 

From our experience, the following 4 strategies yield the best results: 

 

  1. Search campaigns – Text ads on search results that appear when a user is searching online. It’s a great strategy for getting home care leads.
  2. Display campaigns – Image ads on websites expand your reach on search campaigns by increasing your visibility. 
  3. Call campaigns  – Ads display a phone number and your business hours to drive call leads by increasing call volume. 
  4. Retargeting  – A Google Ads feature that incorporates a snippet of code on your website to follow visitors so you can retarget them in new campaigns. 

Extra Tools Needed to Work Efficiently With Google Ads

 

The Google Ads platform is jam-packed with features you can leverage to run powerful advertising campaigns that will help you acquire home care clients more efficiently than traditional marketing methods.

 

The key to successful Google Ads campaigns is to use third-party tools to maximize your results for each channel. 

 

At Senior Care Clicks, we use call tracking metrics to track data. With every call, we’re identifying keywords that trigger calls, finding the best time of day to run ads, and fine-tuning locations, etc. This data is extremely helpful for optimizing ad campaigns. 

 

How can you be sure it works? Call tracking metrics also record phone calls. We can provide you with recordings and automated daily reports for quality control and follow-up. 

 

To ward off bad clicks and click fraud, we use a tool that we love called ClickGUARD. It provides a high level of security against fraudulent clicks, enabling us to protect your budget from wasted clicks. The tool monitors activity and automatically excludes suspicious IPs. What’s more, the post-click analysis can’t be beaten for gaining insight into who is visiting your website allowing you to optimize your ad campaigns to their fullest potential. 

 

Final Thoughts

 

Overall, by incorporating home care ads into your larger marketing strategy it will help your home care business reach the top of the search engine results than SEO alone because PPC gives you another touchpoint. In that way, PPC and SEO work together to keep your brand visible and accessible. This strategy is highly effective for bringing you a stream of qualified leads for home care services and qualified job applicants. 

 

We know that by investing a bit of time and money in PPC and SEO for new home care agencies or new agency websites, these strategies pay off. It takes time for Google to crawl your website and deliver organic results for search queries. Ultimately, PPC ad campaigns will take your marketing efforts to the next level. 

 

If you’re ready to give your marketing strategies a boost by learning more about how to leverage PPC ad campaigns, reach out to our experts at Senior Care Clicks without delay. Our experienced marketing team is eager to assist your home care agency to rank your website higher and target your unique audiences. We do it all within your marketing budget.

 

Give Senior Care Clicks a call today at 954-401-9058 or use our simple contact form to get your PPC ad campaigns started. In no time, you’ll be on your way to setting your home care agency apart from the competition.

 

Please check out the following case studies which should inspire you to get started with Google Ads campaigns right away! 

 

 

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