How to Grow a Home Care Agency: Get More Clients and Hire Qualified Caregivers

As a home care agency, your clients and your caregivers are your livelihood. You play a valuable role in their lives, as well as the lives of their families.

The baby boomer generation is now entering their golden years. Due to aging, many of them need help at home today. While baby boomers aren’t necessarily known for their expertise with technology and social media, many of those that love and care about them have greater familiarity with it. That’s an important consideration when you consider the source of your referrals as you use digital marketing and social media as a means for how to grow a home care agency.

Facebook and other social media platforms are highly popular places where people hang out online. By establishing a strong presence on social media, you’ll quickly learn how to acquire new clients and how to hire caregivers using this medium.

SEO for home care is your ticket to using your company website pages as a hub to acquire leads, get reviews that lead to referrals, and hire caregivers. Your website is live 24/7 and it can be a hive of activity even when you’re sleeping.

How Can SEO Help Your Home Care Business?

To understand the benefits of SEO as you develop your marketing plan for how to grow a home care agency, do an online search for “home care agency.”

Here’s what you’ll find:

·   Large featured ads for well-established home care agencies

·   A map with locations of high-ranking home care agency websites

·   Links to other home care agencies  (much lower on the page)

The question you should be asking yourself is, “What can I do to get my home care agency’s website at the top of the page?”

The beauty of SEO is that you can appear at the top of the page even if you’re not an industry leader in home care when you use the right SEO digital marketing strategy.

What does the right strategy consist of?

·   Backlinks

·   Valuable Content

·   Schema markups ( advanced SEO)

·   Establishing a local online presence

·   Reviews

·   Video

·   Social Media 

All of these digital marketing strategies work individually and together to get Google’s attention and prompt them to rank your site higher on a SERP, which refers to a search engine results page. These SEO strategies will increase organic traffic to your website.

What Is On-Page SEO?

There are distinct ways to improve your company’s web pages to attract prospects and new caregiver hires directly to your website. These enhancements are called on-page SEO strategies.

On-page SEO is in contrast to off-page SEO which refers to guiding people to view your website from the backlinks from other online sources like other commercial or personal websites and social media platforms.

Caregiving is a highly personal and sensitive issue for many people, and they’re bound to do multiple online searches in their quest to find home care services. The question is, “Will they find your home care agency?”

Use Keywords to Boost Your SEO

As you’re searching for the information you need on the internet, you don’t consciously think about the word “keyword.” Yet, you’re putting keywords into the search box every time you need to look up something on the web.

In fact, you probably searched using the words “how to grow a home care agency” and you found this article.

When your prospects are searching online, they’re using keywords for:

·   Names of local cities near your agency

·   Types of care

·   Conditions or illnesses that typically benefit from home care

·   Home care services, home health care services, in-home care agency, caregivers, and other variations.

Your prospects are relying on your knowledge and expertise in the home care industry. The more of that you share online, the more likely they’ll be to choose your website over another one.

Write Great Page’s Title/Description

Here’s a little-known digital marketing secret. The key to using keywords is to use them consistently throughout your marketing plan. The title and description of your webpage is a good place to start.

If you looked closely enough when you did the online search for “home care agency” as noted earlier, you noticed that companies used various styles and formats for their listings. The most effective listings will include one or more of the following things:

·   A city in the title

·   An adjective

·   A qualifier

·   A descriptive phrase

Think of each word in your page title as a keyword.

Publish Fresh Home Care Content Often

Another essential SEO tip is to publish home care content often and make sure it’s quality content. Google gives high priority to relevant content that is of high quality.

Here are some tips for how to do it well:

·   Diversify your content with video, blogs, infographics, social media posts, etc.

·   Add a relevant meta description to all your visual media formats.

·   Add new content to different pages or sections of pages on your website

·   Publish existing content in other formats (turn a blog article into an infographic)

·   Publish one piece of content per day (once a week at a minimum)

By following these tips, search engine crawlers will lead prospects to your door.

Acquire Backlinks to Boost Your Online Presence

Backlinks are mutually beneficial. Let’s qualify that by saying, they’re beneficial to your home care agency when they originate from a quality web page. The number and quality of backlinks to your site have a major bearing on whether Google sends you organic traffic. Partner with them by offering to link to their site as well.

Where will you find quality backlinks? Here are some viable sources:

·   Healthcare facilities

·   Local nonprofits

·   Well-ranked companies within your industry

·   Independent care managers

·   Other industry professionals that refer people to home care services

An easy way to do this is to add a list of trusted local resources for families exploring home care services on one of your web pages.

The Importance of Online Local Presence

Go local is a common modern phrase, and it also ranks high in importance for establishing a strong local presence online.

Again, if you’re detail-oriented, you’ll notice that Google My Business listings appear at the top of the search results. That’s a strong indication that you need to claim and set up your Google My Business page and do it correctly. It’s free and easy, so there’s no reasonable excuse for not doing it.

Here’s how:

·   Search for your home care agency online using Google Maps

·   Click on “manage this page” on the bottom right

·   Sign into a Google account

·   Start adding details, business hours, photos, links, and videos

Newer agencies may not find their businesses on maps, but you can set one up by going to google.com/places and click on the “get started for free” button.

Advanced SEO Will Put Your Website in Front of Potential Clients

With an aging baby boomer generation and people needing home care due to the pandemic, the competition for home care is profound. In addition to general SEO practices, E-A-T and schema markups are advanced SEO strategies that get results.

What Is E-A-T SEO?

Despite its acronym, E-A-T has more to do with feeding organic traffic to your website than food. E-A-T refers to Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines emphasize the importance of demonstrating quality on and off your website to increase your ranking. A simple way to do create credibility using E-A-T strategies is to write a concise profile of an expert from the site that your backlink originates from. Referring to an admin isn’t authoritative enough on its own.

What Is Schema Markup?

Schema markup refers to code that you use to tag your content to help search engines narrow in on the sites they’re looking for.

This example depicts what schema markup looks like here an example of FAQ schema markup and how it looks on Google.

Use Local Business Directories to Boost Local Presence

To prevent giving your prospects the runaround, keep a spreadsheet of all the places your business contact information appears online, complete with usernames and login information, and keep it current.

Here are the 20 most popular Business Listing websites:

1. Google
2. Bing
3. Yahoo!
4. Yelp
5. Facebook
6. Better Business Bureau
7. Angie’s List
8. Merchant Circle
9. LinkedIn
10. YP.com
11. Whitepages
12. Superpages.com
13. Yellow Book
14. CitySearch
15. MapQuest/Yext
16. Local.com
17. Foursquare
18. CitySlick
19. USDirectory.com
20. Dex Media

Place priority on “local search rankings” over “general page rankings.”

Reputation Management: Don’t Forget to Collect Reviews

As you become more in tune with how to grow a home care agency, don’t overlook the importance of managing your online reputation. Prospects that find your agency through referrals are likely to take the extra step of checking out your reputation online and they’re bound to make reviews their first stop.

Reputation management for home care will help you highlight positive reviews and avoid bad reviews that can destroy your online presence and your agency.

Social Media to Enhance Your Home Care Brand

Your future clients come from your community, and the best place to find them is on social media. Take a look at these recent statistics:

·   4.54 billion people use the internet worldwide (up 298 million from January 2019)

·   3.8 billion people use social media the world over as of January 2020 (321 million more than 2019)

·   YouTube and Facebook top the list of the most popular social media platforms

Video Marketing as part of your marketing mix

Videos are particularly important for marketing plans for home care agencies due to the personal nature of caregiving. Videos will draw people in because it helps them envision the type of care they can expect if they contract with your agency. Video storytelling makes your promotions believable.

Creating videos is also a good way to multipurpose your content. Here are a few ways to put them to use:

·   Display videos on your website

·   Post videos on social media

·   Add videos to your Google My Business page

·   Include videos on your e-newsletters

How to Acquire Qualified Leads

To be successful in developing an overall plan for how to grow a home care agency, it’s critical to heed the following tips for successful SEO strategy for home care agencies:

·   Use your keywords consistently

·   Post on social media regularly

·   Add some type of content to your blog daily

·   Bolster the content on your Google My Business page

·   References to experts in the industry boost your credibility (especially if they have 20 years’ experience or longer)

The more online visibility you give your agency by using different digital marketing channels, the better chance you have of being seen as a trusted authority within the industry of home care.  

I Need Caregivers! How I Can Find Them?

The boom in the home care industry has also led to a scarcity of caregivers. According to Home Health Care News, the turnover rate for caregivers in the home care industry has plummeted to 64.3% in 2019 after it reached a high in 2018. The findings stem from the 11^th edition of the annual Home Care Benchmarking Study which also reports on other industry trends.

You can easily extend your digital marketing efforts to recruiting highly qualified caregivers. There are lots of digital and non-digital options for acquiring caregivers. With our many years of experience in the senior home care industry, we’ve discovered the following methods to be the most successful for acquiring top talent in senior caregiving:

·   Social media paid ads (i.e. Facebook employment ads)

·   Google PPC ads

·   Email marketing along with a referral program

·   Promoting an in-house event online

Here’s the best news of all. You don’t have to do it alone. Senior Care Clicks can help you to grow your home care agency through digital marketing. We work exclusively with those who care for the elderly and their families. You need a digital marketing expert like us that knows the senior care industry inside and out. We have the hands-on expertise on how to implement SEO to increase online visibility for your brand and increase the stream of organic traffic to your website.

Call us now at (954) 401-9058 or contact us today to learn more