Imagine that your home care agency was located in the center of town and there were a few other home care agencies within a few blocks of your location. In making your decision for where to set up shop, you considered the amount of auto and foot traffic. You checked out your competition’s storefronts and dressed the windows with ads using keywords to draw in your target customers.
Setting up your website works much the same way. When you enter the term “home care agency” into the search engine box, you’ll see featured ads for large, well-known agencies right at the top of the page. Next, you’ll see a map with locations of high-ranking agency sites. Scroll down the page and you’ll see links to other home care agencies near you or in the location that you named in your search.
On-Page SEO for Home Health Care
It’s essential to optimize your home page so that it will rank high in search engines. In the same way, you’ll get more relevant traffic on each of your other pages when you take the time to set up the content and the HTML source code to drive traffic to each page.
On-Page SEO Elements
Review each of your pages to make sure your keywords are optimized without being overused. Here are areas to review:
- URLs
- Title tags
- body content
- image alt text
- meta descriptions
- Schema mark up
Use your strongest keywords consistently when optimizing your pages. Begin with your site’s webpage title and refine each page title and description along the same lines.
When you do a search for a home care agency, take note of the different styles and formats of the boldface titles of each listing. Most listings will have more than just the name and/or city. When Google crawls the internet it’s looking to match the search terms against the words in your page title to determine how high to rank your page.
If you’re not sure where to find your site’s page title, look for it in your HTML code. If you can’t find it, do a search for “revise (page title) and your site platform (WordPress, Wix, etc.)”. Strive for a strong, specific title and try to limit the total characters to 65-70 characters including spaces. If you are using WordPress adding a plugin such as Yoast will make it easy for you to add and optimize the On-Page elements.
For example, a keyword strong title of your homepage could be something like:
Your page description is called the meta description and it will appear right under the title in the search results. Be aware that your meta description won’t be taken into account for your webpage ranking, but it gives your prospects a quick glimpse of what you do. That’s a key point because it may trigger them to click on the link to your site. It’s a no-cost way to advertise your site. You’ll have the best luck with it when you can keep your character count under 160.
Use the Right Keywords for Home Health Care
To find the right keywords to optimize your pages, start building a list of keywords that you can choose from. Here are some ideas for how to get it started:
- Words your prospects are likely to type into the search box
- Words based on your expert knowledge of the industry
- Types of care
- Illnesses or conditions that benefit from home care
- Local or community names
Once you have a basic list, you can use digital tools to check your list which might give you some additional keyword ideas. The following three tools are some of the favorites:
- Keyword Planner by Google-gives you the search volume for the keywords you want to rank for. It also gives you the prices of suggested bids which come in handy if you want to run Google ads in the future.
- SEMrush-provides huge amount of data on keyword, competitors, paid ads( keywords), content marketing( keyword ideas)
- Ahrefs-gives you instant data on new keywords earned, lost keywords, keywords movement, competitors keywords.
Home Care Content Marketing
So many socioeconomic changes are happening in the world right now that it’s creating lots of new opportunities for home care agencies. Think shareworthy and variety when choosing content that will grab your prospect’s attention and keep it.
Vary your content to keep it interesting with formats like:
- Short videos
- interviews
- Blog articles
- Site and facility tours
- Infographics with statistics
- Guides
- Podcast series
- Case Studies
By creating content using a variety of formats, you can often repurpose it in other ways, as needed. Another tip that I find to be very effective is to touch base with the sales team after publishing new content because it often generates new questions. I can then take those questions and incorporate the answers to improve my content even further.
Claim Your Local Business Directory Listings
Don’t neglect the “local” search rankings. It’s not worth your time, effort, or money to attract national traffic if your staff only travels a 25-mile radius.
All the major search engine platforms have their own online maps to match up with your business listing. For your business to appear on each search engine, you have to claim your listing on their site.
Local search is a powerful tool, so take the time to update your business listing as completely as possible, including your hours of operation and photos. The more information each map app has, the higher your home care agency will rank in local search.
Use this link to see your local search status. Work toward achieving a score of 60 and the higher you can drive it up, the more visible your company will be. This is also a good place to check out your competition’s visibility.
Google maps are essential because it creates citations (an online mention of your company’s name, address, and phone number) on other websites like:
- Merchant circle
- Angel list
- Yellow pages
- Bing
Add Reviews to Solidify Your Credibility
Prospects for home care agencies rely heavily on reviews and testimonials due to the personal nature of the business. Reviews give you an opportunity to boost your brand’s reputation and protect it by quickly answering negative comments.
The Importance of technical SEO
You don’t have to be a developer to design a well-optimized website, but you should have a good understanding of how websites work, how search engines view websites, and how your visitors interact with your website.
Build the Backlinks for Your Website
Backlinks provide an easy way to drive traffic to your website. Any other site that links to your site creates a backlink for you. Continuously build your backlinks from guides and other sources.
Final Thoughts for SEO Best Practices
The demand for home care services has never been greater. Prospects should be able to find you within seconds using any mobile device. A good SEO strategy can help you make that happen. Your Google ranking is akin to taking out a full-page ad in the yellow pages without the enormous cost. Today, you have the benefit of flexibility and control to modify your SEO strategy as the home care industry evolves without having to print a bulky paper directory.
If you need help to implement the right SEO for Home Care Strategy, Contact us we can do it for you!
Karina has spent most of her career working in the senior care industry, mostly as a digital marketing manager for home care and nursing home facilities. With 8+ years of hands-on experience in digital marketing to her credit, Karina also worked as a consultant for senior care businesses. As someone who cares deeply for seniors and has expert skills in digital marketing, Karina founded SeniorCareClicks to fulfill her passion for her permanent career.
Karina and SeniorCareClicks have been featured in Home Health Care News, HomeCare Magazine, Forbes, The Nursing Home Podcast, and other media. Karina is “the premier expert in senior care marketing”!
