What is SEO for homecare agencies?
Search engine optimization
search engine optimization
is a marketing strategy that helps your home care agency’s website rank on Google. Online visibility is important for any industry, and home care agencies are no exception. By ranking in Google with SEO, you’ll create organic traffic and attract potential customers and caregivers to your home care agency.
Attract potential customers with home care referrals
90% of families search for their local homecare agencies online. This means that SEO is not only necessary, but extremely important if you want your ideal customers to find your website when they perform a
search on Google
. Thanks to SEO, you can rank on the first page of search results, where most future clicks and conversions take place.
Attract potential caregivers with home care referrals
SEO for your home care agency is not only a good idea for attracting customers, it’s also a key marketing channel for acquiring caregivers. Just as potential customers search online for home care agency services, potential caregivers search online for home care agency jobs.
SEO can help you
optimize your page
for the exact keywords that potential caregivers would search for.
Now that you understand what SEO is and why it’s important, you need to understand how it works. Below, we include five tips for home care companies ready to pursue SEO.
How SEO works: 5 tips for home care companies
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Know your target customers
The
ranking on Google
is only half the battle when it comes to SEO. Once someone finds your website and accesses a page, your home care agency’s content should be targeted to their needs and problems.
Well-written, relevant content is ultimately what turns visitors into customers. It doesn’t matter if people find your website. If they feel your service isn’t targeted to their home care needs, they won’t convert. Therefore, all your content must be tailored to your customers.
One way to write content optimized for your ideal customers is to develop personas.
Developing Personas helps you target your market with precision
Personas are fictional characters designed to represent your ideal customers. These traits need to be mapped with qualitative information such as age, gender, work, interests, pain points, etc. Developing personas helps you target your market because it takes an abstract idea and makes it concrete.
Instead of targeting the idea of a customer, personas allow you to target a very specific person with very specific needs who closely matches your ideal customers.
Common personalities for the homecare sector include the elderly, adult children who make decisions for the elderly, and referral sources such as social workers or doctors.
When creating personas, be sure to create several if you feel that one persona doesn’t capture your diverse customer base. It’s important to have each type of customer mapped to ensure that content is specifically optimized for their unique needs.
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Know your target keywords for the home care industry
While most people use Google to find home care agencies, they usually don’t know what to look for when they do. This makes it hard to know which keywords to target. Your ideal customers could be looking for everything from caregivers and babysitters to home care agencies and home health care companies.
By doing some research, you can find the best keywords for home care agencies. This will enable you to optimize your pages and be found for the most relevant keyword sought by your audience.
Keyword research basics
You know that
keywords
surrounding home care agencies are complicated and require more in-depth research, but what is keyword research? Keyword research for home care businesses is the process of identifying popular search terms that people enter into Google to find home care services.
Many tools can be used to perform keyword research, such as Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs, to name but a few. However, if you don’t have the money to spend on these tools or don’t know how to use them, you can also perform a keyword search directly in Google.
Start typing your main keyword and use Google’s automatic suggestion to see what Google thinks you’re looking for. Google may suggest these keywords because other people are also searching for them. This way, you can start connecting all the different types of keywords to see which one appears in Google’s automatic suggestion.
That’s just the basics of keyword research. There are many layers and strategies to finding the right keywords for your home care agency.
Home health keywords
As mentioned above, the most common keywords surrounding the home care industry include caregivers, babysitters, home care agencies and home health care companies. When we carried out our own keyword research, we discovered that the keyword “caregivers” is the most frequently searched for. However, Google’s first page is about the work itself, not the actual services displayed. This means that the keyword “caregivers” is not the right keyword you should be using to optimize your home care agency.
Taking our keyword research a step further, we discovered that home care agencies and home health care services both show opportunities to rank on the first page.
Keywords for elderly care
When it comes to senior care keywords, we’ve found that home care for seniors and home health care for seniors are good opportunities for your agency to target.
While we’ve discovered some great keywords to target, it’s still important to know that there isn’t just one way to refer to the home care industry. This means optimizing for a wide range of keywords from “home care agency” to “home health care for the elderly”. This ensures that when people try to search for home care services, you’ll be ranked, no matter what they log into Google.
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Optimizing on-site and off-site SEO for home care companies
SEO covers a wide range of strategies and objectives. It’s more than just keyword research. When it comes to your home care business, it’s important to cover all the bases. This means using both on-site and off-site SEO.
On-site referencing
SEO that takes place on your website and on specific pages is known as on-site SEO. This includes content, meta descriptions, title tags and internal links. Below, we’ll describe how you can use each of these elements to optimize your home care agency’s website.
How Google crawls your website
Before getting into the basics of on-site SEO, it’s important to understand how Google crawls your website. If Google doesn’t crawl your website, all your on-site SEO efforts will be in vain.
Crawling refers to googlebot, the bot that Google uses to crawl the web, visiting your website pages and adding them to its index. This means that Google not only knows that you’ve added certain pages, but can analyze the keywords you’re targeting and the depth of your content and rank your page accordingly.
Google crawls your website using links to discover other pages. That’s why our next on-site SEO tactic, internal linking, is so important.
How internal links help your pages rank for your targeted keywords
As far as internal links are concerned, this strategy ensures that Google can find all the pages on your website. If you have a page that has no internal links to it, Google won’t know it’s there, and it becomes what’s known as an orphan page.
Internal links also help your pages rank by distributing authority according to PageRank. This evaluates the quality of the links and then applies a value to them. Using your targeted keywords as anchor text can help Google understand the page’s optimization intent.
Use targeted keywords
On-site SEO also includes using your targeted keyword to optimize every page, URL, meta-description and title tag. For example, if you’re trying to optimize your home care agency’s website for “home care for the elderly”, you’d want that keyword in all your content, including the URL, meta description and title tag. All these elements play an important role in ranking your page for the right keyword.
Off-site referencing
Off-site SEO is a set of strategies for getting other websites to link back to yours. This usually takes the form of link building.
The importance of a high-quality backlink profile
Backlinks can be considered as referrals from other websites. When another page from another company or blog links back to your home care agency’s website, this tells Google that your page is considered valuable. Google then considers your page more worthy of being seen in search results.
However, not all backlinks will help your SEO efforts. You want high-quality backlinks, i.e. links from reputable websites. If you get several spam links, Google will understand that these references aren’t as relevant or value-driven, and it won’t see this as a reason for your page to rank higher.
Link building campaigns
There are many types of campaigns designed to get backlinks to your website. These include guest blogging, outreach, broken link building and more. Guest blogging involves writing an article for a website in your niche, the home care industry, and including a link to your site in the content. It’s important to note that large-scale link building via guest posts goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines and can result in a penalized website, so don’t do it excessively.
Outreach is when you contact people in your niche and let them know about your link-worthy content. You don’t necessarily ask them for a link, but you put the content in front of them, so if they find it useful, they can link to it. Broken link creation is when you find broken links to replace with your own. Contact the website with the broken link and suggest your live page as an alternative.
These are just a few of the link-building campaigns you can run for your home care agency.
Creating passive and active links for homecare companies
Passive and active link building both help you acquire backlinks, but the strategies behind them are very different. In passive link building, you don’t do any outreach or guest posting. Instead, you write complete, link-worthy content. Passive link building is based on the idea that good content alone will generate links.
Active link building is what we discussed in the section on link building campaigns. This means extra efforts to create links. Not only do you write the content, but you also send it out to others in your niche, writing guest articles to come back to, etc.
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Local SEO helps patients find your homecare service first
Local SEO is the process of making your home care agency visible to the locations you serve. For example, people are often looking for a service + a location. A search query for your business could be “home care agency in cherry hill nj”. Local SEO involves optimizing the relevant pages of your website with service and location so that you can appear on the first page for these location-based keywords.
Local SEO helps patients find your home care service first, because when it comes to home care, people want it in their community. If you live in Cherry Hill, NJ, your first instinct won’t be to search for home care services in North Dakota. For people in your community, they’ll be looking for home care agencies near them. If you’re optimized for local SEO, you’re presenting yourself to the right audience in the right place.
You can display two locations for local searches: map results and blue link results. The map results are at the top of the first page, making them an important element to target. This is optimized via your Google My Business (GMB) account.
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The other place where your local SEO work can appear is in the blue links below the map. These results are organic and are ranked according to the SEO work done on the page. For traffic to your website, it’s important to show both.
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Comprehensive local SEO strategy for home care companies
As with link building, there are many local SEO strategies you can use to get your home care agency found on Google. Two main strategies include creating a location page and setting up a Google My Business account.
Localization pages are content elements optimized both for your service and for localization. Like a service page, you’ll introduce your company and what you offer, but you’ll also use location-specific terms throughout the content. For example, if you’re writing a page for Cherry Hill, you’ll want Cherry Hill to be mentioned several times.
Be sure to connect your service and location in a single keyword, “home care agency in Cherry Hill,” because that’s how people will search for it in Google. Now repeat this operation for each location you serve, writing unique content for each page.
However, make sure it reads naturally.
Inserting the name of the city you’re targeting into content in an unnatural way can not only reflect poorly on your home care agency (it reads unprofessionally), but can also be a negative quality signal for Google.
Include your geo-modified keywords (service + city) but make sure it reads naturally.
Google My Business is an account you create to get a listing for your business on Google. For location-based searches, you’ll often find map results on the first page. With a Google My Business account, you can be found via the map function and on the first page. Your ad should always be SEO-optimized to beat other ads for the same keyword, which is where SEO tactics come in.
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Produce content that can be used and shared across multiple media platforms
As we’ve already mentioned, good content alone generates links. This means you have to write each piece of content so that it can be shared. Make sure it provides a thorough answer to the question or sensitive point of the subject. To earn passive links and be recognized as valuable by Google, your content will have to satisfy the needs of your readers.
You can optimize many types of content for your website, including blog posts, videos, images, social networking accounts and more. By connecting all these channels, your pages are more likely to be ranked. For example, if you’re writing a blog post about all types of home care services, you might consider making a video on the same topic and posting a link to the content on different social media platforms.
