Introduction to Home Care SEO
In this article, I’m going to share some of the insights that we’ve acquired over the last couple of years working with home care agencies like yours, both large and small, and how you can use this keyword data then to optimize your website.
Keyword Research
Keyword research really is the first step in successful home care SEO.
This is the step where we’re going to find how people are searching for caregivers in the market that you serve.
To start, this industry is different than every other one when it comes to SEO.
People really don’t know how to search for the services that you provide, and as a result, this often complicates matters.
For example, if you’re looking for a dentist, you’ll do a search like “dentist near me” or maybe “cosmetic dentists near me.”
But there really aren’t a ton of different ways that people look for a dentist, or an attorney, or a chiropractor.
But when it comes to the keywords that people use for home care agencies, it’s all over the place.
They do searches for caretakers, caregivers, home care agencies, in-home health care agencies, in-home caregivers for seniors near me.
It’s really all over the place, and it can be really challenging when trying to optimize your pages.
The Importance of Dedicated Service Pages
Now, before I jump into sharing any sort of keyword data that I’m about to pull, I want to point out a couple of really important things.
First, you need to have dedicated service pages.
Very often, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get your home page to rank for Alzheimer dementia care, private duty nursing, in-home care for seniors near me, caregivers near me, or 24-hour care for seniors.
While most of the time you’re still going to optimize variations on what is essentially the same thing—for example, caregivers near me, caretakers near me, in-home care for seniors, and so forth—services like private duty nursing, Alzheimer dementia care, and respite care, all need to have their own dedicated pages.
Throwing all of these onto one “Our Services” page is going to be a confusing mess for Google to understand.
Also, it’s not really going to be highly relevant to a search like “private duty nursing,” especially if your competitors have an entire page that’s just about private duty nursing and answering all the questions that someone may have about that particular service.
Analyzing Keyword Data
So to wrap up, let’s jump in and take a look at some keyword data.
So, I’ve jumped into Google’s Keyword Planner.
This is a tool that they give to Google advertisers that really is intended for us to use to plan our advertising campaigns, but it gives us keyword search volume data.
So, we get an idea of how people are searching for different things.
We use this tool first to uncover how people search for the different services that you provide.
And in here, I grab the number of what we refer to in the SEO industry as head terms.
Basically, those big keywords that people are searching for just to get an idea of what the search volume looks like, where the opportunities are, and how we may be able to grab some of these keywords, modify them for locally relevant search terms, and prioritize them accordingly.
So, let’s take a look.
As I threw in these head terms—home care services, home care agency, caregivers, caretakers, home health care services, and home care for seniors—this is what the Keyword Planner gave me.
It looks like the keyword that has the biggest search volume each month is “caregivers,” but there’s a couple of things that I need to point out.
First, the intent behind this search is not always to hire a caregiver, as we’re about to see in a minute as I jump into Google.
So, going over here, and then we’re just going to throw in the word “caregivers.”
We get the local map results.
I’m located here in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, so you’ll see all the results are focused on Cherry Hill.
But as I scroll down, we get a directory, a directory I guess for people that are looking to comparison shop for caregivers.
We have a health topic; just this is about the industry of caregivers jobs, caregiver.com, and something about this from the CDC.
Basically, it looks like all of page one is occupied by information about it, and nothing here really looks like it’s an actual service page for caregivers.
On top of that, even if they were and we were able to capture that 49,000 search volume, it’s very localized.
So, this isn’t something where if you are in Oregon and you want to rank for caregivers, something that you probably are going to be able to rank for at all.
And even if you did, it’s going to be really hard for you to convert that traffic into paying clients.
Honestly, someone here in Cherry Hill is not going to call someone from Oregon to come take care of them.
Geo-Modified Home Care Search Terms
That’s when we’re going to have to look at geo-modified versions of this.
So locally, we’re never going to rank for something like “caregivers.”
But what about “caregivers Cherry Hill” or “caregivers Philadelphia”?
Let’s take a look at that.
So here in the map results, I find it interesting that we still have a directory up top, but here at number three, this is an actual service page, and they haven’t done a ton of link building to it either.
So to me, this looks like an opportunity really for someone that wants to rank for “caregivers Philadelphia.”
It’s definitely doable, and I can definitely see how you can turn that into business.
Here as I scroll down the page, I’m seeing a couple of other agencies.
For whatever reason, my tool is not showing the overlay, but I’m seeing a number of agencies here.
So, from there we can then determine that, okay, well we can’t really rank for caregivers, but we may be able to rank for “caregivers Philadelphia.”
But at that point, what do we do?
We want to rank for something like “caregivers” or “home health care.”
Let’s take a look at that.
So, if we were to do “home health care Philadelphia,” that has search volume that’s almost identical.
What do the results look like?
So, I noticed that the map results are completely different.
In the blue links, I’m finding a lot more agencies and a lot less directories, which I think is really an opportunity as well.
I’m also noticing that like some of these numbers are not like astronomical.
Like this Pristine Healthcare Services or Home Care Services has a domain rating of four, which indicates that it’s not super.
You know, we’re not talking about a 53 like this one over here, which means that a small business may have a shot at a keyword like this.
Some of the other keywords that I’m seeing here, like home care for seniors, home health care for seniors, home health care services—let’s take a look at what it would take to rank for these in Philadelphia.
So again, I have a completely different set of map results.
As I go down the page, I am noticing some repeats here.
So there’s like ameribesthomecare.com, for example, Synergy, Pristine from the previous search.
So, what I’m seeing here is that there are opportunities to rank on page one for all these different variations on this keyword, and that’s really what we’re working on doing for our client.
Just getting the home page to rank for all of these different variations on caregivers, caretakers plus Philadelphia, as well as home care agency, home health care agency near me.
We really want to get all of these keywords, not just one of them.
And us sitting there and just focusing myopically on just one keyword is really not a good strategy.
Optimizing for Specific Home Care Services
In addition to this, we’re going to take a look at some of the other ones.
Like let’s see some of the other services that one provides.
So, let’s say we do “Alzheimer’s caregivers Philadelphia.”
You know, I don’t even—I can tell you without even looking at this that none of these pages are going to be the same exact home pages that we saw previously.
The intent behind this is totally different.
So, let’s take a look at what the results are for.
So without me even scrolling, I know that the search results are going to be completely different.
We’re not going to see any of those home page results that we’ve seen in the previous several searches that we’ve checked out.
And as you can see here, number one is a specific page for Alzheimer’s and dementia care, homeinstead.com.
The home page is not ranking for this.
As I go down the page, even the same thing.
So, we have high-quality Alzheimer’s care for seniors.
This page has done like almost no SEO, really no link building or anything, and here it is on page one for this, and notice it’s not the home page.
Important Takeaways
All right, so there are a few important takeaways here.
First, there really isn’t one generally accepted, established way to refer to the home health care industry.
People refer to it as caregivers, caretakers, home health care agencies, home health care services, in-home care, and a lot of different other keywords.
And it’s really important that you optimize for all of them.
Don’t focus on just one keyword when you’re optimizing a page or when you’re trying to determine whether your SEO is working or not.
Focusing on just one keyword is going to miss out on the vast majority of the search volume that’s out there.
Second, make sure that you have dedicated pages for each one of your services and that you understand that people are going to be looking for these services in a lot of different ways.
And you need to make sure that you’ve optimized those individual pages according to all these different services.
Finally, there’s a lot of search volume out there for caregiver agencies like yours.
The home care agency is exploding.
You don’t have big players that have dominated the airwaves and built a tremendously strong brand.
And as a result, regardless of the market you’re in, you can definitely capture some of this search volume and turn some of this business, because at one point or another, the families you provide services to are using Google to find caregivers.
