What is SEO for Home Care Agencies?
SEO or search engine optimization is a marketing strategy that enables your home care agency website to rank on Google. Online visibility is important for any industry, and home care agencies are no exception. By ranking in Google through SEO, you will create organic traffic and attract potential cases and caregivers for your home care agency.
Attract Potential Customers with Home Care SEO
90% of families search for their local home care agencies online. This means that SEO is not only necessary but vastly important if you want your ideal customers to find your website when they’re searching on Google. Through SEO, you can rank on the first page of search results where most clicks and future conversions take place.
Attract Potential Caregivers with Home Care SEO
SEO for your home care agency isn’t just a good idea for attracting customers, but it’s also a key marketing channel for acquiring caregivers. Just as potential customers look online for home care agency services, potential caregivers look online for home care agency jobs. SEO can help optimize your page for the exact keywords potential caregivers would be searching.
Now that you understand what SEO is and why it’s important, you’ll need to understand how it works. Below we include five tips for home care businesses ready to pursue SEO.
How SEO Works: 5 Tips for Home Care Businesses
1. Know Your Targeted Customer Base
Ranking on Google is only half the battle when optimizing for SEO. Once someone finds your website and lands on a page, your home care agency’s content needs to be targeted to their needs and pain points. Well-written and relevant content is ultimately what’s going to turn visitors into customers. It doesn’t matter if people find your website. If they feel like your service isn’t targeted at their home care needs, they won’t convert. Therefore, all of your content needs to be tailored to your customer base.
One way to write content that’s optimized for your ideal customer base is to develop personas.
Developing Personas Helps You Precision Target Your Market
Personas are fictional characters designed to represent your ideal customers. These characters should be mapped out with qualitative information such as age, gender, job, interests, pain points, and more. 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 that match closely with your ideal customers.
Common personas for the home care business industry include seniors, adult children making decisions for seniors, and referral sources such as social workers or doctors. When creating personas, be sure to create more than one if you feel like one persona doesn’t capture your diverse customer base. It’s important to have each type of customer mapped out to ensure content is specifically optimized for their unique needs.
2. Know your Targeted Keywords for the Home Care Industry
While most people use Google to find home care agencies, they typically don’t know what to search for when they do. This makes knowing what keywords to target pretty complicated. Your ideal customers could be searching everything from caregivers and caretakers to home care agencies and home health care businesses.
By conducting research, you can find the best keywords for home care agencies. This will allow you to optimize your pages and get found for the most relevant keyword that your audience is searching.
Basics of Keyword Research
You know the keywords surrounding home care agencies are complicated and need further research, but what is keyword research? Keyword research for home care businesses is the process of identifying popular search terms that people are entering into Google to find home care services.
Many tools can be used to conduct keyword research, such as Google Search Console, Google’s keyword planner, and Ahrefs, to name 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 conduct keyword research right in Google.
Start typing in your primary keyword and use Google autosuggest to see what Google believes you’re searching. Google can suggest these keywords because other people are also searching for them. In this way, you can begin to plug in all the different types of keywords to see which one comes up in Google autosuggest.
This is only the basics of keyword research. There are many layers and strategies to finding the right keywords for your home care agency.
Home Healthcare Keywords
As mentioned above, the most common keywords surrounding the home care industry include caregivers, caretakers, home care agencies, and home health care businesses. By conducting our own keyword research, we’ve discovered that the keyword “caregivers” is most commonly searched. However, the first page of Google is all about the job itself, not actual services being shown. This means the keyword “caregivers” isn’t the right keyword you should use to optimize your home care agency.
Going further in our keyword research, we discovered that home care agencies and home health care services both show opportunities to rank on page one.
Senior Care Keywords
As for keywords related to senior care, we discovered that home care for seniors and home health care for seniors are good opportunities to target for your agency.
While we’ve discovered some quality keywords to target, it’s still important to know that there’s no one way to refer to the home care industry. This means that you should optimize for a wide range of keywords from “home care agency” to “home health care for seniors.” This ensures that when people do attempt to search for home care services, you’ll rank no matter what they’re plugging into Google.
3. Optimize On-Site and Off-Site SEO for Home Care Companies
SEO includes a wide umbrella of strategies and objectives. It’s more than just keyword research. When it comes to your home care company, it’s important to cover all the bases. This means utilizing on-site and off-site SEO.
On-Site SEO
SEO that is done on your website and on specific pages is known as on-site SEO. This includes content, meta-descriptions, title tags, and internal linking. Below we’ll outline how you can use each of these to optimize your home care agency website.
How Google Crawls Your Website
Before we get into on-site SEO basics, it’s important to understand how Google crawls your website. If Google isn’t crawling your website, all of your efforts toward on-site SEO will be for nothing.
Crawling refers to googlebot—the bot Google uses to crawl the web—visiting your website’s pages and adding them to its index. This means Google not only knows you’ve added certain pages, but it can analyze what keywords you’re targeting and how thorough your content is and rank your page accordingly.
Google crawls your website by using links to discover other pages. This is why our next on-site SEO tactic, internal linking, is so important.
How Internal Linking Helps Your Pages to Rank for Your Targeted Keywords
When it comes to internal linking, this strategy ensures that Google can find all of the pages on your website. If you have a page that doesn’t have any internal links going to it, Google won’t know it’s there, and it’ll become what is known as an orphan page.
Internal linking also helps your pages rank by distributing authority by what is known as PageRank. This assesses 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 intent for optimization.
Make Use of 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 website for “home care for seniors,” you would want this keyword throughout your content, including the URL, meta description, and title tag. All of these play a large role in getting your page ranking for the right keyword.
Off-Site SEO
Off-site SEO is a set of strategies to get other websites pointing back to your own. This typically takes the form of link building.
The Importance of a High-Quality Backlink Profile
Backlinks can be viewed as references from other websites. When another page from a different company or blog links to your home care agency website this signals to Google that your page is considered valuable. Google then considers your page more worthy of being seen in the search results.
However, not all backlinks will help your SEO efforts. You want high-quality backlinks, which means links from reputable websites. If you’re getting several spam-like links, Google will understand that those references aren’t as relevant or value-focused, and it won’t consider this 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 many others. Guest blogging is when you write an article for a website in your niche, the home care industry, and include a link to your site within the content. It is important to note that building links at scale through guest posts is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can result in a penalized website, so don’t do this excessively.
Outreach is when you contact people in your niche, and you make them aware of your link-worthy content. You’re not necessarily asking them for a link, but you’re putting the content in front of them so if they find it valuable, they can link to it. Broken link building 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 only a few of the link-building campaigns you can run for your home care agency.
Passive and Active Link Building for Home Care Companies
Passive and active link building both help you acquire backlinks, but the strategies behind them are vastly different. In passive link building, you’re not doing any outreach or guest posting efforts. Instead, you’re writing thorough, link-worthy content. Passive link building is based on the idea that good content will garner links all on its own.
Active link building is what we discussed in the link-building campaigns section. This entails additional effort to build links. You aren’t just writing the content, but you’re also sending it to others in your niche, writing guest posts to link back to it, etc.
4. Local SEO Helps Patients Find Your Home Care Agency First
Local SEO is the process of getting your home care agency visible for the locations you serve. For example, people often search for a service+location. A search query for your business could be “home care agency in cherry hill nj.” Local SEO is about optimizing your website’s relevant pages with the service and location so you can show up on page one 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 is not going to be searching for home care services in North Dakota. For the people in your community, they’ll be looking for home care agencies near them. If you’re optimized for local SEO, then you’re getting in front of the right audience in the right location.
There are two places you can show up for local searches: map results and blue link results. The map results are found at the top of page one, making them an important thing to target. This is optimized through your Google Business Profile (GBP).
The other place your local SEO work can show up is in the blue links beneath the map. These results are organic and are ranked based on the SEO work done on page. For traffic to your website, it’s important to be showing for both.
Comprehensive Local SEO Strategy for Home Care Businesses
Like link building, you can use many local SEO strategies to get your home care agency found on Google. Two main strategies include location page creation and creating a Google My Business account.
Location pages are pieces of content that are optimized for both your service and the location. Like a service page, you’ll present your business 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 mentioned several times.
Be sure to connect your service and location into one keyword, “home care agency in Cherry Hill” because that’s how people will be searching for it in Google. Now repeat this for every location you serve, writing unique content for each page.
However, be sure that it reads naturally.
Stuffing the name of the city you are targeting into the content unnaturally 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.
If you’d like to watch a video that walks through this process in more detail, see here:
Google My Business is an account you make to get a listing for your business on Google. For location-based searches, you’ll often find map results on page one. With a Google My Business account, you can be found through the map feature and on page one. Your listing still needs to be SEO optimized to beat out other listings for the same keyword, which is where SEO tactics come into play.
5. Produce Actionable, Sharable Content Across Multiple Media Platforms
As we’ve mentioned before, good content earns links on its own. This means you should write every piece of content to be shareable. Be sure it’s thorough in answering the question or pain point of the topic. To earn passive links and be recognized as valuable by Google, your content will need to satisfy the needs of your readers.
You can optimize many types of content for your website, including blog posts, videos, pictures, social media accounts, and more. By connecting all of these channels, your pages are more likely to rank. For example, if you write a blog post about all the types of home care services, you might consider making a video about the same topic and posting a link to the content on different social media platforms.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we do this for our clients, check out our YouTube marketing services page.
Sagapixel Offers a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy for Home Care Companies
If you’re overwhelmed by SEO or feel like you need more information to make it work for your home care agency, a home care marketing agency like Sagapixel can help. We are a digital marketing company that has extensive experience in driving leads through home care SEO. If you want to learn more about how we can help your home care agency website rank on the first page of Google, call our team of digital marketing specialists at 856-701-7947.
