Question: What’s Home Care Agency SEO all about?
Answer: It’s an effective way of positioning your home care agency website to rank high in Google first page — so that potential customers who need your services can find you easily and contact you right away.
If you have invested a lot of money, energy, and time into your home care business but still frustrated with your results, it’s time to take a different approach that works.
You have a website but you’re not getting the right clients to call you, visit your office, or work with you. Here’s why:
Your website is not structured or positioned to show up in Google. Worse, it’s not even optimized display well on mobile devices.
What you need is an effective home care SEO marketing strategy.
If you’re wondering how SEO marketing can help you increase your revenue and thrive in the face of competition, I wrote this article to show you how. If you have questions, book a free consultation today. We’ll listen to you and guide you.
Search engines will send more people you can cater to. With 12 million people in the U.S. who requires some form of home health care, there’s a big pool of potential customers.
You’ve got to understand that many people carry out research online before purchasing a product or paying for a home care service.
Having 13,314 home care agencies in the U.S. means there’s a tough competition. You probably have to compete with over a hundred agencies in the state you practice.
When your website or business listing shows up for important keywords in your business, you gain more traffic from search engines. This type of traffic is one of the best types you can have on your website. Why?
Because it’s targeted. People who search for home care services in Google are ready to pay for your services. This is a fact!
Now that I’ve shown you why your business needs to rank high in Google search engine, how do you achieve it?
In this guide, I’ll show you what you need to do to get more traffic, leads, customers, and revenue from search engines.
1. Conduct competitive analysis
Competitive analysis is critical. It gives you an idea as to what your competitors are doing with their business and website. For example, if you’re trying to rank for home care keywords (e.g., home care services) today, you might be running against big players.
Some of your competitors are already taking advantage of search engines to gain more leads and customers. You should have embraced SEO a long time ago. But better late than never!
If your competitors are ranking high for keywords you also want to rank for, they’re probably doing some things right. And you need to find out those things. That’s the essence of competitor analysis.
If you conduct a competitive analysis, you can stand on a competitor’s shoulder and see what they’re doing, their strengths and weaknesses.
Also, you gain insights from their years of implementing SEO, their experience and strategy.
When you engage in competitive analysis, you should be looking at 2 major aspects:
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What they’re doing well that you can implement in your business.
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What they’re doing poorly that you can improve massively upon.
What are the aspects of your competitor’s website and online presence you need to check during competitive analysis?
i). Keywords
What keywords are your competitors ranking for?
Are they ranking on Google first page for home care services, home care agencies, elderly home care, etc.?
You have to find out.
If your competitor runs a successful business online, one of the reasons is that they’re targeting relevant home care keywords with a lot of searches per month.
But it’s difficult to know the keywords your competitors are ranking for by just checking their website.
This is where the use of a keyword tool comes in.
There are many keywords suggestion tools you can use for this. I personally like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or UberSuggest. SEMRush is a robust tool that helps you to carry out extensive competitive analysis.
When you enter your website address for analysis on SEMRush, you get a list of competitor websites based on your content.
From here, you can input one of the websites into the domain analysis tool. This will show you value for organic search traffic, paid search traffic, number of backlinks, and display advertising.
You can also check your competitor’s top organic keywords. This will give you a sense of what to target.
Another analysis you can perform is the keyword gap analysis. This helps you to find keywords your competitors are ranking for which you’re not.
You can also get more details about your competitor’s backlinks. Also, you can make backlinks comparison with up to 5 domains.
ii). Local SEO
If you run a home care service in California, for example, you probably don’t need traffic from New York City. Local SEO is the most important SEO strategy for your home care business.
Because it brings in people who are in your locality. So what are the details to look for in your competitor’s local SEO strategy?
a). Local keywords: You need to find the local keywords your competitors are ranking for. You should aim to rank for these keywords too. You can follow the steps explained earlier.
Examples of local keywords:
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Home care California
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San Francisco Home Care Agency
b). Local citations: The number of local directories you appear on will have an effect on your ranking for local keywords. If a competitor is ranking for local keywords, they have those citations already. You have to find out.
One easy way is to put their business address, in quotes, in Google and see the local directories that show up. You should add your business to those listings.
c). Reviews: These are important to your local listings. It’s even more important to have them on the listings where potential customers are more likely to check. Find out where your competitor has the majority of their reviews.
d). Content Strategy: Without effective content, any SEO strategy will fall apart. To rank high in Google, your competitor has been producing a variety of content that attracts people and the search engines.
Some of the aspects to check in their content strategy are:
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The frequency of posts: How often do they post on their website? Some businesses post thrice in a week while some post twice. Some, however, post once. Check the frequency of a few of your competitors and start there.
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The length of posts: A detailed post is usually long. If your competitors are producing detailed 2,000-word posts, writing 800-word posts on your blog for the same topic probably won’t get you ahead in the search rankings.
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Targeted audience: With home care services, it can be difficult to target a single audience. Because the recipients of the home care service can carry out the research themselves whereas their grown-up children could do it in some cases. For instance, 69.1% of home health care recipients are over 65 years old.
Who is your competitor targeting most? Are they targeting both? You need to find out on their website.
Performing a competitive analysis can give you many insights into what to do and what to avoid.
2. Target long-tail keywords in the pages
There’s a broad classification of keywords based on customer’s interest:
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Head keywords usually contain 2 or fewer words.
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Long-tail keywords contain 3 or more keywords.
Both keywords have different characteristics. Head terms usually have a higher search volume and competition compared to long-tail keywords.[source]
For instance, the term “home care” will have a higher search volume and competition than “elder home care service Los Angeles.”
As a home care service provider, you should target long-tail keywords. This is because there’s a lower competition and you can attract the customer you want.
Even though you may generate a lower traffic from long-tail keywords, the traffic is more likely to take the actions you want.
One other thing to note is that you can rank for many long-tail terms as search engines are intelligent enough to know what your page is about. This means you can still generate a lot of organic traffic when you rank for many long-tail keywords.
The question is: how do you know the long-tail keywords to target?
The easiest way is to check the terms that Google shows you in their autocomplete function.
These are similar terms that people have searched for. You can also check the related searches under each search results page.
To get more keywords, you need to use Keywords Research tools. These are tools that provide more keyword suggestions than you get on the Google page.
Added to these, they also show you the Search volume, Competition, and Cost Per Click (CPC) for the terms.
Some of the tools you can use are KeywordTool.io, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc.
To use Keywordtool.io, visit the page and enter your main keyword. Click on “Search.”
You’ll see keyword suggestions pulled from Google autocomplete. To get more keyword suggestions and other details like search volume, trend, competition, and CPC, you’ll have to subscribe to the paid version.
Ubersuggest is another free tool you can use. To get keyword ideas and other details, visit the page. Enter your keyword and select your location. Click on “Search.”
You’ll see the keyword overview with details like search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and cost per click (CPC).
For keyword ideas, click on the button. This will bring you keyword suggestions. You’ll also see the pages currently ranking for those keywords on Google. You can click on any of the keyword suggestion to see the SERP.
You can also check the SERPs separately. The long-tail keywords are evident here.
Even though they have low search volumes, anyone searching for such terms is more likely to convert. The key here is to find the keywords with a high volume and low competition or difficulty.
To get the best results with long-tail keywords, insert the important ones on your homepage.
This is because most backlinks will point to your root domain and the page will rank faster than your individual pages.
3. Implement local SEO
If your local SEO is poor, forget it. You can’t get the right traffic from search engines. This is because most people looking for home care services are looking for a provider in their locality. As a home care service provider, you want customers in your area. [source]
A large portion of your resources should be committed to improving your local SEO.
What are the steps you can take to attract more customers from your locality to your home care business?
a). Claim your Google My Business page
Google is by far the largest search engine.
To appear on Google’s local map pack that contains 3 local businesses, it’s necessary to have a Google My Business page. This listing could serve as your much more detailed business card online.
On your Google My Business page, you can have details about your business like name, address, and phone number.
Added to that, you can have other details like opening hours, images of your business, and directions on the map. Customers of your business can also add ratings and reviews of your business.
Search for your business and see if it already has a Google My Business page. If it does, you can claim the listing. If it doesn’t, visit the Google My Business page and click on “Start Now.”
Fill out the necessary details like Business Name, Address, Phone number, Business category, and other information about your business. After that, you can verify your business using one of Google’s recommended methods.
After verification, you can take full control of your Google My Business page. Here, you can add posts weekly to keep your page update. This also includes promotional offers that you’re running or events you’re hosting.
b). Get citations from local directories
Having your listing on Google doesn’t mean you’ll automatically rank for the Google local map pack. You need to have your business on other local directories.
In fact, BrightLocal found that businesses that appear at the top 3 of local searches have an average of 85 local citations.
The local directories you need to appear on are the following:
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General directories: These are directories that are available to all types of businesses at various locations.
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Directories in your city/state: Having your business citations on these listings show your credibility as a local business in that city.
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Professional directories: Having your business on these directories shows you’re a professional and this helps your business to rank for local searches. Examples are medically related directories like Healthgrades, UCompareHealthCare, etc.
b). Target Location-based keywords
Local keywords usually include ‘location.’ A location-based keyword will include both the location of your business and the keyword. Examples are:
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[city] home care services
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Best home care services [city]
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Home care service provider [city]
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Home care services near me
c). Get reviews to boost rankings in the Local Map Pack
Reviews show that you’ve been serving customers. It also shows what those customers think about your business. Having reviews is one way to increase your rank in the Google local map pack.
If you’ve done a local search before, which you have, you’ll notice that businesses that appear on the map pack also have reviews.
Apart from that, reviews are a form of social proof to your potential customers. Research shows that 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
But most times, your customers won’t drop reviews on your business listing pages. You have to remind them. And if you’re taking care of someone who is too old to write a review, you can tell their child or anybody in a position to do so.
Let’s Help You To List Your Home Care Agency on Google My Business. Get Free Consultation Today!
4. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that search engines can crawl and index your website pages. Before your website can show up on search results, it has to be indexed. A quick audit can help you.
What are the steps you need to take to make sure that your pages are correctly indexed on search engines? Some of them are:
a). Submit your Sitemap to Google
Your sitemap is a document that shows search engines bots the pages on your website. The sitemap presents the links of your post for easy crawling. To add your sitemap to the Google Search Console, navigate to the website.
Click on “Sitemaps” at the sidebar of the Google Search Console.
This will take you to the page where you can enter your website’s sitemap URL.
b). Remove duplicate pages and broken links
Duplicate pages can waste search resources as bots have to crawl the same page multiple times. [source]
Consequently, it becomes difficult for Google to select which page to present for searches. In some other cases, Google may rank different versions of the same page.
This will dilute the authority and the rank.
Some ways to rectify the issue is to perform a permanent 301 redirect or add canonical tags to the duplicate pages so that search engines can identify which page to rank. Broken links lead search bots to dead ends and this may affect your search ranking.
c). Fix Image Alt Text and Title
Search engines read image alt texts and title to determine what the image is all about.
When you search for a keyword, there are usually image results. In most cases, These images have optimized ‘title’ and ‘alt text’ with the keyword for that page.
Instead of using a random title for your image, use your home care keyword and add an alt text.
d). Refine Page Title and Meta description
When your website appears for search terms, one way to increase the click-through rate to your website is through an effective headline and meta description. This should tell potential visitors what your page is about.
If your website is on WordPress, you can use the Yoast plugin to specify meta description for your post.
Do You Need Help With Technical SEO? Scott Keever Can Help.
5. Get inbound links
These are links from other websites pointing to your homepage or specific pages on your domain. Links are one of the most important Google ranking factors. [source]
In fact, Google search quality senior strategist, Andrey Lipattsev, named it as one of the 3 most important ranking factors along with content and Rankbrain.
Backlinks show that other websites have a level of trust in your website. They also believe that your content is good enough for their readers.
There are many ways you gain more backlinks apart from producing quality content. Some of them are:
1). Link reclamation
Link reclamation is about claiming links you should have but you don’t.
Most times when you redesign your website or change a URL, or remove a piece of content from your website, there are broken links on your website.
For internal links on your website, you can change the URL to the current active page. In some cases, you can redirect that link to another similar page.
Another way to reclaim links is through brand mentions. When other websites mention your home care business but fail to link to it, you can contact the webmaster and tell them to link to your website.
To find broken links on your website, you can use Google Console. Log into your Google Console account. Navigate to diagnostics and click on crawl errors.
You’ll see links resulting in 404 error. When you click on each link, you’ll see the pages that link to it.
You can also use Broken Links Checker to find these links. This will show you external links from your page that are broken. You can fix those links or remove them.
2). Podcast and Interview links
Getting featured on a podcast is an opportunity to increase brand awareness for your business. It’s also an opportunity to showcase your expertise to a larger audience.
Getting interviews is another way of displaying your expertise.
When you appear on these programs, they’ll give a brief description of your business and add a backlink to your website. Here’s an example of such links on Entrepreneur On Fire, when John interviewed Rick.
3). Sponsor or attend a local event
Getting backlinks from websites in your locality will help your business rank for local searches in the community.
When you sponsor a local event, it’s an opportunity to meet potential customers, website owners, and even journalists. These people will write about this event and include backlinks to your website.
This gives your website a greater power to rank for local searches in your locality.
To earn local links, a DUI attorney offered scholarships to Colorado students who admit to drunk driving. The news appeared in The Denver Post and later The Wall Street Journal.
6. Build Social Signals
It has been said many times that social signals have no correlation to search rankings. But that doesn’t mean you should neglect social signals.
Because a high level of social performance can have effects on signals that matter for search ranking. Getting signals from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other social networks are important to your online visibility.
When a post has a high number of social shares, more people read it. Some of the people reading it will link to it from their website.
Backlinks are signals that influence search ranking indirectly (Google says it doesn’t affect ranking directly). To increase your reach on social media, you can share your posts on some of these social media channels:
a). Facebook: This is the largest social media network with 79% of Americans using the network. Apart from this, the channel has the highest population for any age group, including the baby boomers you’re targeting. For instance, 62% of Americans older than 65 are on Facebook.
b). Twitter: This is one of the largest social networks and has a large population of old Americans. There are 21% of Americans aged 50 to 64 on Twitter and 10% of people older than 65.
c). LinkedIn: Even though LinkedIn is a network for professionals, it has a large number of baby boomers and people who may be looking to employ a home caring service for their parents. 24% of Americans aged 50 to 64 are on LinkedIn while 20% of people over 65 are on the network.
7. Embrace content marketing
Implementing SEO for home care companies can be boring if you don’t know how to create useful content.
That’s why content marketing is critical to your success.
To gain a higher rank on search engines and more customers, you need effective content marketing. But what does content marketing entail?
The first step to embracing content marketing is to produce quality content. Quality content is one of the most important ranking factors. What is quality content?
A quality content is a type of content that attracts your potential customers and convert them to customers. Quality content provides the knowledge a visitor needs or tell them to how to solve a particular problem.
According to Demand Gen Report, 47% of buyers viewed 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.
There are many forms of marketing. But content marketing is one of the most effective and cost-effective forms of marketing. If you want to achieve a higher rank, you need a strategy. What does Google say about creating content for your readers?
According to Google Search Quality Guidelines, “Creating high-quality MC (main content) takes a significant amount of at least one of the following: time, effort, expertise, and talent/skill.”
To give your content the widest reach possible, you need to distribute your content and produce content for other websites. Some ways to do these are:
i). Social media: Sharing your posts on social media help will help you to reach more people who can visit your website.
ii). Guest blogging: This gives you an access to a bigger audience. It establishes your reputation in the home care business and you can gain customers this way.
It’s important that you guest blog on other websites in the home care industry or websites that your potential clients read.
iii). Paid promotions: You can pay other websites to promote your content or fun Facebook ads to boost your page, and your post in the process.
Another way to improve your content marketing is by creating a variety of content.
You can repurpose your blog post into various forms like infographics, podcasts, videos, etc. as some home care clients prefer visual content and understand it better.
Conclusion
Each time we execute SEO for elderly home care businesses, our goal is to understand the challenges in this industry and how we can outperform the competitors (i.e., other elder home care agencies) in the search engine.
The steps in this guide will help your home care website rank for important keywords and gain more traffic.
With this, you can capture more leads, turn them to customers, and increase revenue for your home care business or agency.
Do You Need Scott Keever to Help You Drive Traffic and Leads to Your Home Care Business?
