We review one home care website’s SEO
Are you making one glaring error on your home care website?
You might be putting in a lot of time writing interesting blog posts – but are you losing visitors because your posts are not SEO optimized?
I’m sure you know how critical search engine optimization is in the home care field. Many people turn to Google when they don’t have referrals when mom or dad needs home care.
Sure, your “how to” article, or a piece about your trip to a home care convention was a great read. But if the article is not optimized for SEO, you’re wasting a lot of your digital efforts. What do I mean?
SEO case study
Let’s take a look at the website of a home care service in a major metropolitan area. We’ll call it ABC company.
I chose an article on this website about dementia, surely a troublesome problem. This ABC company’s website page is mobile-friendly, so that hurdle is crossed. Its home page downloads is five seconds. Well, OK, although Google really wants three or less.
Not to get too technical here, but here’s where problems arise:
1. Sloppy tags
There are three H1 tags (main headline). One is the actual headline, which is good, but two are hidden away in the source code behind the page, which is sure to confuse the Google bots. There is an H3 subhead on the page, but not an H2. Confusing.
There is no description meta tag, so Google has to scrape up the description from the first sentence of the article. (Makes for boring reading from the search engine page.)
2. No keyword, apparently
When I searched for the headline on Google, their article came up first. Great. But if I reworded the search, the page did not come up on the first page. Since my search was a local search, this company should be aiming for a first page ranking for this topic for their local market. They should probably be optimizing for searches similar to “how to deal with dementia husband,” or “caring for someone with dementia at home.” (By the way, both of these phrases came up on the Google auto-fill, so you know many people are searching for them.) So you would choose one of these phrases for your main keyword, but use the other phrase, and similar phrases as well.
What else can be found about this page?
Sitechecker.pro found seven critical errors on this page. (You can check your own website there, too.)
3. No links
And some of my further observations: There were no outbound links or internal ones as well. Bad, bad. This is a mark against you. Google wants links to relevant and authoritative websites. Three or four here would have been good. Say, a little help for the reader, here!
This company is also posting about one article per month, which I would say is the bare minimum. Every week would put real muscle into their home care SEO program.
There were 440 words in ABC’s article. That’s good. Google wants at least 300. Longer articles are good, too. When it comes to keyword density, your keyword (which is usually a phrase) is divided by the total number of words in an article. It should be around 1 – 3%. This home care article does not seem to be targeted toward any given keyword.
4. No client capture devices
Another observation – there were no client capture devices on the page. When people stumble upon your article when searching, you want to find a way to provide their email address so that you can keep in touch with them.
An authority speaks out on SEO for home care
Why is search engine marketing so important for your home care agency? Home Care Pulse, which conducts the largest and most in-depth annual study on the private duty home care industry, says,
According to the “2014 Private Duty Benchmarking Study,” an annual study of the home care industry conducted by Home Care Pulse, the top consumer marketing method is SEO, which refers to methods used to help consumers find your business online.
(See the full article, “Marketing Your Home Care Business: The Difference Between Consumer and Referral Marketings”)
Check out another authority in the field, Moz.com, “Why Search Engine Marketing is Necessary.”
Sure, SEO takes time and expertise. But if you are a company that wants to compete with the big boys, you have to be attentive to good marketing methods.
Say, if you’ve enjoyed this article, why not read our other piece, “Home care marketing – keep current clients and find new ones”?
