Home Care SEO: What Keywords Can Do for Your Agency
Why finding the right SEO keywords can help you gain a competitive edge
SEO is a fundamental part of any marketing strategy. And if you’re a home health care agency looking to increase brand awareness and bring on new clients, a strong and carefully crafted SEO strategy is a must-have.
And the foundation of SEO strategy is the keyword. Without keyword research and a plan for how you’ll use them, your SEO plan isn’t worth much. So, let’s take a look at what keywords can do for your home care business.
Understanding Search Engine Optimization
Definition of SEO and its relevance to home care
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) through various techniques and strategies. For home care agencies, SEO is particularly crucial. It helps increase online visibility, making it easier for potential clients to find your services. By optimizing your website, you can attract more potential clients and establish your agency as a trusted provider of home health care services. In essence, SEO is the bridge that connects your agency to those in need of your care.
Importance of SEO for home care agencies
In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is essential for home care agencies. Most people search for home care services online, and a well-optimized website can help your agency stand out from the competition. Here’s why SEO is vital for home care agencies:
- Increase Online Visibility: SEO helps your website rank higher on search engines, making it more visible to potential clients.
- Attract Potential Clients and Caregivers: Through targeted keyword research and optimization, you can attract the right audience to your website.
- Establish Trust and Reputation: A well-optimized website with valuable content can position your agency as a trusted and reputable provider of home health care services.
- Drive Traffic and Conversions: Effective SEO strategies can drive more traffic to your website, leading to higher conversion rates and more clients.
By investing in SEO, home care agencies can reach a wider audience, attract more clients, and build a strong online presence.
What are keywords?
In search engine optimization, or SEO, keywords are the words and phrases the search engine users plug into their search bar.
For example, if you’re out and about, looking for a pick-me-up, you might search for the keyword: coffee near me. If the power is out, you might search for a longer keyword, like how do I find the flashlight on my phone.
Potential clients looking for an agency like yours are also searching keywords on Google, Bing, and similar search engines.
The keywords on your home care site tell search engines about the content of your pages, and this helps the algorithm evaluate your content and rank it on a search engine results page, or SERP. Including terms like 'local home care agencies' can enhance your visibility in local search results.
How to use keywords for search engine optimization
You should be using keywords and keyword phrases on every page of your site, from the home page to your blog posts to your contact page. Emphasizing local SEO is crucial for home care businesses to optimize content for geographic relevance. Your ideal keywords should appear in:
- Site navigation
- Site headers
- The site footer
- Page URLs
- Blog post titles and subtitles
- Blog content and subheads within the post
- Page headers and content on the page
Here’s how:
1. Identify the keywords you want to rank for
Let’s say you want to promote your home nursing services, so you decide to target the keyword in-home nursing care.
2. Identify the primary page you want to rank for that keyword
To rank for this keyword, build an informational page on your site about your agency’s home nursing services. The header of that page should read something like In-Home Nursing Services. This keyword should also appear in the page’s URL. For example: yourhomecareagency.com/in-home-nursing-care.
3. Research that keyword
Plug the keyword into a search engine. What else is ranking on page one? The goal is not to duplicate what everyone else has created, but to satisfy the same query in an even better way.
Your page should include all the most helpful information about your agency’s in-home nursing services.
4. Write helpful, thoughtful content for the person searching that keyword
One of the most important goals of SEO content creation is to write for a human, not a search engine. Google’s recent Helpful Content Update prioritizes content that was written with people in mind, not its algorithm.
In your content, you’ll want to include exact match keywords. That means using the keyword in-home nursing care on the page verbatim. And just as important are keyword variations, like nursing care at home or home nurse.
5. Be careful to avoid keyword stuffing
One common mistake in SEO writing is keyword stuffing, or loading up a page with exact-match keywords and close variations with the goal of getting the attention of the search engine. You will get its attention, but not in a good way, and your page will be deprioritized or even penalized.
Examples of home health care services keywords
There are a few different ways to categorize keywords. Most commonly, you can separate yours into general keywords and local keywords. The former are words and phrases that might be searched by potential clients anywhere, for example, how to find an in-home nurse. The latter are words and phrases that might be searched by people in your physical vicinity. For example, how much does 24 hour home care cost in Georgia.
It’s also worth noting long-tail keywords. These are phrases that often read like whole sentences or questions, like how do I find senior care for my parents or how much does in-home care cost. Long-tail keywords should factor into your SEO strategy as well, and make great prompts for blog posts. Including these keywords effectively can be part of your essential SEO tips to enhance online visibility.
What is keyword research?
Before you pick keywords you will use on your site and in your blog content, you should consider the marketing goals you have. For example, do you hope to bring on new clients for a specific home care service? Is your goal to establish awareness in your local market? Setting clear business goals will make it easy to pick the right keywords. Additionally, optimizing your Google Business Profile can significantly enhance your visibility on Google Maps and improve local SEO rankings.
Once you’ve identified your marketing goals, it’s time to do your keyword research.
How to do keyword research
There are a number of sophisticated tools that home care agency marketers can use to conduct keyword research. More on those later.
But to get started, you can start with a few basic searches of your own. Let’s start with a keyword your potential clients are very likely searching for, like home care agency near me. Plug in the keyword and make observations about the results. What are the page titles? What questions do the pages answer? Who is the intended audience?
Then, scroll down to find a list of other questions people ask related to that keyword.
This is really rich information you can use to create the content on your page, or you can create whole pages dedicated to answering these questions. Additionally, consider how this content can be shared and optimized across your social media accounts to increase visibility and engagement.
For more advanced keyword research, use a platform like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Surfer SEO, and Moz. These platforms will give you rich analytic data about individual keywords, like how many people search for them every month (search volume), how hard it will be to rank for those keywords (keyword difficulty), and insights into your competitors’ content.
SEO Strategies for Home Care
On-Page Optimization for Home Care Websites
On-page optimization is a critical component of SEO that involves enhancing individual web pages to rank higher in search engines. For home care websites, this means:
- Conducting Keyword Research: Identify relevant keywords and phrases that potential clients are searching for, such as “in-home care services” and “home health care agency.”
- Optimizing Website Content: Ensure that page titles, descriptions, and headings include target keywords. This helps search engines understand the content of your pages.
- Creating High-Quality Content: Develop engaging and informative content that addresses the needs and concerns of potential clients and caregivers. This not only helps with SEO but also builds trust with your audience.
- Improving Website Structure and Navigation: A well-structured website with easy navigation improves user experience and makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site.
- Using Header Tags: Organize your content with header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to make it more readable and SEO-friendly.
- Optimizing Images and Videos: Include alt tags and descriptions with target keywords for all images and videos on your site.
By implementing these on-page optimization strategies, home care agencies can improve their website’s visibility, attract more traffic, and establish their brand as a trusted provider of home health care services.
Want to make research for home care keywords easy with local SEO?
At Home Care Marketing Pros, we can take care of keyword research for your home care agency and target those keywords as part of our SEO-focused, professional website design. Contact us to get started with a no-obligation Discovery Call!
