STEP 5 – How Does Google Find Your Agency?
When people search for home care agencies or services in your area, you want your agency to appear in the top portion of organic search results. Why? Because 60 percent of clicks on the search engine organic results pages go to the top three results according to Yoast, a search engine optimization company. Meaning the chances of users clicking on your agency’s link dramatically decreases the lower you show up in the organic results.
Here’s a tip: Some home care agencies are getting more than 50% of their leads online. Potential customers might look you up by your agency’s name or they might look up “home care in X city.” Either way, it’s important you understand how these Google results are displayed and work.
Your goal here is to boost your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results so your agency shows up on the top portion of organic results.
Here’s how Google displays results for searchers:
- Top Section – Paid Search Results – This section shows businesses that have paid for placement there. If you don’t spend money on Google Ads, you won’t show up there.
- Middle Section – Local Business Listings, also knowns as Map Pack or Local Pack. These are the results that show up on the map in a person’s local area. To appear here, complete a Google My Business Listing profile. Client reviews will boost your ranking here as well.
- Organic Search Results – The organic results are driven by three factors: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This is by far the most important section of Google search results and this is where you want to make sure your agency’s link shows up.
Let’s take a look at Organic Search Results. Google only wants to recommend sites that are a good match for what people are looking for– which means you need to get Google to trust your site. One way to do that is to prove your home care agency fits the criteria. You have the expertise, you are an authority in the field and you are a trustworthy business. A great way to establish that is by adding content to your site – like blog posts. You could include posts on your website such as:
- What is home care?
- What are the top 10 reasons for using home care?
- Why is home care becoming more widely used?
- How can home-care help your loved one improve their life?
- How can you help a loved one avoid slips and falls?
- How important is proper nutrition for senior health?
- How your agency specializes in helping with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s patients.
STEP 6: Boost Your SEO – Your Online Juice!
To help Google put your company in front of the right potential customers, maximize your chances by boosting your SEO. There are two general ways to do this.
On-Page SEO
Google and other search engines constantly crawl the content of your website. Content will represent value and gives Google a reason to rank your website based on relevance. Relevance is basically what your website says you do or provide. Your website should be optimized with keywords that are relevant to when someone searches for those keywords in Google. Relevance does not necessarily mean your site will be ranked higher – it only means it is a good match for what someone is searching for.
A few tips to optimize your On-Page SEO:
- Create content on your website that is unique and valuable to your readers.
- Make sure you’re using keywords that are a strong match with what people search for.
- Check your HTML Title and Description Tags and make sure they include a primary keyword, a secondary keyword, and your company name. This is what Google uses to display you in their search results. For example, the following is an optimal title tag for a home care agency in San Francisco:
| <head> <title> Home Care San Francisco – Specializing in Alzheimer’s | Name of the Agency </title> </head> |
HINT: For more information on how to optimize your on-page SEO, including HTML title tags, check out Chapter 5 of my book, Caring For Millions.
To show up for Google rankings, building relevance alone won’t suffice. You will also need to work on off-page SEO, which we will cover next.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to actions that occur outside of your website that affect your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs.) The most important of these activities is link building. Having high-value links to your website increases the authority of your site therefore increasing its ranking in Google SERPs.
Building off-page SEO can be done in multiple ways. Have you started:
- Social media marketing?
- Guest blogging for other relevant sites?
- Creating press releases to local or state outlets when important things happen for your business?
These activities all create external links to your site.
Don’t discount the value of social media. Having Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and other social media accounts may not help you directly in finding clients, but they create off-page SEO signals that help boost your ranking in Google SERPs.