As home care marketing experts, there’s one question we hear every week from senior care business and home care agency owners. We hear it so much, in fact, that we’re willing to bet that you’ve asked this same question yourself. Here it is:

“Can you get my business on the first page of search results?”

That is, without a doubt, the most frequently asked and pressing question on the minds of those working to effectively market their senior care businesses online.

We’ve decided to take a cue from the best-selling pregnancy book, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, to help business owners better understand the SEO process. After all, starting, running, and growing a business is a lot like pregnancy and parenting – it begins with a concept and continues to evolve over time as you get to know your audience. So, here’s what to expect when you’re expecting your home care business to be on the first page of search results:

1. Expect that it will take time and results will not happen overnight. Also expect that it won’t happen in a few weeks, or, in many cases, less than six months after you’ve started working with your first agency to provide monthly search engine optimization (SEO) services. Marketing your home care agency is a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s important to keep in mind that SEO is a commitment that builds effectiveness over time. It is a process that consists of growing and evolving your website through the deployment of accepted, legitimate, quality-based website optimization and interaction strategies. These strategies help your site to better interact with search engines, and searchers on your own site and the web at large. Anyone who guarantees that they can get your business on page one is not being honest with you and is probably not attempting to increase the quality of your website over time. In fact, that’s a sign that you should be looking for someone else to handle your SEO.
2. Expect that it will be an ongoing process versus a project with a start and end date. Pregnancy is just one phase of many in the parenting process. The same is true for creating a website. SEO must continue for the duration of the life of a website and a business. It does not end. Instead, it evolves as the Internet, technology, search engines, and your market competition evolve. If those things evolve over time, which we know that they do, then your SEO must also evolve over time. The saying from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come,” is a pipe dream when it comes to websites. If all you do is build a website, very few will come. You must deploy SEO practices on a continual basis to get more searchers to find you, or they will find your competitors instead.
3. Expect that there are multiple ways to measure the effectiveness and interaction of your website in addition to whether your business is on page one for a specific key word phrase. There are endless combinations of keywords searchers might use to find your business. Oftentimes, these keywords are not ones you might immediately think to associate with your business. (That’s another good reason why you should employ a professional agency that understands home care and senior care SEO!) It is possible to rank on pages one or two for certain keyword combinations for a period of time, but it is an ever-changing dynamic. It’s possible to rank high for certain keyword combinations, but not all keyword combinations. After all, SEO is a competition – a race that’s being run by you and your competitors on a weekly basis. Expect it to change constantly, and keep an eye on the bigger picture. There are many other measurements that make a difference and show that your site is making gains over time, including seeing an increased number of visitors to your website, visitors spending longer amounts of time on your website and visitors picking up the phone or filling out a contact form to inquire about your services or employment.

At corecubed, we help senior care businesses and home care agencies build and evolve their websites and interaction with search engines and searchers over time through quality-based SEO strategies, including heat mapping/user journey analysis, link building, keyword analysis, rank tracking, competitor analysis, social integration, content curation, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and more. We also work to educate clients continually on best SEO practices and how they can help affect the ranking, quality, and usability of their senior care websites.

We understand that you expect a lot out of your SEO provider. If you’d like to learn more about the SEO services for senior care businesses provided by corecubed, develop a targeted home care marketing plan, and learn how your website can better perform, please contact us.