This article isn't like our usual blog posts that cover specific topics surrounding home care, medicaid, and private duty agency Best Practices. This article focuses on aspects of marketing in general that you can consider, adjust, and perhaps apply to your home care marketing campaigns and other initiatives.
In general, I've found that given the time constraints and long work hours those in the home care industry have, marketing can sometimes get lost in the shuffle...but as I mention a lot in these posts, a strong marketing plan is a vital part of any successful business.
As I was writing the above, I realized that we all understand it, but finding the time and resources to do the marketing we'd like to do can sometimes be too time consuming to research and implement. So with that in mind, I thought I'd share some simple tips that you can implement quickly and a few useful resources for you to avail yourself of when it comes to improving the marketing power of your web pages or blog.
Quick Overview of How Search Engines Work
To start, let's quickly go over the basics of how search engines work:
The way that Google and other search engines catalogue and rank content online is that they first looking at a few technical elements that make up the page itself.
It's not as if Google has humans reading each page and ranking accordingly, it is done by "spiders" "crawling" the web. Google crawls the web and looks at the data within the page to determine how relevant the content is (in general and in relation to each search) and how high to rank each piece.
These are little-automated programs or bots that scour the ‘net for any and all new information.
The spiders will take notes on your website, from the titles you use to the text on each page to learn more about who you are, what you do, and who might be interested in finding you.
Bottomline: Whatever you can do to make it easier for the bots to understand, categorize, and rank your content, the better it is for you and the more likely your audience will find your content.
In order to do this, there are a few easy steps you can take to optimize your page:
Have a Picture with Alt Text Labeled
When you put a photo on a web page, there is a label (text you can type in) for the photo, called Alt Text, in most web page interfaces. This label should clearly describe what the picture shows and hopefully demonstrate relevancy to the page's topic.
Match Your URL, Title, and H1 Header
As above, by making sure that these three elements are in alignment, it not only strengthens your point to a human reader, but it allows bots to better "understand" what your page is about and who best to present it to when folks search or surf on the web.
Consider Your Keywords
The days of "keyword stuffing," or putting trending keywords within the content of your page in order to trick the bots into ranking you higher are over. What you do want to do is to research what keywords are relevant to your business, write original and thoughtful content surrounding these keywords or topics, and add to the trending conversation.
And again, this approach will also make your content more interesting and clear to human readers, but it will allow the search engines to get a clear idea of what your content is relevant to and will likely rank your content higher than if you wrote a blog on a less trending topics.
A Few SEO Resources for Your Online Content
As promised, here are a few resources for you to check out online if you're interested in learning more about all this:
What are your thoughts on SEO marketing a home care agency or similar? What SEO Best Practices have worked well for you? Which one's haven't? Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comments below.
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Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital, focusing on efficiency and care coordination. Ankota's primary focus is on Care Transitions for Readmission avoidance and on management of Private Duty non-medical home care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact us.
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