An article from inbound marketing company, HubSpot, entitled "How to Optimize Your Landing Pages for Long-Term Lead Generation" caught my eye recently. It got me thinking about how important a solid marketing strategy is to home care agencies but that between caring for clients, training caregivers and other staff, and managing the business, sometimes marketing can get lost in the shuffle (or implemented without using current Best Practices).
With that in mind, I thought I'd share some stories, data, and research with our audience on the topic of optimizing your online content so that your audience can find it easily online.
Below, I have posted the 8 ways to improve your SEO, but first, I'd like to share a few thoughts:
When It Comes to SEO, There are A Lot of Opinions
More than a few times this year I have researched online to learn what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts say are the best times and days to post blogs or social media content on different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, website blog, and so on.
What I found to be equally interesting and confounding is that 6 or 7 detailed reports from reputable and well credentialed companies, (complete with solid data, research methodology, and confidently reported findings), all gave completely different answers to the same question.
I've had a similar experience when researching how many words a blog article should be in order to optimize it's performance. Again, I found a number of well-researched and confidently validated reports letting me know the best range of word count that search engines "prefer." And again, I received a lot of different answers from a lot of different folks for the answer to the same question.
This is a long way of saying that utilizing current Best Practices doesn't always guarantee the exact same results for each person utilizing them.
What Best Practices do offer is a starting point drawn from learned professionals, measurable data, trackable trends, and so on. From that starting point, each individual must then explore what marketing practices work and what doesn't work in their particular situation. Each individual needs to measure their results, adjust accordingly, try again and measure results again---and repeat.
But you need to start somewhere and starting by looking at current Best Practices is where I suggest.
Small Changes Can Bring Big Results When it Comes to SEO
One of the most mind-boggling piece of information that I heard from an SEO expert that I chatted with once was that by using a photo already posted on the web, and then rotating that photo in one direction and adding a border, then the search engines will rank that photo (and the content connected to that photo) higher in the search rankings.
They discovered this by testing hundreds of small adjustments to the same photo and measured how search engines ranked each different change to the same photo.
Now, that is a level of detail that I wouldn't suggest folks dive into, but I mention this story to illustrate just how much little changes or nuances to what/how you post content online can affect how that content is ranked by search engines and therefore, how it affects how much your content is seen by your audience.
Bottom line, this stuff can be as simple or as complicated as you like, but again, even small changes can often bring big results.
With those stories as context, I suggest you read the full article from HubSpot that I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post by clicking this link here. The article is chock-full of easy to implement ideas to improve your SEO.
Eight Ways to Improve Your SEO via HubSpot
HubSpot is a leader in the online marketing space and they have a marketing blog that is essentially an online library of useful content covering pretty much every marketing topic one would want or need. As I always, I suggest reading the full article, but as a start, here are some bullet-points from the piece:
- Create a short but keyword-optimized page title.
- Structure your landing page URL correctly.
- Create a heading tag that matches the page title.
- Write a clear and direct meta description.
- Optimize the title. (wait, what?)
- Use structured data to qualify for rich snippets.
- Be careful with how many form fields you have.
- Have a link-building strategy.
What are your thoughts on marketing a home care agency or similar? What marketing Best Practices have worked well for you? Which one's haven't? Why? 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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