Today's article is by Jason Chagnon from Providentia Marketing.  Jason and Providentia's goals are to help to drive client referrals and attract caregivers to your agency.  In today's blog, he offers an introduction on how to improve your SEO, your website performance, and ultimately, how to improve your marketing.  Enjoy his post (below) and feel free to leave a comment!

In an effort to help home healthcare agencies understand the potential in the area of search engine marketing, Providentia Marketing is publishing a series of posts with the hope of helping home care business owners understand this effective online marketing technique.

Let’s get started.

What Is PPC?

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It can have a variety of meanings in online advertising but essentially, it’s an online newspaper ad. Companies buy valuable real estate across millions of websites with the hopes of getting clicks back to their website or to increase brand awareness.

Literally, your ad campaign will incur costs when someone clicks on your ad result. (There are other strategies about paying by the impression instead of the click, but we won’t go there in this post).

What Is Search Engine Marketing?

Head over to your favorite search engine (probably Google but it could be Yahoo or Bing), and type in a search for anything. I like to search for cameras and photography.

The top results are related to shopping on Google and are all sponsored images. That might not be relevant to home care, but it is valuable ad space in e-commerce.

The next result is from Tech Wizdom and is a search engine marketing ad. That is a very competitive spot. Those results are straight text ads and have a lot of great features.

Below that result are organic search results, which are the benefits of search engine optimization. SEO is always a hot-button topic and can’t be ignored when looking at search engine marketing. SEO should be a foundation of your content marketing strategy.

I’ve Heard the Term “Google AdWords.” What Does That Mean?

Remember that Tech Wizdom ad at the top of my Google search for “cameras?” That’s a PPC ad that gets displayed when someone enters that search into Google. A number of factors come into play to determine which ad appears and in what order. Google has an algorithm and bidding model to determine the order and appearance of certain ads. In home care, this can be a tough place to rank (at least in the top spot) because a local home care agency wants to gain attention but a huge company could come in and buy every top spot.

Those Ads That Follow You Around? That’s Remarketing!

We’ve all been there. We visit a couple of websites and then get bombarded (seemingly) with ads from that same website or for that product during the following days and weeks. It actually happened for me when looking for VoIP Phones. I was on one website looking at home theater speakers and that same evening, on a totally separate website I saw an ad for the speakers I looked at.

Remarketing is a very effective PPC strategy that shows online ads to people in that capacity. We visit a website and later on we see ads for that exact product or service. It’s the perfect strategy to create brand awareness and to always be present. When someone has a need for your home care, you are right there.

Don’t Forget About Social Media Advertising

While social media advertising (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn), isn’t officially search engine marketing, it is a valuable part of the PPC spce, especially for home care agencies in specific markets. Facebook advertising provides one of the best returns on investment in terms of a PPC strategy. Twitter and LinkedIn have their uses as well but we haven’t seen as much success in terms of ROI with those social media outlets.

Next Time on Our PPC Series

We’ll dig a little deeper into PPC advertising vs. search engine advertising. When is each one effective and how it can fit the goals and strategies of a home care business?

This article, originally titled, WHAT IS PPC? LET'S COVER THE BASICS, first appeared in the Providentia Marketing blog.

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