What Home Care Keywords Can Do for Your Agency
Why finding the right SEO keywords can help you gain a competitive edge
SEO is a fundamental part of any marketing strategy. And if you’re a home health care agency looking to increase brand awareness and bring on new clients, a strong and carefully crafted SEO strategy is a must-have.
And the foundation of SEO strategy is the keyword. Without keyword research and a plan for how you’ll use them, your SEO plan isn’t worth much. So, let’s take a look at what keywords can do for your home care agency.
What are keywords?
In search engine optimization, or SEO, keywords are the words and phrases the search engine users plug into their search bar.
For example, if you’re out and about, looking for a pick-me-up, you might search for the keyword: coffee near me. If the power is out, you might search for a longer keyword, like how do I find the flashlight on my phone.
Potential clients looking for an agency like yours are also searching keywords on Google, Bing, and similar search engines.
The keywords on your home care site tell search engines about the content of your pages, and this helps the algorithm evaluate your content and rank it on a search engine results page, or SERP.
How to use keywords
You should be using keywords and keyword phrases on every page of your site, from the home page to your blog posts to your contact page. Your ideal keywords should appear in:
- Site navigation
- Site headers
- The site footer
- Page URLs
- Blog post titles and subtitles
- Blog content and subheads within the post
- Page headers and content on the page
Here’s how:
1. Identify the keywords you want to rank for
Let’s say you want to promote your home nursing services, so you decide to target the keyword in-home nursing care.
2. Identify the primary page you want to rank for that keyword
To rank for this keyword, build an informational page on your site about your agency’s home nursing services. The header of that page should read something like In-Home Nursing Services. This keyword should also appear in the page’s URL. For example: yourhomecareagency.com/in-home-nursing-care.
3. Research that keyword
Plug the keyword into a search engine. What else is ranking on page one? The goal is not to duplicate what everyone else has created, but to satisfy the same query in an even better way.
Your page should include all the most helpful information about your agency’s in-home nursing services.
4. Write helpful, thoughtful content for the person searching that keyword
One of the most important goals of SEO content creation is to write for a human, not a search engine. Google’s recent Helpful Content Update prioritizes content that was written with people in mind, not its algorithm.
In your content, you’ll want to include exact match keywords. That means using the keyword in-home nursing care on the page verbatim. And just as important are keyword variations, like nursing care at home or home nurse.
5. Be careful to avoid keyword stuffing
One common mistake in SEO writing is keyword stuffing, or loading up a page with exact-match keywords and close variations with the goal of getting the attention of the search engine. You will get its attention, but not in a good way, and your page will be deprioritized or even penalized.
Examples of home care keywords
There are a few different ways to categorize keywords. Most commonly, you can separate yours into general keywords and local keywords. The former are words and phrases that might be searched by potential clients anywhere, for example, how to find an in-home nurse. The latter are words and phrases that might be searched by people in your physical vicinity. For example, how much does 24 hour home care cost in Georgia.
It’s also worth noting long-tail keywords. These are phrases that often read like whole sentences or questions, like how do I find senior care for my parents or how much does in-home care cost. Long-tail keywords should factor into your SEO strategy as well, and make great prompts for blog posts.
What is keyword research?
Before you pick keywords you will use on your site and in your blog content, you should consider the marketing goals you have. For example, do you hope to bring on new clients for a specific home care service? Is your goal to establish awareness in your local market? Setting clear business goals will make it easy to pick the right keywords.
Once you’ve identified your marketing goals, it’s time to do your keyword research.
How to do keyword research
There are a number of sophisticated tools that home care agency marketers can use to conduct keyword research. More on those later.
But to get started, you can start with a few basic searches of your own. Let’s start with a keyword your potential clients are very likely searching for, like home care agency near me. Plug in the keyword and make observations about the results. What are the page titles? What questions do the pages answer? Who is the intended audience?
Then, scroll down to find a list of other questions people ask related to that keyword.
This is really rich information you can use to create the content on your page, or you can create whole pages dedicated to answering these questions.
For more advanced keyword research, use a platform like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Surfer SEO, and Moz. These platforms will give you rich analytic data about individual keywords, like how many people search for them every month (search volume), how hard it will be to rank for those keywords (keyword difficulty), and insights into your competitors’ content.
Want to make research for home care keywords easy?
At Home Care Marketing Pros, we can take care of keyword research for your home care agency and target those keywords as part of our SEO-focused, professional website design. Contact us to get started with a no-obligation Discovery Call!
