SEO Keywords for Home Care Agencies
SEO Keywords for Home Care Agencies
Over the last several years, we’ve had the opportunity to get to know the ins and outs of home care marketing. We’ve worked with both small independent home care agencies, as well as franchisees of a large national home care company, and we’ve learned a great deal about what works when marketing a home care agency—and what doesn’t.
I’m going to share with you some of the important lessons we’ve learned about how to market home health care services.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment in the home care industry will grow by 54% by 2026. Getting your home care marketing right could mean that your agency could be positioned to capture a larger part of this growing market.
By the end of this guide, you should have a clear picture of how to market your home care business. If you’d like to speak with a marketing strategist from LevelUP Digital Solutions,
click here and we’d be happy to take a look at your market and put together a proposal for you.
Keywords for Home Care Agencies
Keyword phrase research really is the primary step for effective Search Engine Optimization.
This is the action where we're most likely to locate just how individuals are looking for caregivers in the market that you serve.
The Keywords Used for Home Care Services Vary Wildly
To start, SEO for the the home care industry is different than every other one. When it comes to SEO, people really don’t know how to search for home care services; as a result, this often complicates matters.
For example, if you’re looking for a dentist, you’ll do a search like dentist near me, maybe cosmetic dentist near me, but there really aren’t tons of different ways that people look for a dentist, or an attorney, or a chiropractor.
But when it comes to the keywords that people use for home care agencies, it’s all over the place.
They do searches for caretakers, caregivers, home care agencies in home health care agencies in home caregivers for seniors near me.
It’s really all over the place.
And it can be really challenging when trying to optimize your pages. Now, before I jump into sharing any sort of keyword data that I’m about to pull, I want to point out a couple of really important things.
Create Dedicated Pages for Each of Your Home Care Services
First, you need to have dedicated service pages. Very often it’s going to be an uphill battle to get your homepage to rank for Alzheimers/Dementia care, private duty nursing, home care for seniors near me, caregivers near me, AND 24 hour care for seniors.
However, most of the time you’re still going to optimize variations on what is essentially the same keyword. For example, caregivers near me, caretakers near me in home care for seniors and so forth services like private duty nursing, Alzheimer, dementia care, respite care.
These services need to have their own dedicated pages, rather than throwing all of these onto one page.
If you do throw all these services onto one page, it is going to be a confusing mess for Google to understand.
Also it’s not really going to be highly relevant to a search like “private duty nursing,” especially if your competitors have an entire page targeting just that keyword; just about private duty nursing and answering all the questions that someone may have about that particular service.
So to wrap up, let’s jump in and take a look at some keyword data.
How to Tell What Keywords to Optimize Your Home Care Agency Website For
So I’ve jumped into Google’s keyword planner. This is a tool that they give to Google advertisers that really is intended for us to use, to plan our advertising campaigns, but it gives us keyword search volume data. So we get an idea of how people are searching for different things. We use this tool first to uncover how people search for the different services that are, that you provide.
Here I grabbed the numbers for what we refer to in the SEO industry as head terms; basically those big keywords that people are searching for just to get an idea of what the search volume looks like, where the opportunities are, how we may be able to grab some of these keywords and modify them for locally relevant search terms and prioritize them accordingly.
So let’s take a look.
So as, as I threw in these head terms home care services, home care, agency, caregivers, caretakers, home health care services, and home care for seniors. This is what the keyword planner gave me.
It looks like the thing, the keyword that has the biggest search volume each month is caregivers. But there’s a couple of things that I needed to point out. First. The intent behind this search is not always to hire a caregiver as we’re about to see in a minute as, as a jump in the Google.
So going over here and then we’re just going to throw in the word caregivers, we get the local map results.
I’m from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. You’ll see all the results are focused on cherry Hill, but as I scroll down, we get a directory, a directory, I guess, for people that are looking to comparison shop for caregivers. We have a health topic just about the industry of caregivers, jobs, caregiver.com, something about this from the CDC.
Basically it looks like all of page one is occupied by information about it. And nothing here really looks like it’s an actual service page for caregivers on top of that, even if they were, and we were able to capture that 49,000 search volume, it’s, it’s very localized. So this isn’t something where if you are in Oregon and you want to rank for caregivers, something that you probably are going to be able to rank for it all.
And even if you did, it’s going to be really hard for you to convert that traffic into paying clients. Honestly, someone here in Cherry Hill is not going to call someone from Oregon to come to care of them.
That’s one we’re going to have to look at geomodified versions of this.
So locally, we’re never going to rank for something like caregivers, but what about “caregivers Cherry Hill” or “caregivers Philadelphia.” Let’s take a look at that.
So here in the map results, I find it interesting that we have still a directory up top, but here number three, this is an actual service page and they haven’t done a ton of link building to her either. So to me, this looks like an opportunity really, for someone that wants to rank for caregivers, Philadelphia, it’s definitely doable. And I can definitely see how you could turn that into a business here.
As I scroll down the page, I’m seeing a couple other agencies, for whatever reason my tool is not showing the overlay, but I’m seeing a number of agencies here.
So from there we can then determine that, okay, well, we can’t really rank for caregivers, but we may be able to rank for “caregivers Philadelphia,” but at that point, what do we do?
We want to rank for something like “caregivers or “home health care.”
Let’s take a look at that. So we were to do “home health care Philadelphia,” that it has surged by, and it’s almost identical.
What are the results look like? So I noticed that the map results are completely different in the blue links.
I’m finding a lot more agencies and a lot less directories, which I think is really an opportunity as well. I’m also noticing that like some of these numbers are not like astronomical, like this pristine healthcare services or home care services has the main rating of four, which indicates that it’s not super, you know, we’re not talking about a 53 like this one over here, which means that a small business may have a shot at a, at a keyword like this.
Some of the other keywords that I’m seeing here, like home care for seniors, home health care for seniors, home health care service, let’s take a look at what it would, what it would take to rank for these in Philadelphia.
So again, I have a okay, a completely different set of map results as I go down the page. I am noticing some repeats here. So this like Ameribest home care.com for example, synergy pristine from the previous search. So what I’m seeing here is that there are opportunities to rank on page one for all of these different variations on this keyword.
And that’s really what we’re working on doing for our client. Just getting the homepage to rank for all of these different variations on caregivers, caretakers, plus Philadelphia. As well as home care agency, home health care agency near me, we really want to get all of these keywords, not just one of them and us sitting there and just focusing my optically and just one keyword is really not a good strategy.
In addition to this we’re going to take a look at some of the other ones, like let’s say some of the other services that one provides. So like, let’s say, do Alzheimer’s caregivers, Philadelphia you’ll know. I don’t even, I can tell you without even looking at this, that none of these pages are going to be the same exact homepage that we saw previously, the intent behind this is totally different. So let’s take a look at what the results are for. So without even scrolling, I know that the search results are going to be completely different. We’re not going to see any of those one page results that we’ve seen in the previous several searches that we’ve checked out. And as you can see here, number one is a specific page for Alzheimer’s and dementia care home. Instead.Com. The homepage is not ranking for this as I go down the page, even the same thing.
So we have high-quality Alzheimer’s care for seniors. This page has done like almost no SEO really no link building or anything in here. It is on page one for this and notice is not the homepage. All right. So there are a few important takeaways here. First, there really isn’t one generally accepted, established way to refer to the home health care. The industry people referred to it as caregivers, caretakers, home health care agencies, home health care services in home care, and a lot of different other keywords. And it’s really important that you optimize for all of them. Don’t focus on just one keyword when you’re optimizing a page, or when you’re trying to determine whether your SEO is working or not focusing on just one.
Keyword is going to miss out on the vast majority of the search. Find this out there. Second, make sure that you have dedicated pages for each one of your services, and that you understand that people are going to be looking for these services in a lot of different ways. And you need to make sure that you’ve optimized those individual pages, according to all these different services. Finally, there’s a lot of search volume out there for caregiver agencies like yours, the home care agencies exploding. You don’t have big players that have dominated the airwaves and built tremendously strong brands. And as a result, regardless of the market, you’re in, you can definitely capture some of this search volume. And in turn some of this business, because at one point or another, the families you provide services to are using Google to find caregivers.
