The best is yet to come for Home Care Agencies. With many studies now pointing to a revival and boom phase coming up for Home Care agencies, we bring your tips and techniques to manage your organization’s online presence. Unfortunately, most home care agencies invest little time and effort in building their online presence. It is not as expensive as you think. Here are six things you can do to improve your agency’s brand.

1. Start with a great website

As you begin to look at building your online presence, your website is the obvious first place to start. While you may have a website for your home care agency, great websites require a good understanding of content, technology, and design. Remember that your work is not done after you have built a website, you need to continue to invest time in developing new content, and engage your visitors. Here are a few tips to improve your website.

TOOLS TO BUILD YOUR WEBSITE

Often, home care agencies utilize the services of third-party providers who either use native HTML or a complex builder such as WordPress. With advances in technology, new age builders such as WiX, Squarespace, HubSpot, bring you the ability to build modern-looking and mobile-friendly websites.

WRITE ENGAGING AND ORIGINAL CONTENT

Home care agencies offer a service that is about compassion and care. Write original and engaging content about how you make a difference in the life of the patients. You should write about your caregivers and how their commitment helps patients lead better lives. It may be a good idea to include testimonials on your website.

BLOGS

Blogs are essential for many reasons. Merely listing your services on a website is not enough. Go beyond and develop content that improves your search engine performance and keeps your website fresh. Utilize good keywords in your blogs.

DESIGN

Invest in professional photos of your people. Try and create a consistent brand image through consisent use of colors and website design elements.
Pay for images from image libraries such as Deposit Photos, Shutter-stock, 123rf.com, etc., or better still, shoot live pictures
Increasingly, videos are being utilized to tell compelling stories. It is a good idea to invest in creating videos.

INTEGRATE ACCESS TO YOUR TECHNOLOGY

Visitors to websites that have tools or have login access to software tend to be much higher than those without these features. If your home care agency offers software to the caregivers of the patients, provide access to the same via your website.

ADVERTISING YOUR SITE

Improve visitors to your website through social media marketing, referral sources, email marketing, and email signatures.
Provide forms to capture data about your visitors and respond to them as soon as possible.
You may consider investing in Google AdWords as well.

2. Measure and Optimize your Home Care Agency’s Website’s Performance

Next, we talk about understanding your website’s performance. Having built a website, very few agencies measure the performance of their websites. As such, web technology is flush with jargon and metrics that profess to show you how your website performs. It is often, cumbersome to find your way through this maze. Here are some tools to help you.

MEASURE YOUR WEBSITE PERFORMANCE

We recommend that you use the following tools.

Alexa Page Rank. While there is no single tool that tells you how your website will perform for specific keywords, Alexa provides an estimate of your page rank. Good sites have a page rank of 500K or less. If your score is above 500K, it’s time to invest some money in improving the build of your website.
Search Console, Webmaster tools, Search Engine Optimization, and more blah... Perhaps the most powerful tools are the ones that are provided by the search engines themselves. Fortunately, most of these are free.
Google Search Console.
- Submit your site to Google Search Console
- Create a sitemap and submit it to the search engine. Most website builders come with an automated site map generator.
- Improve enhancements by using technical SEO for your organization, products, and services, FAQs
Search Engine Optimization
- Get your basics right. Define all elements of your webpages clearly – Logo, Page Title, clear and unique meta description, Heading 1 for each page, and add social sharing images. Each of these elements is important for your site to be ranked.
- Add a favicon to the website.
Technical SEO. Most websites today do not utilize technical SEO, and therein lies your most significant opportunity. Technical SEO is a set of codes that define your organization, your social media channels, your products, job postings, blogs, and more to the web crawlers. We recommend that you use tools such as https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/ for generating technical schemas.
Advanced users can create social media sharing images for specific channels by using OpenGraph codes.
Submit your site to other search engines such as Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, Baidu, etc., using their Webmaster tools
Google Rich Results. Test each of your pages on Google Rich Results tester. Rich results help you identify and enhance pages to get into Google’s rich and featured snippets.
Google Analytics. Monitor your traffic using Google Analytics.
Additional Tools. You can also subscribe to tools such as SEM Rush, SEO Profiler, and Alexa Paid Subscription

3. Home Care Agencies and Social Media

Home Care Agencies can use social media to connect with clients and prospects. Please note that an integrated web and social ecosystem makes a website perform better than the others.

INTEGRATED WEB AND SOCIAL ECOSYSTEM

Create an integrated digital and social ecosystem by:

Creating social sharing images for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for each page.
Ensuring all your social profiles link back to your website
Post regularly and ensure that all your posts lead back to your website

IMPROVING YOUR FOLLOWER BASE

Improving your home care agency’s follower base on social channels can be costly. Here are a few tips to improve your follower base.

Post regularly
Involve your staff in your social media marketing initiatives to help amplify the reach of your content
Marketing your social profiles by adding them to your email signatures and your website
Post your content in regional groups as well
Engage with your followers by replying to comments and liking their posts
Invite your customers and prospects to follow your page
Create a contact list and link the contact list to your social media handles.

4. Online Listings

As search becomes more localized, Google and other search providers are endeavoring to help businesses get better results from their local area through focused tools such as Google My Business.

The Golden Rule for all online listings is to ensure that you manage all your online listings, and keep them up-to-date. Whether it is information about your office location, or your products or web pages, managed listings give you the control to update information as often as you need to.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

Perhaps the best-kept secret in local search optimization, Google my Business, can be a real differentiator for home care agencies. The tool captures information about the address, business description, products, services, and even allows you to post updates.
For small businesses, the tool can also build a free website. While we do not recommend the free website feature, as it does not allow you much flexibility with design, a completed Google My Business listing will enhance the reach of your business significantly.

BING PLACES

Bing Places tightly integrates with Google My Business. A Bing Places profile can be easily configured once you complete your Google My Business Profile.

APPLE MAPS CONNECT

Claim your location on apple maps connect.

YELP

Pretty popular in the US, Yelp also provides free business profile features that home care agencies companies can use.

OTHER BUSINESS LISTINGS

Once you have your profile information handy, you can use that to update your listing on local chambers of commerce list or the lists published by industry associations
It may not be a bad idea to try a listing service such as www.yext.com for a year or so.

5. Online Reputation Management

Many sites and applications provide users with the ability to give reviews. Facebook pages have review features, and so do your google location listings. Several Job sites also provide business reviews – negative reviews may hamper your ability to hire quality talent.

Respond to reviews promptly. Engage with reviewers to understand why they rated you high or low and make course corrections where appropriate.

Job Sites are important for home care agencies to recruit quality talent. Ensure that you have a great profile on Indeed, Glassdoor, and other such recruitment portals. Publish your jobs and respond to reviews promptly. A rating of 4 and above is desirable.

6. BUILD A TEAM OF SOCIAL MEDIA AMBASSADORS.

Recognize that you cannot build a brand alone. The more engaged your team members are on social channels, the more your brand is likely to strengthen. Watch for signals in your google analytics data, LinkedIn, and Facebook performance data, and make course corrections each week.

ABOUT CAREVOYANT

CareVoyant is a leading provider of cloud-based integrated enterprise-scale home health care software that can support all home-based services under ONE Software, ONE Patient, and ONE Employee, making it a Single System of Record. We support all home based services, including Home Care, Private Duty Nursing, Private Duty Non-Medical, Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), Home Health, Pediatric Home Care, and Outpatient Therapy at Home.

CareVoyant functions – Intake, Authorization Management, Scheduling, Clinical with Mobile options, eMAR/eTAR, Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), Billing/AR, Secure Messaging, Notification, Reporting, and Dashboards – streamline workflow, meet regulatory requirements, improve quality of care, optimize reimbursement, improve operational efficiency and agency bottom line.

For more information, please visit CareVoyant.com or call us at 1-888-463-6797.