Building a beautiful, usable website for your home care agency is a great way to attract new clients and keep your current clients happy with your communication efforts.
But how do you create a website that helps you achieve these goals? We asked Amy Selle, managing director of corecubed, a home care marketing agency, for her best tips.
Building Your Agency's Successful Home Care Website
A successful home care agency website has several important features or functions that you should pay careful attention to during your preparation, design and development phases. According to Ms. Selle, a successful site should be:
• Mobile responsive: viewable in formats adaptable to any device the website visitor might be using (smartphone, tablet, desktop, etc.)
• Built on a search engine optimization- (SEO) friendly content management system like WordPress or HubSpot (versus a do-it-yourself website builder, which can have extra code that hinders SEO).
• Created with both the home care consumer and search engine optimization in mind. Both consumers and search engines need to find information efficiently.
• Built with a blog so your agency can regularly share helpful content about aging care topics, which also bolsters SEO and helps potential clients find your site.
If you hold tight to these principles, you'll be well on your way to creating a beautiful and usable site that achieves your goals. But what about mistakes? How will you know what to avoid?
Selle says that the most common mistakes are the ones you should look out for. Don't do the following:
• Use a DIY approach to building, branding, writing and updating your website. (Unless, of course, you have real experience in this area.)
• Fail to differentiate your agency from competitors with a well-crafted brand story that helps consumers connect emotionally. (Studies show that emotions are the primary drivers of most meaningful life decisions.)
• Neglect to extend your website’s reach via blogging, social media, email marketing and asking clients for online reviews, all of which work to build SEO for your website.
• Ignore security and maintenance systems. You need those in place!
Increasing Internet-Based Referrals
If you want your website to help you get more clients, you need to take a multi-pronged approach, says Selle. Her three best tips are:
• Blog regularly about aging care topics, and include keywords in each blog that you've researched and know people use to search for senior care in their market.
• Ask clients to write online reviews. These are extremely important to both consumers and search engines.
• Realize that SEO is always moving and changing, which is why it requires ongoing work by an expert who knows home care and stays abreast of SEO changes.
And on that note, while you're creating your website, working on social media, or maintaining your site and blog, you'll need to pay special attention to those changes and trends to remain effective.
Working with Google's Algorithms
Selle points out that Google changes quickly, and highlights some trends to be aware of.
Google is paying increasing attention to:
• Whether or not a site is mobile responsive.
• The speed of both desktop and mobile versions of websites. They know that consumers like websites that load and move quickly.
• Overuse of keywords on website pages, also known as “keyword stuffing.” Google now has a more sensitive keyword reader.
• Meaningful content that is relevant and helpful to your agency's unique customers. Google’s job is to show consumers the highest quality websites — so your site needs to be one.
Seeing the results
After you've built your site, it is crucial to measure how your website is performing. Are more visitors filling out your website forms and employment applications or calling and saying they found you online? Is Google Analytics hooked up to your website so you can track and measure where website leads are coming from and what each visitor's journey through your site is? Don't miss out on the feeling of success just because you can't measure it!
Stay focused on these tips and you should be ready to dive into building a site that both nets results and helps your prospects and clients stay educated about home care — and isn't that what we all want?
