The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on June 28th, 2011 by tasha
#3 in a (delayed) series.
I got so caught up with collaboration across the continuum, and then social media, I forgot I was in the process of a series on regular ol’ Web 1.0 search engine optimization. Well, here’s the latest scoop:
How to take advantage of local search
As a rule of thumb, only 50% of people will find your website because of a search, and they are a fickle 50% (leaving quickly). For the rest: 25% will find it through a link on another site, and 25% because they typed in the web address directly, usually as a result of your own brochures or marketing efforts. (These visitors are much higher quality, more likely to stick around and engage. Still, 50% from search is nothing to sneeze at.)
Search engine optimization can be a very elaborate process. Businesses pick strategic keywords, write their content to those keywords, tweek their websites weekly/daily. They then run tests to see where they rank relative to their competition. Based on where they stand, they start the cycle over again. All of this activity is an effort to be in the first few listings at the top of page one (which is jokingly referred to as the “Google sandbox” because the sands of “who is on top” are always shifting).
Is it worth it? Well, think about your own behavior. How often do you click to page 2 in a search result? Most of us click on the first three links, five if we’re intrepid.
I don’t have specific data for elder care in general, but I can tell you that family caregivers (the Boomer daughters and sons who are most likely to be cruising the Web for elder care resources) may scan the listings of a search result to evaluate for credibility before clicking. But if they are like most people, 20-30% will just click the first links at the top of the page, the paid links. The rest will start clicking at the first link in the organic search results (the results showing just below the paid links).
So how do you increase the chances that you will naturally place high (and more importantly, higher than your competition) without a lot of expense and effort?
Written on June 7th, 2011 by tasha
Cross-promoting is not a new concept in marketing. But many people have distinctly different teams, or mindsets, when handling their newsletter/e-newsletter and their social networking. While the communication styles, and in many cases the type of viewer within these communication channels, are quite distinct, you can easily expand your reach by promoting content in one medium to the audience in the other.
Here are 8 tips for integrating your campaigns: Read the rest of this entry »
