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?
We described basic search engine optimization strategies for organic search in a previous blogpost.
While organic search is great, there’s an even simpler way to end up on the first page: Local search.
Starting a few years ago, Google began to show not only results that seemed most relevant and credible on a national level, but they also began to deliver a map on page 1 that showed related businesses near to the searcher. (They are able to determine this based on where you are logging on to the Internet, or by looking at geographic words included in a keyword search, e.g., “hospices in Oklahoma City.”)
Location, location, location…While the map feature may seem more pertinent to storefront businesses, the location mantra takes a decidedly different turn when you think in terms of location on the search result page.
Approximately 50% of visitors who arrive from a search engine result page have gotten to a website because they clicked from the map. At least this is the statistic presented at a Local Search seminar I attended last week. It makes sense. The map appears near the top of any search result page.
In organic search, you are often competing on a national level. Since your service as an elder care provider is very localized, this can “hurt” you. Small businesses often cannot compete readily with the resources large companies can invest in search engine optimization. Depending on what the searcher is looking for, your website may or may not be strong enough in the search engines to bring you to the top.
With the map feature, just by being local, even as a small business, you have a place at the table. Placement on the map is, in a way, much more democratic than regular Google searches (or Bing or Yahoo). Mostly you need to show up and you will be counted.
So what do you need to do to show up? You need to “claim your places page.” If the three major search engines have found you, and your address and phone number (with local area code) are on your website, you probably have a temporary page set up in their local search database.
Go to the local search login for the three major search engines and enter your information.
There are free versions and enhanced accounts, depending on your interest and budget. The more you tell them about you, the better (i.e., the more information they will have to deem you “relevant” to a search and the more information they will have to give to your prospective clients).
In our next blogpost, we’ll talk about strategies to optimize your local search entries to increase the chances that you will rise to the top of the maps list.
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