You may consider yourself quite savvy with online website templates and design. But that doesn’t mean you have the tools necessary to implement a full-scale SEO strategy to drive more traffic to your site. In our last blog, we covered why DIY website design will cost you more in the long run than hiring an expert. In today’s blog, we’ll cover why DIY home care SEO will cost you more over time vs. hiring a professional in the first place. Between 70 and 80 percent of users ignore paid ads (PPC) and instead focus on the organic results, according to Search Engine Journal. Furthermore, SEO leads have a 14.6 percent close rate, compared with outbound leads (such as print advertising) with a 1.7 percent close rate. But in order to fully understand these stats, you have to know exactly what SEO (search engine optimization) is and how important it is to your home care business.
Here’s a pretty simple way to put it from Moz: SEO makes your website easy for users and search engines to understand. Even though search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, they still can’t understand a web page the same way humans can. SEO helps those engines determine what each page is about and how it may be useful for users.
Attempting to tackle SEO on your own when creating your website can be risky. Here are three reasons why you should forgo the DIY approach and hire a pro.
1. Low-quality links = Google penalty: Being penalized by the Google gods is never a good thing, so don’t contribute to the chances you’ll trigger one. If you outsource to a so-called expert at a couple of hundred bucks a month, or if you decide to just do it yourself, chances are good you won’t get quality content marketing and link building out of it. Instead, you’ll likely get low-quality spammy links built with automated software and tools, says Entrepreneur. Most of those low-quality SEO strategies only concentrate on the number of links offered, which can look great to inexperienced business owners who may assume more is better. Not so. Fewer higher quality links are always going to be better for your site in the long run. In fact, low-quality mass link building may trigger a penalty from Google, which takes time and money to fix.
2. Poor grammar and low-quality content: If you opt for low-quality outsourced SEO or take a DIY approach, you can bet that any content you get will be poor in quality and often times even unreadable. Hey, we don’t mean to bruise your ego. You may think you can pen masterpieces, but when it comes to writing well and carefully weaving SEO keywords and geo targets into the prose, you may be missing the mark. You may think you can get away with cheap software that simply compiles existing online content from multiple sources and then spins it together to create many new pieces of content. Problem is, if you ever actually read the finished products, they don’t even make sense. And they most certainly do not have SEO as a backbone. Remember that every piece of content you offer for consumption online and that links to your website is a direct reflection on your business. Any piece of content that doesn’t make sense or that isn’t crafted carefully could come back to haunt you later. Reputation and professionalism go hand in hand with the quality of your content. Don’t turn off clients right out of the gate.
3. Maintaining effective SEO is time-consuming: Never underestimate the value of your time. As a home care business owner, you are likely given a choice each day: focus on administrative tasks that get the immediate bills paid, or focus on patient care and employee training, which helps to foster your business and grow trust over time. Any web design or development task that takes you away from your passion will cost you in the long run. You may assume SEO involves just researching a few top keywords and incorporating them into your content. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth — at least not in today’s world of ever-changing SEO. In general, it takes between four and six months to even start seeing results with SEO. And that’s with a professional doing all the work.
Here’s a quick outline of what you could expect to do each month to get the results you want, points out Forbes:
- Month 1 – Research and discovery, website audit, keyword strategy, and planning.
- Month 2 – Begin technical SEO work, making modifications to the website based on site audit results. Work on your link profile and build content.
- Month 3 – Focus on content creation, such as blogs, FAQs, whitepapers, articles, product and company information, etc.
- Month 4 – Continued content creation, technical optimization of website, and development of link profile.
- Month 5 – Incorporate social media management into your online marketing plan to help direct traffic to your website.
- Month 6 – Add conversion rate optimization and improve conversions. Continue to build content creation.
Think you have time for all of that and tracking results?
Contact A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing
Because we work exclusively with those who care for the elderly and their families, we know the specifics of this industry and the challenges you face. Call us now to learn more about how we can help you expertly implement a comprehensive SEO strategy at (760) 227-2720.
