Choosing the right partner in your SEO journey can be an overwhelming prospect at first. After all, there are many online marketing agencies out there to choose from. Which one is best for you? We’re here to give you some pointers.
Red Flags to Look For
There are good ways and bad ways to go about choosing an SEO company for your home care business. Check out these pitfalls to avoid that many businesses fall victim to:
Trusting the Top Googled Results
Using Google as your sole filter isn’t always wise. You may think you can just search for top SEO firms or consultants near you and receive a comprehensive list of the best SEO companies in the area, ranked best to worst. After all, we’ve been trained to think that typing “best SEO near me” in the search bar will certainly ensure the #1 company shows up at the top. However, the opposite is oftentimes true. The very good companies, those that are in high demand, do consistently stellar work and receive amazing referrals, don’t really even need to rank at the top. They’re too busy with clients and are actually overwhelmed due to all those referrals that they are already as busy as they want to be. Plus, with such a high retention of clients, they don’t need to rely on your search to make it big. This means they don’t spend a lot of time or money on SEO optimization of their own website.
So, what are you left with? The SEO companies that may be good, but that definitely need the business. Because they’re ranking high, they’re putting a lot of time and energy into achieving that so they can snag new clients. While you may find some gems, Google just isn’t the best filter.
Believing in Magic
Another mistake is blindly believing the sales pitch that unfortunately many less-than-reputable firms employ. Moz says it best: there is no secret sauce in SEO. If your SEO consultant is promising big overnight results thanks to some secret optimization technique that they can’t fully disclose to you, run the other way. Truth is, there is no silver bullet to SEO, no proprietary methodology; rather, SEO is an open field. While it’s well understood, there are still many uncertainties to it and no one should be promising quick results. SEO by its very nature takes time. It’s organic and must be grown slowly with that in mind.
Companies That Cater to Everyone
As a home care business, you have very specific clients, services and goals. What works for an accountant’s website won’t work for yours. You need an SEO company that focuses on home care owners just like you. Looking at an agency’s portfolio will help you understand what types of businesses it serves. Keep an eye out for patterns related to your niche, as this shows experience within your industry, points out Entrepreneur.
As a side note, here at A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing, we built our own successful home care and geriatric care management company, growing it for 13 years through expertise in online marketing. Our company consistently ranks in the top three on Google search results within our service area. So, you want a company that is comprised of elder care industry veterans and experienced online marketers.
Positive Steps
Instead of falling into the trap of the above mistakes, here are some tips on what you should look for in an SEO consultant.
Sit down with your team and establish the goals you want to reach with SEO. Ask yourselves why you want to do SEO and why you want to rank organically for keywords. Here are some examples of positive goals to reach for:
- We need traffic from specific groups of people (i.e., adult children of aging parents).
- We need to boost revenue and thus need to use SEO as a sales-driving channel.
- We want to boost brand sentiment and get better reviews.
- We want to gain awareness for downloads, free signups, newsletters, etc.
if you’re simply looking to get more traffic, if you are only interested in rankings alone, or if you solely want to beat out your competitors for keywords, these are not the goals that you should be setting in the hopes SEO will fix all these things.
Other things to look for in an SEO company, suggests Forbes, is to pay attention to reporting and transparency, customer service, thought leadership and knowledge transfer, and company position on out-sourcing work.
Contact A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing
We’ve been there and we know how SEO works for your type of business. Why choose us? It’s simple: we have vast experience building websites and conducting successful online marketing, reputation management and search engine optimization campaigns for many eldercare clients just like yours. Contact us today for a free website SEO consultation at (760) 227-2720.
