Online Marketing And SEO

Contents:

Online Marketing

Online Marketing CTA

Online marketing for your business includes a wide variety of actions that have one ultimate purpose: generating more calls for new service.

  • Email newsletters
  • Social media
  • Advertising
  • Content creation
  • Authority building

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – has one primary goal: helping Google decide that your business website should be listed before others when prospective customers search Google for search terms that are relevant to your business and the goods and services that it offers.  That’s desirable because users tend to click only on the first two to five listings  in the search engine results pages (“SERPs”).  There are a variety of types of SEO to understand and implement.

  1. On-site vs. On-site SEO
  2. Organic vs. Local SEO
  3. Forensic SEO

1. On-site SEO vs. Off-site SEO

“On-site SEO” refers to everything that you do in designing and building the pages on your website in order to get Google to rank your website more highly in the SERPs.

  • Well-written, relevant and meaningful content including:
    • “Pages” that describe the company, what it offers to customers, how people can apply to work there, and other “static” information that changes only occasionally.
    • “Posts”, most often referred to as “blog posts”, which are articles published on a regular basis with relevant, interesting and helpful information.
  • Invisible notations called “markup” on every page and post.  The markup contains information that Google uses to understand the content fully, for the sake of correctly assessing when that page or post will be a helpful answer to a search request.
    • Google uses this markup for search indexing, which is what Google does when it is deciding how to categorize, store and retrieve information about the page or post.
  • Photos and other images that are helpful and useful and which have appropriate markup for search indexing.
  • Videos and other rich content that contain appropriate markup for search indexing.
  • Offers of further information and help such as newsletter subscription forms.

“Off-site SEO” refers to everything that you do or ask others to do in places other than your own website in order to get Google to rank your website more highly in the SERPs.

Google will “notice” or “see” these actions in other places; it uses them as “signals” that indicate greater or lesser levels of authority and trust for your website and your business.

  •  Articles that you write and have posted on other relevant, authoritative websites.
  • Social media activity and engagement on behalf of yourself and your company.
  • Links that others place on their websites, pointing to yours.
  • Articles that mention your company online, written by others.
  • Selected web directory sites – but not all of them.
  • Online reviews about your company, posted by clients, their families, and others.

2. Organic SEO vs. Local SEO

“Organic SEO” is any type of SEO that is done to cause a website or web page to rank ahead of others in SERPs regardless of whether they are in response to searches with geographic intent.

“Local SEO” is a special type of SEO, designed to cause the website or web page to rank well for searches with geographic intent.  Here are some examples of searches with geographic intent:

  • “Home care agencies near my location”
  • “Eldercare companies in Omaha NE”
  • “Miami geriatric care managers”

Searches with geographic intent are primarily ones that seek goods or services at or near a specific geographic location.  If you think about this, it becomes obvious that most searches for providers of services for the elderly and their families are searches with local intent.

The goals of local SEO are

  1. To ensure that Google knows about your company’s location
  2. To ensure that the location’s name, address and phone (“NAP”) information is accurate and consistent across the 50 or more local directory service sites around the world.  NAP consistency matters because Google views NAP consistency as a signal that the company represented by the website is more stable, reliable and more likely to have those attributes in the way that it does business.
  3. To ensure that Google knows about the geographic area that your company serves
  4. To collect legitimate customer review information about your business to present to searchers as information that helps them choose which company to click on, based on what others have said about your business.

Relevant local SEO direcctory sites include these:

  • Google My Business – location information, company information and customer reviews
  • Yelp – location information, company information and customer reviews
  • Facebook – location information, company information and customer reviews
  • Caring.com – location information, company information and customer reviews
  • Assisted-Living-Directory.com – location information, company information and customer reviewsSites that are industry-specific to those who serve the elderly and their families including the ones shown below. Note, however, that these have decreasing significance as the public becomes increasingly aware that these are “pay to play” advertising sites and that they are not unbiased.

 3. Forensic SEO

Forensic SEO is another special type of SEO.  Forensic SEO refers to the investigation, assessment and mitigation of website performance and SEO problems caused by third parties or by prior SEO practices that used to be permitted by Google but which now result in Google penalties.

Examples of forensic SEO activities include these:

  • Google Manual Penalty Response
  • Negative SEO attacks investigation

 

Specific Online Marketing and SEO Topics