As a home health agency, your primary goal is patient care, of course. But your secondary goal is to encourage traffic to your business. The portal through which you can do that effectively is your website. But even further than that, you can use link building to boost customer engagement. Moz puts it like this: for search engines that crawl the vast metropolis of the web, links are the streets between pages. Sophisticated link analysis is how search engines determine how pages are related to each other and in which ways.
If you’re going to incorporate link building into your website management tools, (which you should), you need to be prepared to make way for a well-defined workflow, scalability and structure. Here at A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing, we can guide you step by step to link building success.
What is Link Building?
In a nutshell, link building doesn’t just involve the process of acquiring backlinks that point to your site; it’s also a proven marketing strategy that boosts brand awareness and conversions, says Search Engine Watch. It also happens to increase search visibility and exposure to your company, but it does so much more: it also has the power to drive other marketing strategies, including content marketing. Everything is interconnected. And it all comes back to links, links and more links. Why are links so important? Well, they remain one of the most important ranking signals in Google’s algorithm.
In fact, link score is the #1 quantifiable ranking signal, showing the strongest indication of authority to Google, points out Search Engine Land. Contributing to the link score is your link quantity, to be sure, but you can no longer get away with sub-par, spammy links and expect Google to sit back and take it. Those links have to carry some weight. So, focus your efforts on the number of linking domains you have, as well as every incoming link’s individual quality score and the number of links to the site.
Why Do You Need Local Link Building?
As a home health care agency, your business is built on community presence and local brand recognition. That said, your backlinking campaign isn’t something that will happen overnight. Like SEO, these things take time to nurture. As such, you need to develop strategies to build backlinks over the course of several months, backed by diverse goals and objectives. But take heart: you don’t need thousands of backlinks to rank with the Google gods. Your goal, rather, should be to implement sustainable activity that will continue to pay off in good links that make sense, minus any wacky patterns or high link velocity.
The local component is important because it helps you build confidence and trust. Unlike a national retail clothing chain, for instance, the very life blood of your company depends on local business. As such, you are better able to take advantage of your locality. Because you likely have many local customers and clients, it’s wise for you to invest in local link building, particularly when you take into account how search engine results pages (SERPs) are affected by localization.
That means Google will position your website higher in the SERPs for those searching in your immediate area, giving you advantage over companies that are not local to that neighborhood.
Local Link Building Strategies
Local link building isn’t all that different than industry-based link building, but with a local approach, the focus shifts to location instead of niche. Keep these strategies in mind when building local links for your home care business.
- Create local resources: As a community-based business, you are in a great position to make yourself available as a community resource. To obtain excellent local links, you can offer a map of local tourist attractions in the area, pet-friendly locations, and free wi-fi spots, or you can be the go-to local guide for the best eateries in town, bars and pubs to grab a drink, and interesting museums downtown. Another way to approach this is to include a calendar of local events, such as town meetings, charity events and sporting events.
- Sponsor an event locally: This method takes time, but consider hosting or sponsoring an event paired with a local charity, say, to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s disease. Alternatively, you could start up a scholarship fund for local students, interview VIPs in the community, act as a liaison for the town paper to offer expertise on a particular subject, or offer a discount or product partnership in conjunction with a community group.
Contact A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing
If you would like to know more about building local backlinks for your home care website, look to A Servant’s Heart Web Design and Marketing for expert assistance. Contact us at (760) 227-2720 for a free consultation or to find out more information about our services.
