'A new website has just been designed for my care home, so that's sorted me out if anyone is looking at carehomes in my area on the internet- isn't it?
Oh, dear-if it was that straightforward. Almost 80% of carehome enquiries now com directly from the internet, so you have to make sure that your internet presence is far greater than just a basic website if you want to get found online. This is especially the case if you have a website which is rarely updated. Rather than this, you should focus on really using the internet to sell your care home to potential enquirers online.
There is a useful piece of jargon which it is handy to remember when it comes to the internet and search engines-'content is king'. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo can find the most up-to-date and relevant information to display for people searching for any type of business, and if your information and website is not kept up to date and continually changing, then your website move lower down the web rankings quicker than a rat down a drainpipe.
The best case scenario when it comes to internet marketing is that you should be aiming to deliver a website with an updateable news section which can then be kept up to date regularly with useful new about your business and the industry as a whole. This could then be interwoven with a Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube and LinkedIn pages at the bare minimum to widen your scope.
This might sound time consuming, but once up and running, it is easy to merge these various online entities so that when you write a news item onto your blog or website, it will also tweet that news item and then this can also show up on your Facebook page, Linkedin profile and so forth.
You might wonder what sort of news items you might decide to keep these services updated with, but give some thought to all of the various activities that take place in your carehome on a regular basis. 100th birthday parties, changing gardens throughout the year, other activities in your carehome, keeping people updated on stories relating to the carehome industry; there is a huge quantity of knowledge that you could be writing about online in order to generate interest in your care business.
With all of the items that you put onto the internet in relation to your own carehome, you are growing in stature as far as the search engines are concerned, so in effect you are developing authority from the search engines with regards to the fact that:
a) your website is a useful resource
b) you know what you are talking about!
Both of these things are important to ensure that your carehome website or blog rises through the search engine rankings and crucially doing so without you having to spend advertising money on the internet.
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